 The Cube presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Good morning, welcome to day two of The Cube at Dell Technologies World, live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, Dave Nicholson. Guys, a lot of momentum yesterday, the vibe was amazing. We're thinking there's about 8,000 people here, announcements yesterday, a lot going on with multi-cloud, with partners, with customers. John, we got Michael Dell coming on in just about 15, 20 minutes. We got the keynotes getting out, people are starting to come in, you can see them flowing through the hallway. Michael Dell will be on in about 15 minutes, and we're going to ask them every year when they have The Cube here, where you're going to have room with questions around digital transformation, security's the hot thing obviously here, data, and what's up with Dell? So we'll see what he's going to say. We had some really good interviews yesterday. We had customers on, we had partners, and the overall sentiment was, people are very excited about, I mean the momentum that Dell is coming off of from FY22 of first time hitting north of 100 billion, first time in the company's history, the partner ecosystem expanding, what their acknowledgement of multi-cloud is here, the vibe was good, the partners are excited, a lot of opportunity. I mean I think the big thing's story here this year is that VMware's not part of Dell Technologies World, although there is some stuff kind of connected together in terms of ownership, but it's still now on its own. So that's a key development that's happened since we were last in here in person. But the digital transformation train continues to go down the tracks and it's getting better and better and better in terms of what is happening, but there's still more complexity at the edge, that's something that's important, and security more than ever is important on a global stage, but also the cyber attacks are going up, ransomware has essentially become so standard, everyone needs a solution. So everyone's pivoting to endpoint protection, zero trust and ransomware has been, you see the storage vendors go that way, so that's a big trend, a lot of people go in there, and they need it too, because ransomware is very dangerous. And then obviously cyber all over the world is huge. So Dell plays a role in that, they have a lot of gear and I think the edge story is developing nicely. Yeah, you talk about ransomware, I was reading some stats recently that there's one attack every 11 seconds, that organizations now, it's not a matter of are we going to get hit, it's when. And I think I read a stat the other day that said 75% of organizations will be hit by at least one cyber attack by 2025, which is around the corner. So security is that board level front and center conversation, and we saw a lot of that with what they were announcing just yesterday alone. Yeah, and to me the cybersecurity issue is just also a political one. The adversaries can play with open source and the threats are real, the threat vectors are increasing, and there's no perimeter as everyone knows that in security, and you start to see data being protected. So now you got data protection is changing, that's big for Dell, they have huge footprint of disaster recovery and data protection, and so that becomes a really key point for protecting the data in flight, data engineering is a hot trend, so data as code has become huge, you're seeing that in all the digital applications, the role of data is becoming more and more. Absolutely, we talked a lot, Dave, about Edge yesterday, especially particularly in retail, and a lot of the massive transformation and the pressure that retail is under, as consumers we bring this, we want the online experience in the connected store, and so they talked a lot about what they're doing with respect to Edge at the retail yesterday and in financial services, really interesting. What are some of your thoughts on the direction that Dell's going? So I've been taking a little bit of a different angle on this since I've been here, prowling around, looking under the covers to get an understanding of the advances in hardware that are driving the top line value proposition. So here it's appropriate to talk about things like retail at the Edge and the experience that that delivers to an end user customer. Dell is still doing, however, the really hard work of optimizing systems on the back end, the stuff that a lot of people would say they don't care about. The idea is Dell makes sure that this development happens so people at the Edge don't have to care about it. So that's the thing that I find fascinating being kind of an old school hardware guy myself is that all these really cool things aren't getting talked about because we don't need to talk about them because Dell hasn't handled. So whether it's retail, whether it's advances in security, they're all driven by highly optimized and tuned hardware. You mentioned partners, partnerships that Dell has behind the scenes are critical to all of that. I mean, I think the big thing about Dell too is they have a co-chairman. They have Chuck Gwitten, a co-chief operating officer, Jeff Clark, Chuck Gwitten's new came in from Bain and you got two co-COOs, right? So you got a fledging company, Dell's growing. And the big question is M&A, right? Dave and I were talking about that last night with a bunch of folks in the hallway about who does Dell buy? Do they need to buy anyone, right? And again, hardware is back. I mean, you look at what we talked about yesterday in our wrap-up, day one was essentially hardware is becoming more important. And even at Amazon re-invent when we were covering that show, the role of Silicon plays a huge role. Now they run hardware in the cloud, so we all know hardware is just servers somewhere in the cloud there. So I think hardware is going to be huge, David, because edge needs smaller, faster, cheaper boxes to sit and co-load. Equinix was on yesterday. You're seeing like 5G edges deploying. So I think hardware is going to matter. I think you're going to see the home become much more device-centric, smarter devices. So smart city, smart homes. Hardware matters more than ever. Yeah, yeah, and from an acquisition perspective, who knows, maybe Dell would acquire VMware. Crazier things have happened. Or VMware could acquire Dell. Or yeah, crazier things have happened. David would argue that one. So the hardware is back, back again. It makes me think of that Eminem song, Slim Shady. Think we need to do some sort of parody on that together. But what does that mean for the partner community? There are over 200,000 partners we can talk about. Bars, distis, GSIs, data center, the hyperscalers, that's partner ecosystem. The partner story is, I think, more important than ever. And you're seeing more ecosystems develop around companies that you wouldn't think have ecosystems. That's because with cloud and now the cloud operating model, which is on-premise and edge, you can do piece parts of solutions. And the glue layers, the abstraction layers in software at scale are now available. So it's easier for customers to buy point solutions or platforms and put them together. Bet it more than ever before. You're seeing the headless retails, an example. The trend that's happening. You're seeing, look at in the consumer market, ghost kitchens, ghost retail. So you're starting to see delivery. And so at the consumerization of IT is happening, you're going to see more and more customs applications that are taking advantage of stacks that are configured either on the fly or with multiple partners. So I think you're going to see the big players like AWS, Microsoft, Dell, have real big ecosystem players. And that's going to be a huge trend continuing. So today, Michael Dell is coming on in just minutes. Chuck Whitten is also on. Jeff Clark, what are some of the things that you really want to dig into with these guys, John? Well, the big thing I want to ask him is how their strategy and operations fit into how their customers are consuming. Dell's got a huge customer base. I want to find out how their solutions are being operationalized by the customers. And that's going to be coming, poking at cloud a little bit and see how real that's going. Apex has been very popular. The security story. I also want to ask about the changing workforce because the IT departments of the old, those folks are aging out. So a new generation of IT is coming together. And I think those folks want things easy, push button, easy button dashboards, they've never, maybe not even racked a server before. So completely different new generation. I want to see how that impacts how they make products. Good point. We saw some of that in the keynote this morning. They were showing some of the gaming opportunities. Dave and I were in there this morning and what they're doing for that. And the gamers are all very excited about that. But the connected home was something that they were talking about. Yeah, who knew you could make a trackpad and a laptop more exciting? I mean, it's brilliant, right? It controls for home video conferencing built in. It just shows that, again, kind of at that hardware level where people think, ah, it doesn't matter. No, there's a lot of room for innovation there. And back to the discussion around partners, much like the big cloud players, depend upon systems integrators out in the marketplace. In order to deliver these solutions to end user customers, the channel's going to be incredibly important. And I know that Dell is putting a lot of effort behind that right now. That's pretty clear. Yep, we've seen a lot of that. So exciting stuff today. I mentioned the three guys, three only of the many folks that are coming on the show today. We've got Allison Dew tomorrow, some other happy hitters. Guys, looking forward to great day two full coverage. Stay with us. We've got a lot of content coming at you from theCUBE. Live from the show floor of Dell Technologies World 2022 from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Stick around. Michael Dell will be up next with John and Dave.