 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of Dell Technologies World digital experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here for this interview. We're not face to face this year, we're remote because of the pandemic. We've got a great guest, CUBE alumni John Rose with the Global Chief Technology Officer at Dell Technologies. John, great to see you. Thank you for remoting in from New Hampshire. Thanks for your time and thanks for going on. Oh, glad to be here. Glad to be here from New Hampshire. It's a lot, the travel is a lot easier this way. Oh, it's been, it's been interesting time. What a year it's been with the pandemic, the good, bad and the ugly has been playing out. But if you look at the role of technology, you're the big theme this year at Dell Technologies World is the digital transformation acceleration. Everyone's kind of talking about that. But when you unpack the technology side of it, you're seeing a technology enablement theme that is just unprecedented from an acceleration standpoint. COVID has forced people to look at things that they never had to look at before. Disruption to business models and business systems like working at home, who would have forecasted that kind of disruption? Workloads changing, work forces working differently with internet of things. So an absolute exposure to the core issues and challenges that need to be worked on and doubled down on. And in some cases, projects that might not have been as a priority. So you have all of this going on. Customers really trying to double down on the things that are working, the things they need to fix so they can come out of the pandemic with a growth strategy, with modern apps, with cloud and hybrid and multi-cloud. This has been a huge forcing function. Love to get your first reaction to that big wave. Yeah, no, no. I think as a technologist, sometimes you can see the future maybe a little clearer than the business people can because there's one thing about technology. It either is or it isn't. Either it's code or hardware and real or it's marketing. And we knew that the technology evolution was occurring. We knew the multi-cloud world was real. We knew that machine intelligence was real. And we've been working on this for maybe decades. But prior to COVID, many of these areas were still considered risky or speculative and people couldn't quite grok exactly why they wanted a machine doing work on their behalf or why they might want an AI to be a participant in their collaboration sessions or why they might want an autonomous vehicle at all. And we were talking about how many people with autonomous vehicles were going to kill as opposed to how many that were going to help. Then we had COVID. And suddenly we realized that the fragility of our physical world and the need for digital is much higher. And so it's actually opened up an enormous accelerant on people's willingness to embrace new technologies. And so whether it's the predictable acceleration of machine intelligence or autonomous systems or this realization that the cloud world is actually more than one answer, there's multiple clouds working together because as you try to do a digital transformation acceleration, you realize that it's not one problem. It's many, many problems all working together. And then you discover that, hey, some of these can be solved with cloud one and some could be solved with cloud two and some of them you want to do in your own infrastructure in a private cloud and some might belong at the edge. And then suddenly you come to this conclusion that, hey, having a strategy has to deal with this system as a system. And so across the board, it's been an interesting catalyst to get people to really think practically about the technology available to them and how they might be able to take advantage of it quicker. And that's a mixed blessing for us technologists because they want things sooner and that means we have to do more engineering, but at the same time, open-minded consumers of technology are very helpful in digital transformations. Well, I want to unpack that rethinking with COVID and post COVID. I mean, everything's going to come down to before COVID and after COVID world. I think it's going to be demarcation that's going to be looked at historically, but let's, before we get into that though, I want to get your thoughts on some of the key pillars of the transformational technologies in play today. Last year at Dell World when we were physically face-to-face, you know, we were laying out on theCUBE and our analysis, the Dell technologies has got an end to end view. You saw a little bit of that VMware, we've emerald this year, you know, the project Monterey. It's looking much more systematically across the board. You mentioned systems as consequences, the reaction of changes. But layout for us, the key areas, the key pillars of the transformational technologies that customers need to look at now to drive the digital path. Yeah, we cast a very wide net. We look at literally thousands of technologies. We organize them and we try to understand and predict which ones are going to matter. And it turns out that over the last couple of years we figured out there's really six, what I'll call expanding technology areas that are actually probably likely to be necessary for almost any digital transformation. And they aren't exactly what people have been doing historically. So in no particular order, and they may sound obvious, but when you think about your future it's very likely all six of these are going to touch you. The first is, you know, the obvious one of, you know, being able to develop and deliver a multicloud. The cloud journey is by no means done. We are like the second inning of a nine inning game maybe even earlier. We have barely created the multiple cloud world much, not less the true multicloud world and then really exploiting and automating as work to be done. But that's a strategic area for us and everybody to navigate forward. In parallel to that, what we realized is that multiple cloud is no longer just present in data centers and public clouds it's actually existing in the real world. So this idea of edge, the reconstituting of IT out in the real world to deliver the real time behavior necessary to actually serve what we predict will be about 70% of the world's data that will happen outside of data centers. The third is 5G. Now it's a very specific technology, but I have a long telco background. I was the CTO of one of the largest telecom companies in the world. And I was involved in 2G, 3G and 4G. 5G is not another G. It is not just faster 4G, it does that. But with things like massive machine type communication with having a million sensorized devices in a kilometer or ultra reliable or latency communication the ability to give preferential services to critical streams of data across the infrastructure mobile edge compute, putting the edge IT out into the cellular environment and the fact that it's built in the cloud and IT era. So it's programmable software defined 5G is going to go from being an outside of the IT discussion to being the fabric inside the IT discussion. And so I will bet that anybody who has people in the real world and that they're trying to deliver a digital experience will have to take advantage of the capabilities of 5G to do it right. But super strategic important area for Dell and for our industry. Continuing on, we have the data world, the data management world. You know, it's funny, we've been doing data as an industry for a very long time but the world we were in was the data at rest world databases, data lakes, traditional applications and that's great, it still matters but this new world of data in motion is beginning and what that means is the data is now moving into pipelines, we're not moving it somewhere and then figuring it out, we're figuring it out as the data flows across this multi-cloud environment and that requires an entirely different tool chain architecture and infrastructure but it's incredibly important because it's actually a thing that powers most digital transformation if they're real time. In parallel to that, number five on the list is AI and machine learning. We have a controversial view on this. We don't view AI as purely a technology. It clearly is a technology but what we really think customers should think about it as is as a new class of user because AI's are actually some of the most aggressive producers and consumers of data and consumers of IT infrastructure. We actually estimate that within the next four or five years, the majority of IT capacity in an enterprise environment will actually be consumed at the behest of machine learning algorithm or an AI system than a traditional application or person and all you have to do is do one AI project to understand that I'm correct because they are just massive demand drivers for your infrastructure but they have massive return on that demand. They give you things you can't do without them. And then last on the list is this area of security and to be candid, we have really messed up this industry, this area as an industry. We have a security product for every problem. We have proliferation of security technologies and to make matters worse, we now operate most enterprises on the assumption the bad guys are already inside and we're doing things to prevent them from causing harm. Now, if that's all it is, we really lost this one. So we have an obligation to reverse this trend to start moving back to embedding the security and the infrastructure with intrinsic security with zero trust models with things like SASE which is basically creating new models of the edge security paradigm to be more agile and software defined. But most importantly, we have to pull it all together and say, you know, what we're really measuring is the trustworthiness of the systems we work with not the individual components. So this elevation of security to trust is going to be a big journey for all of us. And, you know, every one of those six are individual areas but when you combine them they actually describe the foundation of a digital transformation. And so it's important for people to be aware of them. It's important for companies like Dell to be very active in all of them because ultimately what you have today plus those six properly executed is the digital transformation outcome that most people are heading towards. You just packed it all six pillars into one soundbite. That was awesome. Great insight there. One of the things that's interesting I mentioned AI I love that piece around AI being a consumer. They are a consumer of data. They're also a consumer of what used to be handled by either systems or humans. That's interesting. 5G is another one. Pat Gelsing has said at VMworld that 5G and when I interviewed him he said 5G is a business app not a consumer app. Yet if you look at the recent iPhone announcement by Apple iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, 5G was at the center of that announcement but they're taking it from a different perspective. That's a real world application. They got the watch. They have new chips and their devices. Huge advantage is not just bandwidth. And remember the original iPhone launched with 3G if you remember that made the iPhone. Some are saying if it didn't have the 3G or 2G and 3G I think it was 3G in the first iPhone it would have not have been as successful. So again, Apple's endorsing 5G. Gelsinger talks about it as a business app. Double down on that because I think 5G will highlight some of the COVID issues because people are working at home. They're on the go. They want to do video conferencing maybe. They want to do this programmable, unpack the importance of 5G as an enabler and as an IT component. Yeah, as I mentioned 5G isn't just about enhanced mobile broadband which is faster YouTube. It's about much more than that. And because of that combination of technologies it becomes the connective tissue for almost every digital transformation. So our view, by the way, just to give you the Dell official position we actually view that the 5G or the telecom industry is going through three phases around 5G. The first phase has already happened. It was the early deployment of 5G using traditional technology. It was just 5G as an extension of the 4G environment. That's great, it's out there. There's a phase that we're in right now which I call the geopolitical phase where all of a sudden, everybody from companies to countries to industries have realized this is really important and we have to figure out how to make sure we have a secure source of supply that is based on the best technology. And that has created an interest by people like Dell and VMware and Microsoft and many other companies to say, wait a minute, this isn't just a telecom thing. This is, as Pat said, a business system. This is part of the core of all digital. And so that's pulled people like Dell and others more aggressively into the telecom world in this middle phase. But what really is happening is the third phase. And the third phase is a recasting of the architecture of telecom to make it much more like the cloud and IT world, to separate hardware from software, to implement its software-defined principles, to put in machine interfaces, to treat it like a cloud and IT system architecturally. And that's where things like open-ran, integrated open networks and these new initiatives are coming into play. All of that, from a Dell perspective, is fantastic because what it says is the telecom world is heading towards companies like us. And so as you may know, we set up a brand new telecom business at scale, appeared to our other businesses this year. We already are doing billions of dollars in telecom, but now we believe we should be playing a meaningful tier one role in this modern telecom ecosystem. It'll be a team sport. There's lots of other players we have to work with, but because of the breadth of applications of 5G and whether it's, again, an iPhone with 5G is great to do YouTube, but it's incredibly powerful if you run your business applications on there and what you want to actually deliver is an immersive augmented experience. So without 5G, it'd be very hard to do that. So it becomes a new and improved client. We announced the Latitude 9000 series and we're one of the first to put out a 5G-enabled laptop there. In certain parts of the world, we're now starting to ship these. Well, again, when you have access to a millimeter wave and gigabit speed capacity, you can do some really interesting things on that device, more oriented to what we call collaborative compute in which the client device and the adjacent infrastructure have so much bandwidth between them that they look like one system and they can share the burden of augmented reality, of data processing, of AI processing, all in the real time domain. Carry that a little further and when we get into the areas like healthcare transformation or educational transformation, what we realize immediately is reaches everything. You want to have a premium broadband experience and you need a better system to do that, but really the thing that has to happen is not just a Zoom call, but an immersive experience in which a combination of low bandwidth, always on sensors are able to send their data streams back, but also if you want to have a more immersive experience to really explore your health situation, being able to do it with holography and other tools which require a lot more bandwidth is critical. So no matter where you go in a digital transformation in the real world that has real people and things out in the real world involved in it, the digital fabric for connectivity is critical and you suddenly realize the current architectures, 3 5G aren't sufficient. And so 5G becomes this linch pin to basically make sure that the client and the cloud and the data center all have a framework that they can actually work together without, let's call it a buffering resistance between them called the network. Imagine if the network was an enabler, not an impediment. Yeah, I think you're on point here. I think this is really teases out to me the next gen business transformation, digital transformation, because if you think about what you just talked about, connective tissue, linch pin with 5G, data as a driver, multi-cloud, the six pillars you laid out. And you mentioned systems, connective tissue systems. I mean, you're basically talking tech under the hood and operating system mindset. These systems design are interesting. If you put the pieces together, you can create business value, not so much speeds and feeds, business value. You mentioned telco cloud. I find that fascinating. I've been saying on theCUBE for years and I think it's finally playing out. I want to get your reactions of this is this rise of the specialty cloud. I called it tier one on the power law, kind of the second wave of cloud. Look at Snowflake, they went public, biggest IPO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange of Wall Street, second to VMware. They're built on Amazon, okay? You have the telco cloud. We have the cube cloud, we have the media cloud. So you're seeing businesses looking at the cloud as a business model opportunity, not just buying gear to run something faster, right? So you're getting at something here where it's real benefits are now materializing and they're now visible. How, first of all, do you agree with that? I'm sure you do. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. And if you do, how do companies put this together? Because you need software, you got to have the power source with cloud. What's your reaction to that? Absolutely, I think now that now, obviously there are many clouds. We have some mega clouds out there and then we have lots of other specialty clouds. And by the way, sometimes, remember, we view cloud as an operating model and experience a way to present an IT service. How it's implemented is less important than what it looks like to the user. Your example of snowflake, I don't view snowflake as AWS, I view snowflake as a storage business cloud. I mean, they could lift it up and move it on to another cloud infrastructure and it would still be snowflake. So as we look forward, we do see more of the consumables that we're going to use in digital transformation appearing as these cloud services. Sometimes they're SaaS cloud, sometimes they're an infrastructure cloud, sometimes they're a private cloud. One of the most interesting ones though that we see that hasn't happened yet is the edge clouds that are going to form. Edge is different. It's in the real time domain, it's distributed. It might, if you do it at scale, it might look like massive amounts of capacity, but it isn't infinite in one place. Public cloud is infinite capacity all in one place. An edge cloud is infinite capacity distributed across 50,000 points of presence of which each of them has a finite amount of capacity. And the other difference though is that edge clouds tend to live in the real time domain, sub 30 millisecond round trip latency. Well, the reason this one's exciting to me is that when you think about what happened at the software and business model innovation, when for instance, public clouds and even co-location became more accessible, companies who had this idea that needed a very large capacity of infrastructure that could be consumed as a service that suddenly came into existence, salesforce.com. Go through the laundry list. But all of those examples were non real time functions because the clouds we were built on were non real time clouds if you take them in the end to end, in the system perspective. We know that there are going to be both from the telecom operators and from cloud providers and co-location providers and even enterprises, a proliferation of infrastructure out in the real time domain called edges. And those are going to be organized and delivered as cloud services. They're going to be pools of flexible elastic capacity. What excites me is suddenly we're going to spawn a level of innovation where people who had this great idea that they needed to access cloud-like capacity but they ran into the problem that the capacity was too far away from the time domain they needed to operate. And we've already seen some examples of this in AR and VR, autonomous vehicles require a real time cloud near the car which doesn't exist yet. When we think about things like smart cities and smart factories, they really need to have that cloud capacity in the time domain that matters if they want to be a real time control system. And so, you know, I don't know exactly what the innovation is going to be but when you see a new capability show up, in this case, it's inevitable that we're going to see pools of elastic consumable capacity in the real time environment as edges start to form. It's going to spawn another innovation cycle that could be as big as what happened in the public cloud environment for non real time. Well, I think that's a great point. Time series databases for one would be one instant innovation. You mentioned data, data management, time is valuable to the latency and it's maybe not valuable after if you're a car, right? So you've passed in, you know, so again, all different concepts. And the one thing that, first of all, I agree with you on this whole cloud thing. It's a nice edge cloud is going to develop nicely. And, but the question there is it's going to be software defined, agreed. Security, data, you got databases, you got software, software operated. You mentioned security being broken and security product for every problem. And you want to bake it in intrinsic or whatever you call it these days. How do you get the security model? Cause you got access to federate that. How do you build in security at that level? Whether it's a space satellite or a moving vehicle, the edge is the edge. So what's your thoughts on security as you're looking at this mobility, this agility is horizontally scalable distributed system. What's the security paradigm? Well, the first thing it has nothing to do with security but impacts your security outcome in a meaningful way when you talk about the edge. And that is we have got to stop getting confused that an edge is a single monolithic thing. And we have got to start understanding that an edge is actually a combination of two things. It is a platform that will provide the capacity and a workload that will do the job, the code. And today what we find is many people who are advocating for edges are actually delivering an end-to-end stack that includes bespoke hardware, it's infrastructure and the workloads and capabilities. If that happens, we end up with a thousand black boxes that all do one thing, which doesn't make any sense out in the real world. So the minute you shift to what the edge is really going to be, which is a combination of edge platforms and edge workloads, you start your journey towards a better security model. First thing that happens is you can secure and make a high integrity, the edge platform. You can make sure that that platform has a hardware with a trust, that it operates potentially in a zero trust model, that it has survivability and resiliency, but it doesn't really care what's running on it as much as it has to be stable. Now, if you get that one right, now at least you have a stable platform between your public and private environments and the edge. At the workload level though, now you have to think about, well, edge workloads actually should not be bloated. They should not be extremely large scale because there's not enough capacity at the edge. So concepts like Sassy is a good example, which is one of the analyst firms coined that term. But I like the concept, which says, hey, what if at the edge, you're delivering the workload, but the workload is protected by a bunch of cloud oriented security services that effectively are presented as part of the service chain. So you don't have to have your own firewall built into every workload. Because you're in an edge architecture, you can use virtual firewalling that's coming to you as a software service, or you can use the SDN to service chain it into the networking path, or then you can provide deep packet inspection and other services. It all goes back to this idea that, when you deal with the edge, first and foremost, you have to have a reliable stable platform to guarantee a robust foundation. And that is an infrastructure security problem. But then you have to basically deal with the security problems of the workload in a different way than you do it in a data center. In a data center, you have infinite compute. You can put all kinds of appendages on your code and it's fine, because there's just more compute next to you. In the edge, we have to keep the code pure. It has to be an analytics engine or an AI engine for systems control in a factory. And the security services actually have to be a function of the end-to-end path, more likely delivered as software services slightly upstream. That architectural shift is not something people have figured out yet. But if we get it right, now we actually have a modern zero trust distributed software defined service chainable dynamic security architecture, which is a much better approach to intrinsic security than trying to just hard code the security into the workload and tie it to the platform, which never has worked. So we're gonna have to have a pretty big rethink to get through this, but for me, it's pretty clear what we have to do. You know, I'd say that's good observation, great insight. I'll just double down and follow up on that. I get that. I see that where you're going with that software defined, software operated service. I love the SASE concept. We've covered it. But the edge is still purpose built devices. I mean, we've talked about an iPhone, you're talking about a watch, you're talking about a space module, whatever it is at the edge on a tower, it can be a radio, I mean, whatever it is, you seem to have purpose built hardware. You mentioned this route of trust. That'll kind of never kind of go away. You're gonna have that. What's your thoughts on that as someone who realizes, I got a hard in the edge, at least from a hardware standpoint, but I wanna be enabled for software defined. I don't wanna have a product be purpose built and then be obsolete in a year. Because that's again, the challenge of supply chain management, building hardware, what's your thoughts on that? Yeah, our edge strategy, if we double click a little bit is different than the strategy to build for a data center. And we want consistency between them, but there's actually five areas of edge that actually are specific to it. The first is the hardware platform itself. Edge hardware platforms are different than the platforms you put in data centers, whether it be a client or the infrastructure underneath it. And so we're already building hardened devices and devices that are optimized for the power and cooling and space constraints of that environment. The second is the runtime on that system is likely to be different. Today we use the VCloud foundation, that works very well, but as you get smaller and smaller and further away, you have to miniaturize and reduce the footprint. The control plane, we would like to make that consistent. We are using Tanzu and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to extend out to the edge. And we think that having a consistent control plane is important, but the way you adapt something like Tanzu for the edge is different because it's in a different place. The fourth is lifecycle, which is really about how you secure, how you deploy, how you deal with the two operations. There's no IT person out at the edge. So you're not in a data center. So you have to automate those systems and deal with them in a different way. And then lastly, the way you package an Edge solution and deliver it is much different than the way you build a data center. You actually don't want to deal with those four things I just described as individual snowflakes. You want them packaged and delivered as an outcome. And that's why more and more of the Edge platform offerings are really cloudlets, or they're a platform that you can use to extend your IT capacity without having to think about Kubernetes versus VMs versus other things. It's just part of the infrastructure. So all of that tells us that Edge is different enough that the way you design for it, the way you implement it, and even the lifecycle has to take into account that it's not in a data center. The trick is to then turn that into an extended multi-cloud where the control plane is consistent. Or when you push code into production with Kubernetes, you can choose to land that container in a data center or push it out to the edge. So you have both a system consistency goal, but also the specialization of the edge environment, everything from hardware to control plane to lifecycle that's the reality of how these things have to be built. That's a great point. It's a systems architecture, whether you're looking at from the bottoms up, component level to top down kind of policy and or software defined. So great insight. I wish we had more time. I'd love to give you back and talk about data. We were talking before you came on camera about data, but quickly before we go, your thoughts on AI and the consequences of AI. AI is a consumer. I love that insight, totally agree. Certainly it's an application, technology is kind of our example to be vertically specialized with data. What's your thoughts on how AI could be better for society and some of the unintended consequences that we've managed that? Yeah, I'm an optimist. I actually, you know, we've worked with enough AI systems for long enough to see the benefit. We use every one of Dell's products today has machine intelligence inside of it so it can exceed the potential of its hardware and software without it. It's a very powerful tool and it does things that human beings just simply can't do. I truly believe that it's the catalyst for the next wave of business process functionality of human innovation. So it's definitely not something to stay away from. That being said, we don't know exactly how it can go wrong and we know that there are examples where corrupted or bad or biased data could influence it to have a bad outcome and there are an infinite set of problems to go solve with AI, but there are ones that are a little dangerous to go pursue if you're not sure. And so our advice to customers today is, look, you do not need to build the terminator to get advantage from AI. You can do something much simpler. In fact, in most enterprise contexts, we believe that the best path is go look at your existing business processes where there is a decision that's made by a human being and it's an inefficient decision. And if you can locate those points where a supply chain decision or an engineering decision or a testing decision is done by human beings poorly and you can use machine intelligence to improve it by five or 10%, you will get a significant material impact on your business if you go after the right processes. At Dell, we're doing a ton of AI machine learning in our supply chain. Why is that important? What we happen to have the largest tech supply chain in the world if you improve it by 1%, it's a gigantic impact on the company. And so our advice to people is don't get, you don't have to build an autonomous car. You don't have to build the terminator. You can apply it much more tactically in spaces that are much safer. Even in the HR examples, we tell our HR people, hey, use it for things like performance management and simplifying the processing of data. Don't use it to build the higher bot. That's a little dangerous right now because you might inadvertently introduce racism or sexism into that. We still have some work to do there. So it's a very large surface area. Go where the safe areas are. It'll keep you busy for the next several years, improving your business in dramatic ways. And as we improve the technology for bias correction and management of AI systems and fault tolerance and simplicity, then go after the hard ones. So this is a great one. Go after the easy stuff. You'll get a big benefit and you won't take the risk. Get the low hanging fruit learn, iterate through it. I'm glad you guys use machine learning and AI on the supply chain. Make sure it's secure. Big issue. I know you guys were on top of it and have a great operation there. John, great to have you on. John Rose, the global chief technology officer of Dell Technologies. Great to have you on. Take a minute to close out the last minute here. What's the most important story from Dell Technologies World this year? I know it's virtual. It's not face-to-face, but beyond that, what's the big takeaway in your mind if you could share one point? What would it be for the folks watching? Yeah, I think the biggest point is something we talked about, which is, we are in a period of digital transformation acceleration. COVID's bad, but it woke us up to the possibilities and the need for digital transformation. And so if you were on the fence, or if you're moving slowly and now have an opportunity to move fast. However, moving fast is hard if you try to do it by yourself. And so we've structured Dell, we've the six big areas we're focused on. They only have one purpose. It's to build the modern infrastructure platforms to enable digital transformation to happen faster. You know, my advice to people is great. You're moving faster, pick your partners well. Choose the people you want to go on the journey with. And we think we're well positioned for that. And you will have much better progress if you take a broad view of the technology ecosystem and you've lined up the appropriate partnerships with the people that can help you get there. And the outcome is a successful digital leader just is going to handle things like COVID and these disruption better than a digital laggard. And we now have the data to prove that. So it's all about digital acceleration. It's the punchline. Well, great to have you on great segment, great insight. And thank you for sharing the six pillars and the conversation super relevant what's going on to create new business value, new opportunities for businesses and society. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.