 Hello, welcome to this analyst brief where we're discussing Dell's Apex Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift and their announcement around that. I'm Dave Vellante and Rob Strecce and I will unpack the market for cloud computing and what the Dell Red Hat announcement means to customers. First, let's take a reminder look again at cloud usage. You know, the movement between public and private clouds, it continues. But looking at the data from ETR, we're seeing that the market is becoming much more balanced. It's not really reached in equilibrium yet, but it's definitely the balances tipping back toward on-prem. And this chart from ETR shows the percent of usage of public clouds relative to private clouds specifically within the S&P 500, which represents a very large portion of spending well over half of IT spend and is generally considered a bellwether. Now the data shows about 43% usage of public cloud today growing to 55% by January, 2026. Now note that the expected 2026 figure is down from 10 months ago, implying that the market is reaching a more balanced state. As we said, i.e. many workloads are where they belong and the steep momentum to migrate off-prem has stabilized. Rob, what do you make of this data? Yeah, I think it's super interesting in the fact that cloud has become not a place, but it's really an operating model. And I think a lot of what they're looking at is the fact that this equilibrium is because there's better tooling coming to the on-premise. And things like the cloud, Apex cloud platform, are one way that people are looking at how they simplify their life. And AI, of course, is going to be the next battleground here for tooling. Oh, absolutely. Okay, let's look at another set of data. At this time, we're going to look at the overlap of Dell inside 144 Red Hat accounts within the ETR dataset. So the chart shows net score or spending momentum on a platform that's on the Y axis. And presence in the dataset or overlap in these accounts is on the horizontal axis. We see that 46% of those 144 Red Hat customers also have Dell infrastructure installed. So you can see on that X axis, Dell is the dominant player with a greater share inside of these Red Hat accounts, more so than any other competitor. And Rob, I recently talked to Sadeer Srinivasan of Dell and discussed the Apex cloud platform family. Then you spoke with Caitlin Gordon of Dell and Chris Morgan, who's Senior Director of Hybrid Platforms at Red Hat. And Dell recently announced expansion of the Apex cloud platform with the addition of Apex cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift. So Rob, what are the relevant customer requirements that people really need to know about? Yeah, I think what they're really looking for is how do they deal with demand for agility and flexibility? I think that's at the top of the list and they're trying to understand, hey, it is a cloud operating model, we're going to expand, we're gonna keep expanding. How do we really deal with that in an easy way? And it's also a shift towards containerized workloads. I think you and I have been talking for quite a while as people go to microservices and build those next-gen applications, a lot of it is in these containerized workloads where there may be 10 to 20 containers that actually make up an application. And I think there's also a simplified combination of cloud experiences because they're not just going on-premise with their cloud, they're going to other places, like they're going to co-location, they're going to other hyperscalers and they need a operating model that goes across all of those. And also I think they're looking at it and saying, hey, we're a Red Hat shop and we really like Red Hat's experience and their expertise. So we're trying to leverage that and we have their tooling already. And I think also part of the big thing that they're looking for is a true partnership between the organizations and how do they jointly engineer these things together? Because as they move towards a hybrid experience, it's really important to know that you have that supportability going forward. One company can do it alone these days. How do you think in your expert opinion, this announcement addresses customer requirements and or changes them? I think it really is about the unified application in the interplane that the IPEX cloud platform is bringing to bear for customers is a really a big piece of it. It's an operating model that is very unique to what they're bringing out. It is very cohesive. I think it's also they're looking for that all-in-one solution which compute storage and container orchestration is built in so that when they're getting up and running, it's really quick to get up and running and they know where they're gonna go and it's the same tooling across everything. I think the simplified management, modernized infrastructure to your point, hey, how do I get GPUs and other pieces of infrastructure into the compute layer where I'm building these microservices applications? And I think, again, it's the adoption of those microservices and containers that's really pushing it to be more than just, hey, we go out to the cloud and this is where we're always gonna build. I think bare metal has an appeal from a cost factor perspective as well and the benefits of bare metal are really coming true and starting to ring true, but it has to be turnkey. It can't be the old rack and stack, pipe power and ping and connecting everything up. So double click on the announcement. What exactly did Dell and Red Hat announce and why should customers care? Well, I think they really are going after the simplicity and that cloud operating model. It's not just a rehashed, hyperconverged infrastructure, HCI as we've talked about before. It's not just gen two of that. It's really a cloud operating model on top of the hardware and software that's integrated in there. So I think really that makes it cloud native and cloud native applications really easy to deploy and run. The Apex Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift really takes advantage of the leadership role that OpenShift has in Kubernetes. And I think Red Hat really has a developer ecosystem, a DevOps ecosystem that is super strong and allows people to use the kit in the stack for DevOps that they're using today and apply it to this platform. It's a powerful, I would say relationship, not only for Red Hat, but for Dell, especially in their channel partners where they're leaning into the channel where organizations are going, hey, how do I have a better hybrid experience and looking to that channel partner? And really ultimately customers are spending with their money because they want an operating model that not only works on-premise or in Colo, but also can scale up to those hyperscalers for when they're using that for production. And it gives optionality to the customers and to the channel. I think both of those constituents have been looking forward to this day for quite some time. So, Rob, thank you, appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Okay, and thank you for watching this Analyst Brief. We'll see you next time on theCUBE.