 The rise of cloud native concepts created a rush to cloud, enabling a more agile development and deployment for applications. The challenge is multiple clouds create complexity in terms of variances in operating environments, tools and processes. And with me is Sadeer Srinivasan, who's the Senior Vice President of Multi-Cloud and Data Solutions at Dell Technologies to talk about some of these issues in studio. Welcome Sadeer, thanks for coming in. Thank you Dave. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. Now about a month ago we met with Shannon Champion from Dell Technologies to discuss your new family of Apex cloud platforms. And today Sadeer and I are going to discuss what's new and we're going to take a closer look at how this next generation technology is bridging the cloud divide for IT. So Sadeer let's recap if we could, the Apex portfolio approach, the strategy, the challenges that you're focused on for your customers and then specifically, what should we know about Apex cloud platforms? Awesome, thank you, thank you Dave. And I think it starts with what you said, exactly what you said, which is the complexity. The number one problem that we see our customers facing is more and more complex operational complexity because it's multi-cloud. I mean most of our customers are still trying to get hybrid done right and now they're having to deal with multiple clouds. So we talked about in the past our multi-cloud by design strategy and that really has three legs or three pillars I would say. The first is we're enriching the public clouds by bringing our storage, software defined storage assets into the public cloud so we can offer the same level of capabilities, enterprise grade storage capabilities in the cloud. That's what we call our ground to cloud piece. The second piece is connecting the cloud operating environments back on-prem and that's what we call cloud to ground and that's what we're going to talk a little bit more about today, the announcement we're going to talk about. And then the third piece is optimizing that experience, multi-cloud experience to be able to give that cloud consumption experience subscription as a service no matter where you are, whether you're in the cloud or you're on-prem. So it's this, we've taken a holistic approach to multi-cloud that really simplifies operations across cloud, on-prem, edge, wherever. And the trick is how do you deliver that consistency at all layers of the stack, right? All the way from infrastructure, all the way up to the application layer. And that's where this new stuff comes in. Okay, so the new stuff, the Apex Cloud Platform family you're saying addresses operational consistency and this includes on-prem, correct? Can you tell me more about what these are? Yeah, so if you think about sort of cloud native, as you said, there's a lot of applications, modern applications are being developed in the cloud or in modern app dev environments like Kubernetes and containers, right? So what we set out to do was to bring those operating environments to the customers on-prem as easy as it is to consume in the cloud. And we've done this in the past with on-prem infrastructure like VMware, right? We've had a lot of success, years of success delivering that level of ease of use and automation in hyper-converged infrastructure on-prem. We're doing that now for multi-cloud as well. So we, just like we did in the past, we're now collaborating very closely with three partners, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware to co-engineer these turnkey solutions. They're really turnkey solutions that dramatically reduce your operational complexity in ease of use. All right, so you got to giving customers choice, that's important and we've talked before about the need for this. So sorry, we're giving choice, consistency and control. That's what the Apex Cloud Platforms offer. Okay, you got the three Cs. Choice, consistency and control. Okay, so choice is, in other words, any cloud on-prem, consistency, we've talked in the past about sort of the need to abstract all that underlying complexity and have a common experience that obviously gives you control. How do you actually do that in these platforms? Yeah, great question. I think the three Cs actually start with consistency. That's the founding, the base capability. And we achieve that through using common building blocks across all of the Apex Cloud Platform family. And the building blocks are actually three of them, right? The first is the hardware. So we bring to our industry best, industry leading power edge servers. The next generation is sort of the latest generation of power edge servers, which are all based on the Intel fourth generation Xeon scalable processors. So you're getting the best compute across all of them and it's common. The second piece is the software defined storage. Now that again, independent of which stack you're using, which cloud stack, you're getting the same software defined storage across all of them. So you get that consistency. And then the last piece is the management and orchestration software that makes this platform be what it is, which is a turnkey solution, right? Extreme levels of automation that give you fast time to value. And that's also common across all of them. So discussions like this, I like to invoke Einstein, like an adapt an Einstein saying. So my take on this is move as much data as you need to, but no more. Now, but you still have to have data mobility. So how are you addressing data mobility for customers? That's actually, we talked about infrastructure complexity. Data is actually another, yet another level of complexity for customers. Data is everywhere. Sometimes you have to move the data to where the application is. Sometimes you move the workload to where the data is. And we set out to solve this using what we call our universal storage layer, right? We talked about the common storage. So it's this storage stack that's available both on-prem and in the clouds. That's how the two pieces come together, the cloud to ground to cloud. So we get, the customer can get the same storage services and operational interfaces everywhere. And not only that, because it's the same storage stack on both sides, we can actually leverage very efficient data mobility techniques or mechanisms between them. So we're moving data in much more efficient ways. And because it's the same operational interface, customers don't have to re-platform their application, whether you're going from in the cloud to on-prem or vice versa or so. Yeah, so obviously moving data can be time consuming and expensive. So you could give us some use cases where data mobility, where you're kind of making that an enabler as opposed to a roadblock for customers. Sure, I mean the most common one we get is again the application delivery one, right? Where customers might want to spin up a development environment in the cloud to enable their developers to actually develop the application, but they may choose to deploy it in production on-premises. You can do that now without having to worry about it being different across the two locations. The one that's even more compelling I would say is the world of data and especially now with AI, right? The speed at which or the rate at which customers need to consume resource infrastructure to do analytics and to do AI is just incredible. And so you may not always be able to have those resources in one location. And with the universal storage layer now, you can actually move data to wherever you need, wherever you might have the GPUs for example, to be able to do your AI over or machine learning over there and then bring the results back. Got it. Okay, so you got this common framework for management and orchestration. Can you add a little bit of color there and tell me more about that? Yes, that's what we call our Apex Cloud Platform Foundation software, you know. This is the software that we have spent years now developing in the world of, excuse me, in the world of hyperconversion infrastructure and software-defined infrastructure. What we've done now is taken that software which delivers all the automation and lifecycle management and make it available to beyond just the hyperconversion into this multi-cloud infrastructure. And because of the experience that we've built into this, we're seeing customers are seeing as much as 90% reduction in deployment time, for example, or 88% reduction in the number of steps required to deploy a stack, a development environment stack. And this, not only do we do the automation across the Apex Cloud Platforms, we've also integrated this foundation software into the partner's management plane. So what that does is it gives a customer that similarity with their cloud environment so they can still leverage that, but it also gives consistency across the cloud environments. So it's the best of both worlds. This is good. I mean, it's impressive. You guys taking a holistic approach to the problem. You're addressing this complexity head on, which is what customers want you to do. Any closing thoughts, Sidir? Yeah, look, we are very excited to bring the Apex Cloud Platform family. Last month, we announced the one for Azure and today we're announcing the one for Red Hat and OpenShift. And it's going to bring tremendous value to our customers and partners and giving them choice, consistency and control across their multi-cloud estate. That's good. You guys doing some good work. Thanks for coming into the studio today. Thanks, Dave. You're welcome. All right, about a month ago, Dell introduced the first platform in this new Apex family with the Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft Azure. Now it's time for everyone to hear more about the next offer to market the Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. So stick around as Chris Morgan, who's the Senior Director of Product Management at Red Hat joins Caitlin Gordon, who's the Vice President of Product Management from Dell, to dig into this exciting new offer and explain its potential to transform OpenShift operations on-prem.