 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Good afternoon, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and we're excited to welcome for the first time to theCUBE, Ty Schmitt, VP and fellow at Dell EMC. Hi Ty. Hi. Great to have you here. Glad to be here. One of the things that was talked about this morning during the keynote was what Dell Technologies can enable customers to do from edge to core to cloud. You're a data center guy. Talk to us about edge computing. It's known, benefits are known, but it's still emerging. How was that going to differ in terms of data center requirements and processes than core? So in order to best address that, let me spend a couple of minutes on a little bit of the journey that got us here today from a data center perspective. So go back over a decade, we're actually into year 12 of an organization that was structured to engage customers to customize rack level and then ultimately data center level solutions. So different than designing products and introducing products for the masses. We actually created a group to engage customers directly to customize a solution for them. And it started at a rack level and then quickly moved into a data center level. And so that was 2006, seven, eight time frame is when we started that. Can I ask what the motivation was for that? Was it the business opportunity? Was it to get tighter with your customers? Were they dragging you into that business? Because they weren't happy with their- That was a great question. So the business driver at that time was what today is our large hyper scale customers. You think large hyper scale, we know who those folks are. They were growing at a rate that they were moving away from considering their IT expenses on a single rack per rack basis. They were buying at larger and larger scale. And when you go from buying hundreds to thousands to 10,000s to hundreds of thousands of servers, one, I can demand more customization around my exact usage model. And if I'm having to buy something that is for the general purpose or general masses, there may be things in there that I don't value. And therefore I'm going to pay too much for those or Dell's not going to be able to make as much money on those. So there's a real business needed at an IT level. Ultimately, I'm growing so fast, I can't build data centers fast enough. And so I need a similar approach to my data center problem that I do for my IT problem. How do I aggregate all of this IT gear, reduce waste at the end of the day, optimize a solution that can give me the lowest cost, the fastest time to making money for my business at the best OPEX. And that's how we grew our started and grew our organization. Yeah, sorry for the tangent, but that was the Wild West days of the mega data center build out. We helped customers expand from hundreds or thousands of servers to millions of servers per year. And we did it through a very focused customer-centric engineer-to-engineer relationship, looking at how to best customize and optimize a solution for them. Okay, so that got you started. That's how we got started, that's our DNA. And that took us on a wild ride for a number of years. And as in my world as the data center is kind of the rack up, it's the physical infrastructure, it's the connections, it's the security, density, power cooling, it's those things that are needed to operate that critical IT gear. As we became more and more successful and we had different kinds of customers now intrigued and also now beginning to buy these types of solutions, that drove a different behavior for us. I'm a customer, I'm large enough to justify modules. It makes sense for me, but I'm not a hyperscale guy buying millions of servers a year. I need a different set of tenants. And so that drove us to optimize around those specific tenants. That was kind of the middle years. Now we're talking about the edge. So all of these same customers, by the way, are looking at how to effectively populate, occupy, operate IT outside of their traditional data centers or modular data center. How do I effectively do that? And how do I do it with a balance of risk? CapEx, OPEX, and time. And what we are doing is applying what we've learned operationally and how we engage customers to optimize and right size for a mega type of solution to small discrete edge type solutions. And my example is, there's a different operational model required for a customer who's going to buy 10 megawatts of IT and data centers in one location. That same customer wants to spread that 10 megawatts across 1,000 different locations that requires a different operational model. Most likely different architecture and a completely different approach. And so maybe at the end of the day, you still have to power it, you still have to cool it, you still have to secure it. But how I do that effectively to result in a business gain or an effectiveness for that customer is different from the edge than it is to the macro data center space. So in the mega data center space for years, the pressure was the density for square foot. And now you're saying the paradigm is shifting to how do I distribute megawatts to the edge? Once in some cases, density still plays, right? So I need twice the data center space if I have half the density. That's cost, that's real estate, there's losses. So if I can effectively optimize this smaller piece of real estate, but times hundreds or thousands, that's still goodness for me. So it's still very important to me. And so we're doing that. So Tal, you said you guys started this about 10 years ago. Seems to be a lot of innovation that's gone on as you've learned from what customers need to do. And as technology has changed, as Dell grew, acquired EMC, et cetera, what are some of the key hallmarks that differentiate this offering? You started with hyperscale customers, you're now helping customers get to the edge because their businesses are driving that. What differentiates this offering? I think the biggest differentiator, and it's actually been the same differentiator from day one, is we've approached this through the lens of providing a solution, not a fixed product. And so my example is, if 10 years ago, if I thought I was a smart guy, and we had smart people, which we do, but we were going to design, we thought we had enough of the key requirements to create a product, a fixed product, that's great if that product does apply to multiple customers. But when you start talking about the data center space, there are so many variables involved. How many racks, how much IT gear, what is my density, what is my resiliency, what are my security needs, how am I going to cool it? What is my accessibility requirements? At the edge, it's even more so. All of those variables are prohibitive to creating a fixed product. So our approach is to approach it like a solution. What is the right solution for you? Let us use the tenants, the lessons, learn the building blocks that we know work, and configure them in a way that is most optimized for you. So it's really a business approach, it's an engagement approach differentiator, more so than the technology. But that also allows us to push the envelope on technology as well, because we're addressing it as a system. So guys like you, you have visibility on a lot of stuff. Mega infrastructure, you know, mega internet players, SaaS providers are all, you're working with those guys. Guys specialize clouds, trying to compete with the mega clouds. Nations, building out infrastructure governments. So, paint a picture, what is actually happening out there? You know, there's notion that there's only going to be a few clouds. You guys, Michael, others have always said, no, we see a world of, you know, hybrid world, et cetera. You're in that world, what do you see? So my lens is infrastructure, and what I see is customers who are facing on a case by case basis, a very complex problem. And this complex problem is, I need to transform my business. I don't quite know what I need to do, but I know that my limitations today, predominantly around my physical infrastructure, are preventing me from transforming effectively. And so, how do I identify, what is the right solution for me to enable my transformation? And we work with them, this is like a step one engagement with customers, it's to build a model. What is your CAPEX? What is your real estate? What is your OPEX? Who actually controls those budgets? Where does that spend come from? At the end of the day, if your data center, what you have today is limiting your software, your application, your customer-focused transformation. If it is a limiting factor to what you can do, that's a problem. Your IT solution should be driving your facility strategy, not the other way around. And so, that's easy said, hard to do, but we're working with customers to help that transformation. We've only got a couple seconds up, but I'd love to get your perspective of a customer that really exemplifies this differentiated service that you guys deliver. You want a name of a customer? If you can, or tell us a little story where there's a big impact. That's the thing about your business. So, what is public? And it's not a statement of the edge necessarily, but eBay has been a wonderful customer of ours. There's public case studies of how we help them achieve massive transformation, higher densities, lower OPEX, through modularity, through this approach that I've described, and I can mention them publicly because they're our public case study. That's a pretty good one to mention, if you're going to mention it. Well Ty, thanks so much for stopping by. My pleasure. Thanks for your time and sharing what you're doing and I'm sure the next, not just 10 years, but probably the next year we'll bring a ton more innovation internally. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much. Okay. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are live in Vegas at Dell Technologies World Day One. Stick around, we'll be right back.