 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host, David Nichols and David, I think the first time we've co-hosted this week. Excited to be with you. Very excited. Live wall-to-wall coverage, two and a half days, two days and one evening. I'd say 7,000 plus people here, so really good showing. Caitlin Gordon is here, she's the vice president of product management for cloud solutions and tech alliances at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCUBE. Always a pleasure to see you, thanks for coming on. Really good to be back in a physical cube with three-dimensional humans. Yeah, so. Unbelievable. And it was good to see you up on stage today, so a fantastic job. I think the keynotes have been good. I think it's funny coming out of COVID. It seems like the keynotes are really tight this year, and so I think that's good. You have a lot to say, so that's why we love theCUBE, so you can come back and... It's nice to have a live audience, get the feedback, yeah. Yeah, they were... I tell you, the audience was engaged today, right? I mean, lots of hooping and hollering, so let's talk about multi-cloud. It's some pre-COVID, post-COVID, feels like things have changed. Maybe due to COVID, maybe not, but what are you seeing the patterns in customers around multi-cloud? Well, it's been interesting. I've been on a multi-cloud world tour here over the last six to nine months, and one thing is clear. For the first time as an industry, we agree on something, and that's multi-cloud. We don't agree on what it means, but we do agree that multi-cloud is our reality, and customers are having a lot of challenges with what that means. I mean, today, reality is multi-cloud, most of the time just means multi-contract, right? I know what hyperscaler is my primary. I have a secondary. I probably bought someone that brought someone else in. I've got SaaS providers. I've got my on-prem partners, but there's not a lot of continuity and consistency across that. It's really operational silos, data silos. Being able to predict that spend is a challenge, and there's a lot of people challenges in there, whether it's developer velocity, as Jen talked about earlier today, or even just simply having enough people with the right skills is a real big challenge because no matter what definition you have of multi-cloud, it means distributed, and it means a lot of different places, and that's a big challenge. I tagged you in my tweet today when you're up on stage. I don't know if you saw it, but basically, we use this term super cloud, and it was pretty clear to me anyway, an example of what I think of is what multi-cloud should be, an experience that spans location, that is the consistent experience with all my policies and my security, my governance. Talk about what you guys are doing to map into the trends that you see. You used my favorite phrase, consistent experience, and really what we're doing is two things. We are building a portfolio of software and services, and that's really targeted at that consistent experience, so you can have your data and your workloads in the right place, but you can have a consistent experience with what you already have on-prem. We really need to have true hybrid cloud operations. We overused that term and we ruined it, and then we didn't use it anymore, but that's what we're talking about. On-prem to multiple public clouds have that consistency, but that's not enough because this is just such a complex landscape. The second part of what we're building is really an ecosystem of cloud partnerships. So whether it's the hyperscalers, certainly, but also co-location providers like Equinex or SaaS providers like Snowflake, the more we can partner with the key providers in the multi-cloud landscape, the more we can simplify that across. Yeah, so you mentioned something that's key. Most people when they think about multi-cloud, they're not going into that because they really want to do the same thing nine different ways. So that consistency. It's not the design point. No, exactly. It's like, I want multi-some things, but not multi-everything you offer. So the concept of using this well-worn, well-proven set of storage intelligence software titles and putting them out into a variety of cloud providers, linking them with a unified experience is obviously powerful, and that seems to be what's behind Alpine. Is that the strategy? Yeah, it's absolutely right because you want that consistency because you have established multi-lots of things, but you want to be able to get the consistency, but you want to get that across all your data types. You can't just have consistency for file. You can only have consistency for object. You want to have that flexibility in who the providers are and what type of data, and yet still have that operational consistency no matter what. So that's the tough combination, keeping flexibility, but also that simplicity and consistency. So Project Alpine, tell us more about it, what it is. Why is it called a project? When will it be a product? All of the things. So Project Alpine, if you've been tuned in this week, you've heard this a few times, but it is our initiative to bring our block file and object storage software to all of the major public clouds. So that is all about being able to really break the barriers between your data and native public cloud services. The key thing that you started off with it, operational consistency. If I have a power store on-prem, I cannot run our block software in the cloud, have that operational consistency, so it's the same UI, it's the same APIs. Why that really matters, the undercurrent of that comes back to people. If you have the same tools, the same APIs, you don't have to learn anything new, you don't have to reskill or rehire any people, and eventually you can drive that even more efficiently all through APIs. So it's all about that consistent operations. I'm not going to ignore your project questions, so I'll get to that as well. It's a project because for a number of reasons, it is something we're working towards and it's going to have deliverables and milestones over a number of months and years, to be honest. We actually first announced Project Alpine back in January, as you know, and we have already extended that now in May to say what we're talking about and who started to show you what that's looking like. So original announcement as a project in January, technology preview here in May, and then we're going to start to have early access for some of these to customers later this year, and then availability into next year. Excellent, so the primary value proposition that I'm hearing is that operational consistency. Is there another dimension of value in terms of function? In other words, I get why I'm not going to get that operational consistency across clouds and on-prem from a public cloud provider. Are there functional capabilities that you bring? I mean, yes. Help us understand that gap between what you can offer as a long-term, you know, the leader in storage versus kind of the new entrance in the public cloud. Yeah, two things come to mind. The number one is data mobility. So having that very efficient and very simple data mobility, because what's the most efficient way to send data from an on-prem storage appliance? Use the native mobility services that are already built into that platform. They're already there. You already know how to use them, and they're very efficient. So they're going to be very smart about what data you send to and what data you send back from the cloud, which is critical from a people standpoint, but also from a cost standpoint, which is the other piece of this. We've been talking about the technology, but as you well know, the business requirements are pretty important. So being able to also not only have your software in the cloud, but transact that through a public cloud marketplace, and in one case will actually be delivered as a native cloud service is critical. So all the pre-committed spend that you have with any one of these hyperscalers, you can actually draw down against that credit to purchase these software and services, which is equally important to the technology value problem. Hence your expanding ecosystem, that kind of goes both ways. Okay, so when I'm on a console within one of the public clouds, I want to go into Alpine, and now I'm into a Dell experience. Is that correct? I talked about flexibility, right? And choice. You have that consistency to say, if you want to standardize on one of the hyperscaler ecosystems, we'll inter-operate that through our APIs. We're not going to force you into any single walled garden, but if you have chosen an ecosystem you want to be working through, you can abstract out our value through APIs and still leverage that underneath the covers really at the data layer. So we are really all about that consistency at the data layer, but inter-operating with whatever control planes and whatever ecosystems you are working with, which I've said it five times, but APIs are a critical part of this. We love UIs and they're pretty in a nice demo, but the reality is probably APIs is where this is mostly going to be consumed. So I have a question for you as a marketer. You mentioned technology versus business value. Clearly outcomes, the actual business value associated with what we do in technology is key. However, as an old-time storage guy myself, I realized that what you're talking about here is decades of development, focusing on things like data protection, resiliency, performance, built originally in an environment that wasn't instrumented for high availability. You needed things like clusters. There wasn't the concept of just J-Bot and servers. One server fails, you throw it away and it automatically goes to another. How do you balance, this is a very long question here, how do you balance the fact that your underlying technology is so good with the desire to communicate the business value? Do you find yourself having to not talk about the technology as much anymore? Because there's so much impressive stuff there. Yeah, I'm a recovering marketing person myself. It is really interesting, having been at this show for many, many, many years, not as many as Dave, probably. I would say a number of those years, we spent most of our time talking about speeds and feeds, how many IOPS, what's the latency, what's our hero number of the day, and we still care about that, right? And data protection, what's your DDU grade, how much can we save you? Still important, but it's a secondary conversation. What are we talking about now? Cloud-native app mobility and app modernization and the underlying infrastructure isn't always going to be Dell's anymore. It's going to be in the hyperscalers in some cases, so it's a completely different conversation and different people we're talking to. It's very exciting, it's a little bit foreign to us, but we welcome it and it's also still important that we understand the infrastructure side too. Because ultimately, even if this is being delivered as a service, someone is still delivering and managing that infrastructure and that is still critically important. So, okay, Project Alpine, is it multi-cloud, is it Apex, is it subscription, is it as a service? Yeah. How should we think about it? Yeah, all those things, yes, check. All of the things. So they're coming together, isn't it? It's coming together, right? You hit all of the right buzzwords, bingo. But multi-cloud, the value prop is project Alpine, multi-cloud, data, and yes, subscription is going to really be the model from an economic standpoint. That's really the key, but ultimately it all comes together. What are you seeing with data architectures, kind of up level in a bit these days, where, you know, customers generally, they'll shove everything into a big data warehouse or a single store or a cloud, and you guys talk about the Edge a lot, we just had a great conversation with Lowe's and what they're doing with VxRail and their stores. How are you seeing the evolution of data architectures? I think the Snowflake announcement was a really, really good example and it came through as an announcement, but it's a partnership, right? And what's really interesting is it's very clear that what we've kind of inherently understood as an on-prem, primarily an on-prem vendor traditionally, is that data has a ton of gravity and between data privacy and just governance regulations, there's a lot of reason that data is not going to move. And what that means from a modern cloud-based analytics standpoint like Snowflake is they need to be able to support the data no matter where it lives. That doesn't mean pulling it into the cloud. Many customers, including us, will not do that. It means being able to access that data. So that more distributed data architecture, but still being able to use those cloud-based tools is really where we're seeing and why we've really announced this partnership this week and I think there's a ton more opportunity in that space. Well, that's the epiphany of the Snowflake deal, is you're able to access non-native Snowflake data into the Snowflake data cloud. That's a first. That's a big deal. Now, I'm sure Snowflake's going to want to migrate it at some point, but to your point, you won't. As a customer, a lot of customers say, no, first of all, a lot of times it's not a business case. If I don't have to move it, why should I move it? If it's cost-effective and it's protected. And then there are constraints to moving data, legal constraints and so forth. Absolutely, and data regulations are not getting less stringent, right? All right, we got to go. Caitlin Gordon, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It was great to see you. Congratulations for all the announcements and awesome to see you face-to-face. Yes, thanks for having me. All right, you're very welcome. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for David Nicholson, Lisa Martin and John Furrier, watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.