 Hello, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of the CUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios for CUBE Conversation remotely. Drew Schoek is VP of Product Management at Dell Technologies. This segment is about autonomous operations and moving beyond the hype into practice, reality of what's going on in automation. Drew, thank you for coming on this CUBE conversation. Yeah, great job. Thanks John, glad to be back again and talking to you. So, automation, autonomous operation. Everyone sees the Tesla as a self-driving car. We've even heard words like self-driving storage, self-driving data center, self-driving cloud. It's kind of a buzzword, it's been hyped up a lot, but it's becoming much more of a reality as people start to think about how to automate away the manual, undifferentiated tasks and move the value into either writing better software or into operations. This is kind of a hot topic. Why is it so hot right now? What's your take? Yeah, I think the answer to this lies really in the digital transformation that every company is having to embrace right now. And I use the word company, but everything I described here would apply to public entities as well. I have plenty of conversations with governments and universities and so forth. And to leverage the cliche that I've heard you before, if you're not a technology company and you don't think you need to become one, you're not going to be around for very long because every business to business, business to consumer, even consumer to consumer interaction is becoming digitized. And so making all those connections, digital based takes human talent. And that's really at the core of why this is a hot topic. Anybody who's going to try and hire that talent right now or who's actively trying is going to tell you the competition is fierce. It's a seller's market, so to speak, in terms of getting capable IT talent. And so this topic of automation and autonomous operations has an incredibly pragmatic component to it because you can't hire your way through digital transformation. An element of your strategy is going to have to involve making that talent more efficient. And so along with good business processes, automation is going to be a prerequisite to make any progress on your digital transformation within a finite set of IT talent. So, do your question, why is it a hot topic? Look at every entity's digital transformation is going to depend upon. You know, you've been around, seen a lot of ways of innovation come and go. Everyone has its own kind of like unique characteristics. Now we're seeing with this transformation, this digital transformation, a lot of things kind of coming together. So it's always been the classic people process technologies, you know, the three kind of areas people talk about. But if you look at what cloud and now edge and distributed computing is bringing into the equation, companies are identifying competitive advantages to processes that can be software enabled or defined or automated. And where their workflows are the IP of the company. So this is kind of like a new revelations. Like, I mean, that process has always been great with their manufacturing or whatever that was, you know, in place, but now the scale of that in digital with the apps out there, this has been a big focus of the modernization of applications. What's your reaction to that? Yeah, no, no, very much so. It's, you bring up an extra point, kind of all the focus and attention that corporations have given to these other processes for time now that, you know, this whole, you know, online digitized modern operations model, it's flowing into that as well. And, you know, it's, you know, at the end of the day to some of the points that you made here, you know, are you and your whatever business or entity that you're supporting, you know, are you pushing out the levels of features and capabilities that your internal customers or your external customers need at the pace and velocity that you need to, that's where competition is going to take place, that's where business is going to be won or lost. And so I think seeing an indexing of the processes around that and our customers starting to think more about that as critical, just as much to your point as, you know, this technology strategy and how are you going to engage, you know, your customers through a modern, you know, digitized process is important for the factory as the factory line for Ford Motor Company is in terms of how they're going to be interfacing with their customers. So yeah, very timely and certainly top of mind. Yeah, and a lot of CIOs and customers that you work with, I know you guys are having a lot of conversations we've talked with you guys in the past across all of Dell actually, Dell Technologies and it's the same conversation. It's distributed computing and automation AI machine learning are all factoring in, workflows becoming competitive advantage. Now we're into this autonomous phase which is like self-running or healing or all these new stuff. When customers think about this and we've heard CIOs talk about strategies, don't touch the white hot core until you get to the edges first. Put your toe on the wall, different approaches to tackling autonomous operates. What sort of strategies and results should customers expect as they go in and start jumping into the pool, if you will. You know, as I said. I'm glad you asked this question because the subject of automation gets lumped in with a lot of topics with similar buzzwords of AI and machine learning and self-healing and self-driving. While these technologies like that make autonomous operations a reality, we run the risk of having the underlying technology dominate the discussion and that's not where it needs to go. In my discussions with customers, they don't care if the underlying technology is machine learning or deep learning. It doesn't really matter. They want to see tangible outcomes. And so when we talk about the kind of results to expect, there's some pretty simple questions to ask is, that I engage with any CIO or any person in an IT operations capacity is my team spending, how much time is my team spending on updates? Are the updates taking place within tight enough windows? Is my team getting the root cause of issues faster? Is my team closing out tickets faster? Is my business deploying more applications for week per month per year? These are the kind of things that really matter. I mean, this is where the rubber meets the road on this. And the way we approach this is as we deliver more capabilities and features in this space of autonomy, we're constantly engaging our customers in a before and after state to understand if we really move the needle. And so we do collect data on this front to see if we are delivering tangible results. And what we've seen just in the past year is when we do this and do it right, we're seeing issue resolution times dropping like 50 to 90%. We're seeing time spent on admin tasks reduced by like 85%. We're seeing operations cost drop by a third, applications being pushed out almost doubling. So these are the real benefits, right? If you can free up and pull the human component out of some of these necessary but not necessarily value added tasks in your day-to-day operations, this is the kind of results customers can see. I want to ask you about your recent event hosted by Mark Hamill but about the framework you guys announced. But before that, I want to ask you, well, I got you here about supply chain. I mean, obviously Dell made its bones in supply chain and innovation. Going back to the early days, Michael's book is awesome and he talks about being successful. But you're starting to hear words like software supply chain. You're starting to hear words like the word supply chain is now becoming lingua franca in business, not just on moving goods here and there. Digital supply chains are emerging and it's impacting developers because they have to secure them. And there's also mindset of an operational mindset or systems thinking as well as design thinking but mainly systems thinking. So this is not for the supply chain geeks out there. This is like hitting me. She has this notion of supply chain. Doesn't the autonomous operations hit to the core of this? Yeah, it, yes, it should because ideally what you're doing is your autonomous operations strategy is contemplating the fact that that supply chain is going to be fluid. Like, you know, and so, you know, just think about the, you know, the underlying infrastructure and the choices that you have being on bare metal, on VM based, on container based, there's different distributions within that. We didn't start to think about, you know, how I might orchestrate that and the different platforms that we have there around configuration management or application orchestration. You're right, that supply chain does become, you know, pretty complex. And so us as a provider to customers that are having to deal with that software supply chain, you know, what we need to be cognizant of is the fact that, you know, we can't dictate that always. We have to assume there's going to be changes in there. And so that certainly does influence our approach and trying to make that as, you know, friendly to a heterogeneous environment that we know is going to change going forward. Awesome. And we're going to see more of that kind of thinking and apply it to the people, skill development and also software automation to offload that. But, okay, back to the event, you guys had Mark Hamill who's a huge fan, Star Wars, the Jedi master, represents the old guard, you know, of IT now looking at the cloud. You guys announced at that event this autonomous operations framework. Could you talk about what that is and why is it important? Yeah, so to begin with, you know, if you had told me when I was watching Mark Hamill as a child in a movie theater that he would one day help me do my job, I would have gone insane. But anyways, that aside, that autonomous operations framework, it's built around six levels of automation. And we can kind of take the cue from the Society of Automotive Engineers and work that they had done around autonomous cars. But we believe that we needed something distinct for IT. And, you know, it starts off with level zero, which is no automation. There's a human doing absolutely everything and you progress up through five subsequent levels of operator-assisted partial automation, conditional automation, level five being full autonomy. There's a set of expectations with each of these. And look, as you progress up, the level of involvement of humans in the decision and the reaction is decreased each and every step. And some might say, well, so what? All you did is document a framework. Well, it's important to both our customers and then our internal teams that have to deliver this. And let me just elaborate on that a little bit. Why it's important to customers is that automation implies trust. As you, as my infrastructure provider, Dell, do I trust you to automate something that is typically involved my own team, assessing what it is the problem to be and determining their mediation action? Am I willing to hand over the keys to that to you? You have to earn that. And you earn that by progressing up through these different levels. And if I can't trust you with conditional automation, I'm not going to trust you with full autonomy. So the customers, there's a psychology that's involved here that they have to progress through these levels. And so you have to be deliberate. I'd say as well, you need to recognize that not all customers are going to progress through that at the same pace. So it's important that when we think about how we're going to provide this, yeah, we want to have an option for the highest level of autonomy as possible, but that doesn't mean all customers are going to be ready. So we need to think about, you know, how do you provide the N minus one and N minus two levels of capabilities? So we're meeting customers where they are in terms of their comfort and embracing this idea of autonomous. And then, you know, for us internally, that's the customer's perspective. For us, then this is a great set of guideposts for our teams to think about how we advance. And so when we have a feature that we're deploying and making available, let's say it's sort of a workload contention feature, right? We then think about that about, okay, how do we start to advance up through the different levels here? We know workload contention is an important problem, but how do we start to take the human out of that equation in a methodical way to advance up through these levels? So we give a suite of options to our customers to adopt it. Drew, talk to me about your reaction with customers because I know there's a spectrum of customers that are leaning in. Some are putting the toe in the water, so to speak. Some want more information. Some are just looking at the architecture of how they're going to scale post COVID. And then have a growth strategy for their business. What feedback are you getting? How would you put the customer's mindset? And can you describe the makeup of the customer profile per, yeah? Yeah, I would say, when we talk about these six levels, they're about halfway up in general if you ask me to kind of do the bell curve, right? And in terms of comfort level, and we'll call it partial or conditional automation there where it's like, in general it's like, okay, we know we need to take some of the humans out of this but why don't we start by, you recommending what the remediation is. I'll take a look at it and decide if I want to implement it or recommend the remediation and give me a button I can click to act upon it. So there's still some level of human checks and balances in there, but we've taken a lot of the grunt work out of it, so to speak, to do it. But that's where they are. They certainly aspire to move up again back to this resource crunch competing for talent that I can't keep hiring people to keep up with the work here. And what they want to do is work with us to, okay, so how do I evolve this to start to prove it? And this is where we can kind of go back to some of these things of the machine learning and so forth where it's up to us as we think about how we design the systems around this is how can we start to observe how customers are responding to our recommendations? Are they always taking them? Are they modifying them? So we can get smarter in terms of what it is we're going to suggest and what it is we're going to automate so that we're doing it around their values, not necessarily ours. That's a really important component here, this value-based approach that we need to embrace because what might be considered an acceptable set of circumstances for a financial services company might not be for a manufacturing company. And so that's something that we need to take into account in the overall design. Yeah, and also to your point earlier about meeting them where they are is super important. And I think what's interesting, I've been watching over the past five Dell technology worlds, the transition of Dell becoming much stronger and cohesive in each element of the end-to-end mix, if you will, of hybrid. And that's been a big boost. And so as customers go, okay, I still got to get better, right? So they're taking this way. And some customers, you know what? I need to do more. But you guys are running these companies with your technology. So it's not like as easy as not a clean sheet of paper, in some cases it is when you have new projects, they go cloud native and they just, they deploy and they have an edge and all that good stuff. But in terms of making autonomous operations real, in terms of your roadmap, as you guys evolve, how close are you to having that secret formula? Or do you have the secret formula now? What is it? Yeah, so the short answer is, do we have the secret sauce, the secret formula made today? We do, but that doesn't mean we're done. Like, so back to the framework, like nobody in the industry is at full autonomy. So let's just be like really honest there. It's an aspirational North Star that we all have to make progress too. But, you know, what that means is you can take something that has a level of autonomy today and let's take something like workload contention analysis that I brought up earlier, where, you know, we can identify where we've got workloads competing for shared resources that need to be redistributed. You know, today we flagged that contention and let the customer determine remediation. So, hey, we're letting you know you've got a problem. You know, they're going to determine that remediation based upon their first hand knowledge of the environment and applying the values that they have to determine the best path. But, you know, our task is then to gain insight on that and how our customers are choosing to remediate, translate those into rule-based decisions for an explicit outcome that kind of advances you up one step. Moving beyond rules, you start to understand more generalized outcome soft that's a conditional automation. And then you move beyond that to get to a service level-based objective, which would be high autonomy. So, you're there, but this framework clearly calls out, like, this is a journey, like there's no, you never really get to the end, so to speak. And that's fine, right? That nirvana full autonomy, we all should aspire to it. But we are going to be very, very deliberate in terms of how we take things like this and advance them up through the framework to make it more real. And again, to give customers choice as they're willing to progress up through that trust, we'll be there with an option for them when they want to stay back with where they are, because that's where their comfort is, we'll be able to meet them there as well. Yeah, and I think also to be fair to anyone who may look at this as, you know, kind of like, maybe futurist, every customer that you have is different operationally. I mean, you have, again, you mentioned financial fintech, they're huge. The financial services area versus say, you know, classic enterprise, I mean, could be insurance or whatever. A lot of legacy and now new technologies coming in, this all part of the opportunity is to kind of bring that together. And it's not a switch. Yeah, it is. And I'll just, you know, the one last plug for why I feel great about doing this is Dell Technologies is I think about the breadth of what we cover in that environment, you know, with the breadth of our portfolio and the level of insights that we can have by kind of contemplating all the impacts across that topology that we span. It's super exciting in terms of kind of what we can really unlock here in terms of value from an end-to-end perspective. Drew, it's great to chat with you. I have one quick, more important question, most important question is, did you get a selfie with Mark Hamill? No. Oh, come on. I've seen every Star Wars, I mean, I'm a huge Star Wars fan, of course, Star Wars Star Trek all on the same tier one. No, sorry, I missed out. I was virtual for that one. So, although I probably could have done a screenshot on Zoom or something like that and claimed it. Okay, well, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for your insight. I think this is a great area. Autonomous operations are moving beyond the hype with seeing evidence in it. You're seeing, obviously, on clean sheet of paper, greenfield opportunities. And then as it comes into the white hot core enterprise, even more trust is needed, even more reliability track record, you guys doing great work. Thank you so much for sharing on theCUBE. Great, thank you, John. Okay, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host for this CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching.