 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Welcome back to Dell Tech World 2022, you're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host, John Furrier, live event, I would say 78,000 people, really exceeded our expectations. And we're here with Chuck Whitten, who's the co-chief operating officer and chief dot connector, I sometimes call him at Dell Technologies. Chuck, welcome to theCUBE. I am thrilled to be here. How great is it to be back in Las Vegas, 78,000 people here talking innovation, it's great. It's like Jeff said this morning, I'm really thrilled to be in Vegas maybe, but I'm happy to be back live, so yeah. Friends and customers, great to hear. Awesome, okay, the operative phrase is multi-cloud by default, that's kind of the buzz from your keynote, what do you mean by that? Well look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, multiple public clouds, on-premise clouds, increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers, clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default, it's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was, it can be and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds, they will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an on-premise cloud, on-premise clouds are not going away, I mentioned edge clouds, so it should be strategic, it's just not today, it doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default, we mean that's the state of the world today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I mean I totally agree with you 100%, we all know multi-cloud exists, it's by default, it's not going away, it's only going to get more complicated. What are you guys seeing in terms of the customer need as this becomes more of the strategy plus operations? I want to operationalize multi-cloud, is it an abstraction layer? How do you guys see the customer requirements? What problems are they trying to solve? Well look, the multi-cloud by default today are isolated clouds, they don't work together, your data is siloed, it's locked up and it is expensive to move and make sense of it, so I think the word you and I were batting around before this is an interconnected tissue, that's what the world needs, they need the clouds to work together as a single platform, that's the problem that we're trying to solve and you saw it in some of our announcements here, that we started, starting to make steps on that journey to make multi-cloud work together much simpler. It's interesting, you mentioned the hyperscalers and all that capex investments, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a cloud and build on the capex and then ultimately have the solutions, machine learning is one area, you see some specialization with the clouds, but you start to see the rise of super clouds, Dave calls them and that's where you can innovate on the cloud, then go to the multiple clouds, Snowflakes one, we see a lot of examples of super clouds. Project Alpine was another one, I mean it's early, but it's clearly where you're going, the technology is just starting to come around, I mean it's real. Yeah, I mean why wouldn't you want to take advantage of all of the cloud innovation out there? Well the answer would be I don't want to do that if I'm going to feel locked up, if it's going to be too expensive, so again I think Project Alpine's a perfect example of a step on that journey, if you can create a common storage pool, a fabric if you will that allows you to choose where you're going to process your data and store it and more importantly give your teams the same M&O tools, the same skill sets, the ability to operate on-premise or in the public clouds, you know I think ultimately the theme of the last couple of days in multi-cloud for us has been customer choice, we want to give them the choice to operate how they want to so they can take advantage of all those cloud services. Real quick, where does that innovation go from that Alpine project because that's the software defined and I believe that's all your IP, all Dell Technologies IP, so that factors in, so is that going to make the hardware more innovative, is it going to be more application specific, where do you see that going? Well look, putting our file block and object storage into the public clouds just gives them choice on taking advantage of enterprise class storage software, you know you saw in our announcements today, we're not stopping the innovation in our core arrays and hardware and in fact the theme today was software innovation, I think we announced 500 different software updates across PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore, so look, we're going to continue to innovate across the storage portfolio, now we're giving customers the choice, hey you want it in the public cloud, that's what project Alpine will let you do. Michael had a smile on him, I won't say spring in a step because he's sitting in that chair, but he's smiling about the market share numbers on that, so pretty impressive, you guys got a good commanding lean there. The super cloud thing, back to that concept, Snowflake, as we consider super cloud, they took their IP, put it on a hyperscaler, differentiated themselves, have great value and scale, and they're running away with it, it looks like, at this point, I mean you got data bricks, you got redshift in there and all this stuff, but as a concept it's working and now they're on multiple clouds, how do you see that super cloud connecting with Snowflake, because you guys are building a little Snowflake connector, there's one of the big announcements here is Snowflake and Dell, so can you talk about that? It was probably the one that got the most excitement from customers in the last day, and so look, you said it well, Snowflake, one of the most exciting companies in the data space right now, and a vision from that company to say hey, let's make the consumption of data as simple as cloud operating models have made the consumption of infrastructure. Well we share that vision and love that vision, but we're each coming at it from different parts of the stack, right? So we're coming at it from storage up to data, they're coming data management down to data, it's a perfect match of our capability, so the announcements we made in our partnership, we're going to start with two use cases that our customers have been asking for, the first is the ability to bi-directionally copy data from our storage to Snowflake's data cloud, that's exciting, but the more exciting one that created the buzz is, if you don't want to move your data to the public cloud, Snowflake only operates in the public cloud today, we're now giving the opportunity to access their data services on-premise, and that's the excitement from customers that have said, hey look, I want to take advantage of Snowflake's capabilities, but for regulatory or security reasons, I'm not doing that today, this is a ground breaker. Well it's the interesting thing is, because as many people know, Snowflake requires you to put their data in their cloud in Snowflake format, this is the first example of non-native data being accessed into the Snowflake cloud. Exactly right, exactly right, so again, for customers that say, I just can't do it, I cannot move my data, now they have an option, it's the first time Snowflake has collaborated with an on-premise infrastructure player. How'd that deal come about? Well it started as all great deals in our business to Michael to the top, so it was a, you know, and then it's been our teams working together closely, always, you know, alongside our customers, because that customer feedback of, I want to take advantage of Snowflake's capabilities, you know, it's been, we've been incubating it for a few months now, and it was great to bring it out on stage yesterday. I mean it makes a lot of sense, you connect the dots, so to speak, we look at what Michael was saying, these compute hubs, towers for 5G, to small edges, and big edges, and data centers all coming together, really key value parts of how data is going to be moving around, it's not just storage, it's data as code, it's a big part of the transformation. Incredible, yeah. I mean look, that was the start of the theme yesterday, look, the great unsolved problems in infrastructure right now is data is everywhere, it's sprawling, it is less secure than we would like, help, and help me make sense of multi-cloud. I'd love to get your reaction real quick while I got you up here, because data science is a well-known practice. There's been the rise of a hot persona that seems to be, you know, growing in numbers, but it's a scarce skill, that's data engineering, because the data's not just doing visualizations, there's a lot of architectural work being done to solve that strategy problem. What's your reaction to this new data engineering at the scale that we're talking about? Yeah, I mean it's a space I'm just learning about, to be honest with you, data engineering, but look, part of what we observe is, it takes a lot of calories from organizations to get data in a place where you can make sense of it and make decisions, and whether that's data scientists spending too much time cleaning, or the advent, as you said, of data engineering to create the architectures to help make that decision. Look, there's a lot of work that goes into that. It would be great over time to automate that, I think that's also the next great step on the journey. You know, Chuck, when I did the intro, I really didn't set it up that well, because you know, people, oh hey, here's the new guy, but you have a lot of experience with Dell, you've been a consultant to the company for a long, long time. Tell us a little bit about that, I'm interested in what you see as your greatest strengths that you bring to Dell. Yeah, well as you said, look, I am the new guy-ish, I think it's been eight months, I don't know how long I can continue to use that as the excuse, but I had worked with Dell for over a decade as a consultant previously at Bain and Company, so you know, look, my background is, as a strategist, and I did lots of work in sort of M&A and private equity, and so that's my background, I'm your sort of classic MBA, who spent a decade in technology, in a decade alongside Jeff Clark and Michael in the transformation of the company, so I hope I bring the right sort of outsiders, but insiders perspective to the party, if you will, but you know, I've certainly learned a lot in the last eight months as you get alongside and inside the machine at Dell. So irrespective of the financial magic- I think I know what question he's going to ask. Irrespective of the financial magic that Dell did with the VMware spin, as a consultant, one could have gone through a mental exercise of saying, hey, what about spinning it in? You've got this great software asset, everybody wants software with marginal economics. Okay, the decision was made, and now we're on to the future. That obviously has an impact on margins, and gross margins, and everything else. So I guess as a consultant, you turn that into opportunity. So where is that opportunity? How do you feel about, how do you think about that really hardware, heavy hardware exposure, and where you want to go in the future? Well look, I think that's what we've been talking about the last couple of days. So the VMware spinoff was a moment in which the world looked at us, and I think asked the question you did. What are you, right? Are you a legacy hardware company, or where you're going? But the reality of the world is, it's a multi-cloud world. So it was a signal also to the world that we're not a VMware stack competing against other cloud stacks. We are first and best with VMware. They are still our most strategic partner. But we work with all the hyperscalers, and it's a big world that is becoming multi-cloud. So strategically speaking, as that becomes the reality of infrastructure, and importantly, as data explodes at the edge, we're perfectly positioned as a company. That's the strategy. We like to say these trends are coming our way. It's never been a better time, honestly, to be the leader in infrastructure from the leader in client devices all the way to the core data center in the cloud. How do you think about, you have quite an observation space as a long-time vein consultant, how do you think about the skill sets required to make that transition? Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, we think a lot about it, right? Because certainly we have a lot of the native skills we need to win in the data era as the leader in storage, and the leader in infrastructure. We secure more mission-critical workloads than anybody. We know a lot about data. But what we're talking about now is not just persisting data. It's about protecting data. It's about moving data, right? And those are different skill sets that we're sort of acquiring and always looking at our teams to think about it. Look, we can do a lot of that organically. We are also always contemplating the right strategic M&A at the right time to sort of add to that talent and technology. You got the balance sheet for it now, so. We do indeed, we do indeed. We get the M&A question in there. But my question to you is, as you look at these systems, because we've always said in theCUBE many times, distributed computing's back. It's never went away. Cloud is just a version of that with on-premise and edge. It's an operating system. It's got all the IO, it's got the control plane. It's the internet, right? And so as you look at that, there's a system and with the scale of cloud, ecosystems are emerging and they're super important because if you're plugging in playing solutions, you got glue layers, you got automations coming, AI, machine learning, the partners aren't just totally dependent on each other. The interdependencies go away. So as you see partners that could be Lego blocks and be composed into these large-scale solutions that you guys are rolling out, what is the role of the ecosystem? What does the future ecosystem look like? How do you tell if it's healthy and take us through that new formula? Because we see it changing. Well look, we've been very explicit in our strategy that partnerships have to be a part of our strategy. We can't solve all the problems of the data in multi-cloud world alone and that when you see announcements like Snowflake or you see us announce continued collaborations with each of the hyperscalers or even how we continue to invest in and double down on our VMware relationship, it's an acknowledgement that look, to solve the problems that our customers are telling us, this super cloud you're describing, this integrated multi-cloud journey, we're going to solve a lot of it ourselves but a lot of it we're going to have to partner with. It's just got to be part and parcel of any good strategy. Luckily we're a natural ecosystem partner. As I said, we are not another cloud stack looking to build a walled garden, right? We know our spot in this game and it is to make multi-cloud simpler across the infrastructure layer. Somebody asked me, is Snowflake part of Dell's ecosystem or is Dell part of Snowflake's ecosystem? I said yes. Yes. Because that's a perfect example. I think that's exactly right. These only work and we've learned this with VMware when it's mutually beneficial to both sides. So you look at the use cases we're talking about with Snowflake, right? Bio-directionally copy data from our storage to their data cloud that's beneficial to Snowflake and our customers and of course, bringing data cloud on-premise beneficial to us. So look, there's more win-wins when you stare at these partnerships than there are zero-sum moments. I think that's a key point from even a decade ago. The platform wars were well identified. If you were a platform, they competed against each other. You got now platforms with platforms because of the synergies of the integration. This is a new dynamic. It's the great world of tech. It's cooperation and there's certainly places where we compete sometimes, but other places that we cooperate. And so yeah, we're excited about our position in this multi-cloud ecosystem. We think we've positioned the company perfectly. How do you spend your time? As a COO? You just had Dell. I mean, give us sort of break down. Yeah, well look, I think what makes it fun is no two days are alike, but together, Jeff Clark and I share responsibility for setting strategy with Michael and then aligning the leadership team on our strategic priorities. And in the world we live in, there's days you wake up and today is supply chain day because something has happened in the world, but often it's with customers or investors. So it's a true COO general manager job and I would tell you no two days are the same. Strategy, solving problems, keep it things moving, talk to the customers. Leading the team, setting a vision and listening to customers, right? I mean, at the end of the day, we talk a lot about our durable competitive advantages as a company. I think our single greatest competitive advantage is our go-to-market reach and the fact that we touch more customers and partners than anyone in technology. And that gives us an inside track on what they're worried about, what they're thinking about and how we can help. It's interesting, you mentioned earlier how things come back around on cycles and we're seeing hardware matter more than everything. In fact, we're doing an editorial thing on why hardware matters. Look at the advances in silicon and a smaller footprint of powerful devices compute about towers and edges and so the role of hardware and then you've got the software-defined software and the role of open source and all this. It's almost a perfect storm to kind of reset this none of the trajectory of growth where hardware innovation's working with the new software. Can you quickly react to that? No, I think it's spot on. I think the future of architectural innovation is really exciting when you look at what CPUs and GPUs and DPs and all that's able to do in the future of infrastructure and eventually the ability to compose your infrastructure to the workload versus have it be rigid and silent. I mean, there's as much innovation inside the infrastructure as there is in the ecosystem and that's exciting for our customers, right? It's going to make them more efficient. It's going to make them able to make decisions with data better than they are today. It's great to be in our space for sure. It's great to have you on. Now you're a CUBE alumni. All right, well, I've watched from afar and admired and it was really painless, so thank you. Thank you so much for coming to CUBE. No, thanks for having me. It's great to have you. We'll keep it right there, everybody. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE at Dell TechWorld 2022.