 Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit, I'm Dave Vellante. We're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're going to dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross-cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits into that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now is friend of theCUBE, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you, welcome. You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on theCUBE. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data-driven, multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems? Sure, hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind in everything we do. My leadership team and I spent a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points and we want to get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both current and future offerings, really ensured that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data, so no surprise, going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'll say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those is driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first, the data, as we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. And you can just think of that in its every way, right? And so as IT, is the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time. Environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud, which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations, that's on-prem and off-prem. It's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately for most of our customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed, it's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I talk into them all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth in the ground. You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized IT. You think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts. That all creates operational complexity for their teams or on their processes and their tools. And then you think about security complexity that drives with just the increased attack service. And the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? What they really want from us and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really want to simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile IT and they want more control of their data, right? And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious. And we've probably all heard it in a bunch but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe and we believe as Dell that it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of IT. We're already doing this today just a couple of quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience will go back to that complexity. And it was across a very distributed environment including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level objective, things like cost, complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer is a big New England Patriot fan and Dave, I know you are as well. This one's near and dear to my heart. It's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create a more, I'd say data-driven, immersive, secure experience which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real-time insights for things like cyber resiliency but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a Patriot fan like I am Dave, they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats, on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time we're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make IT simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're going to do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and others at Dell Tech World earlier this year. Right, and we had Salesforce on actually at Dell Tech Group. The craft group is interesting because when you get to the stadium, everybody's trying to get out to the internet but then the experience is so much better if you can actually deal with that edge. So I want to talk about complexity though. You got data, you got the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across, security model is different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a band-aid. So I want to talk to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long-term strategy. Sure, I'd love to. So first, I'd like to state the obvious which our investments in our innovations are really focused on advancing our customer's needs. All right, so really our investments are going to be targeted where we believe customers can have the most value and some of that's going to be around how we create strategic partnerships as well. Connected to what we just spoke about much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places. And customers, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity really enabling those developers to do what they do best which is creating more value for their customers and for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud, anywhere data lives. And we're focused on, also focused on consumption-based solutions which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to find common storage layer. That common storage layer, you can think about this Dave as our IaaS, if you will. It underpins our data access and mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge and it's delivered in a secure, holistic and consistent cloud experience through APEX. We are making a ton of progress so that should just be clear. We've made headway in things like Project Alpine which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announced this back in January which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. Really delivering the best of both worlds allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services in storage software such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services. They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Brokott in the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly we're also scaling Apex which you know well shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify IT and unlock the power of their data. So some good examples there. I like to talk about the super cloud as you know, you're building on top of the hyperscale infrastructure. And you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your IaaS and that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there. And one of the hallmarks of a cloud company and as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company, ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero sum game. And I think super cloud recognizes that that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? For me, it's pretty clear. It's critical. I can't say that enough about having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you. I would assert no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these closed stacks that discharges interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of each of our teams. We, Dell, I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. I mean, just thinking what we're doing with VMware we continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware Explorer which I know you were at. We announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi cloud specifically, we strengthened our relationship with VMware and with Tanzu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say in using your analogy I could think of that as our multi cloud platform. So that's kind of our path there, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very longstanding and strategic partnership with Microsoft. And I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multi cloud space. Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere we've established partnerships for the edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics. In data management, using your super cloud analogy, Dave, the SaaS, right? This is our SaaS, though. We've announced that we're collaborating and partnering with folks like Snowflake and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then giving customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we're expanding our COLO partnerships as well with folks like Equinix. And they're allowing us to broaden our availability of APEX providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's critical for the entire industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem. As we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs we'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. So it's been an interesting three years for you which is just over three years now since you've been made the president of the ISG. And so you had to dig in and it was obviously strange time around the world but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it cloud first? You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand just some closing thoughts if you could summarize? Sure. So I'd say first we've discussed we're working in a very fast paced ever changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multi-cloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're going to help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default as we've discussed before to multi-cloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of IT and what they're trying to accomplish. Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go Pat's and we'll see you around the block. Thanks, Dave. All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.