 Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews, featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're going to explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering, Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here and don't forget it's Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Sam Grocott is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How are you doing? Always great to be here, Dave. All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud, Apex, multi-cloud. What's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? Yeah, yeah, look, Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard as pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud has become a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally, the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design, where essentially organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell, we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multi-cloud by default, rather it's multi-cloud by design, where you're very intentional in how you do multi-cloud. And how we deliver multi-cloud by design is through Apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that beginning of this year, we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SaaS based backup service. We've introduced or announced Project Alpine, which is bringing our storage software intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run in Amazon, Azure, I'm sorry, Amazon AWS, Azure or Google. And then we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announced key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake where you can now access our information, our data from on-prem through the Snowflake cloud or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem of SaaS providers. And then finally, I would say, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announced a strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the recent VMware Explorer. We announced new Tanzu integration. So Dave, I think in a nutshell, we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies World first time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus to the default, which is great. Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course, the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company VMware, of course, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting. Red Hat, so seeing that expand. Now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's got to be new, speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type of ecosystem, telcos. And what's this new frontier platform all about? Yeah, yeah, so we've talked a lot about cloud and multi-cloud. We're talking about private and hybrid clouds. We've talked about public clouds, with clouds and colos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on and that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives and that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We've seen upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3,000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years, delivering edge solutions. 81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a deep understanding of how our customers are using edge solutions say, the bottom line is the game has got to change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Front here. And Project Front here in its most simplest form is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. With Project Front here, organizations are really gonna be able to manage and operate their edge infrastructure and application securely, efficiently and at scale. Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name. It is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capability integration. Is there hardware involved? Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And really there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Front here. And I think I would just highlight a handful of them. Freedom of choice, we definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there. Even more so at the edge than any other part of the IT stack. Being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or IoT frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Front here is being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment. And of course backed by an NIC and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with a centralized management through Project Front here and zero touch deployments. One of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the Front here is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise. And we built in an enormous amount of automation to help streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Front here is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certainly, excuse me, certainly into the future. Yeah, Sam, no truck rolls, I like it. And you mentioned zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day, the kids always ask, when's kids day? And we of course, we say every day is kids day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and how are you responding? Yeah, yeah, no, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company has really been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. Every decision in IT department impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly positively, hopefully impacted, but also can negatively impacted as well. So data security is really not a new area of focus for Dell, it's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cybersecurity and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system and having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together that coexist together in the right way. To truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security it certainly is not absolute, all correct security architectures assume that there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've got to be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. Well, and I think too it's obviously security is a complicated situation. Now with cloud, you've got shared responsibility models, multi-cloud, you got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the key takeaway is as a security pro I'm looking for my technology partner through their R&D and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell technology summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. Yeah, look, I think we're at a transformative point in IT, you know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume IT in different ways such as as a service. A lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them they really want simple consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy. We've got the right portfolio. We are the trusted partner of choice to help them lead their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in IT and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Dave. All right, a Dell tech world in Vegas this past year. One of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Sevadra and we're going to speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022.