 Welcome back to Dell Technology World 2021. Dell Tech World, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to talk about the edge. Very excited to invite Pere Luca Ciedelli, who's the vice president of product management for the Edge portfolio at Dell. And Gil Shnorenson, who is the senior vice president, Edge portfolio, also with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. Great to see you. Yeah, great to see you guys too. Wish we were face to face, but maybe maybe in 22. Gil, let's start with you. The Edge is very exciting. It's not really defined. It's very fragmented, but it's there. It's kind of, you know it when you see it. What do you get excited about when you think about the Edge? I think, well, there's two elements. The first one is that we all live at the Edge. In other words, the areas we deal with are around us every day. We show up when we consume, when we drive, so it's a very physical type of activity. We know it's there. What's really exciting for me is that, and you started with talking about fragmentation right off the bat, it is a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to add value. Because it's so fragmented, because it's so new, because it has developed and evolved the way it is, we see an amazing opportunity for us to add much more value than we do today, and solve problems that have yet to be solved in the industry. And it's an exciting, it's almost like an infinite playground for a technologist, right? I mean, yeah. Dave, I think that's exactly what we find out. The Edge is very exciting, there is a lot of motion, especially due to the pandemic and other things, big factor that accelerate the innovation at the Edge. But this is an inorganic acceleration, and what it kills for most of our customer is also confusion, right? They need to apply multiple solution, but not very organized. So you try to solve the outcome, like having the right production on your line, because demand is surging, but you don't have an organic things to do that and solve the problem. So you see a lot of silos coming in for each one of the solution, and that's what Gil was referring, that's a great opportunity for us as Dell with the breadth of the portfolio we have and what our team, that is a new team, is focusing doing is to bring that idea to be able to consolidate multiple things at the Edge and process things at the Edge. We did an event, a Cube, had an event called the Cube on Cloud in Cube One, and we had John Rose on, and the title of the segment was something like Gaining the Technology Edge, and we were kind of geeking out on the tech at the Edge. And my takeaway there was trying to be like, what is the Edge? It's like, well, it's the place where it makes most sense to process the data. And so that brings up a lot of challenges. There are technical challenges and there are business challenges. I wonder if we could sort of dig into those a little bit. How do you guys look at that? Maybe Gil, you want to start, maybe on the business side and then we could dig into it. Sure. The way things evolved, if you think about it at the Edge, you're a very vertical lesson. Because of that, they're very use case driven. And so in every industry possible, you start with some business person taking a decision, whether they have a need or they want to grow their business. And so for example, they would buy an appliance to do fraud protection in retail or detection retail, or they would buy an application to manage robotics in the factory. And it would come with its own gateway and plan compute and a cloud portal. And then you do it again and again and again. Every time you have a business opportunity, all of a sudden you have this proliferation of IT type equipment at the Edge or it's the worst place to have it really because you don't have the right IT resources and you are in the need to protect it in a much more in a different way than you do in a data center. And so all of that brings us to a point that we see an opportunity to simplify. And so not only simplification, and as simplification or simplicity is the most important driver for any IT purchase. Things that are simple are the easiest and the most economical to operate. The next demand that we see from a customer is security. Because things are at the Edge, they have a much more extended attack surface. They need to be connected to networks. They need to be connected without IT staff. So if you can simplify and secure, you can really unlock amazing value by processing data closely to where it's created. Without it, we're seeing this opportunity as businesses but we can really get to it because there are so those two hurdles in front of us. So Praluka, thank you for that, Gil. When you hear a lot about AI inferencing at the Edge and if you think about AI today, much of the work is modeling, it's done in the cloud but you're not going to be doing AI inferencing in real time in the cloud. Take the autonomous vehicle example. So that brings some technical challenges. There's obviously data challenges. I'm curious as to how you think about that. I mean, we always talk about how much data is going to be persisted. I think Tesla persists like five minutes of data. But some of it is going to go back, that's true. But a lot of it is going to be processed real time and that's just really different than the way we typically think about IT. Yeah, absolutely. So at the Edge, especially in manufacturing, we see right now, or in other use case, it's very important to get the outcome very quickly. Now, you don't use that a deep learning model for that. You need to just understand, for example, in a computer vision use case where you take the image of your production line. You actually, to your point, Dave, you not keep those image, you keep the image where you have the defect. But you need to process that AI ML needs to be intelligent enough to understand that you have a defect and send that image then to the cloud. So the search of the data at the Edge is a very important factor. And why you need to process data at the Edge? Because at your point, you can't wait to send to the cloud and I'm waiting, right? Tesla is a clear example of that, all the autonomous car where you need to react instantly to a change. But in manufacturing, for example, that is our focus for now, is for example, the robots that if you need to optimize the robot, you need to have an immediate understanding of where the pieces are and when they need to put in the tolerance need to be act immediately. Otherwise, you come out with a thousand of pieces that they're not in the right tolerance. So at the end of the day, what we see is not only the surge of the need of processing AI ML to the Edge, but also the need of a new type of compute at the Edge. So in the past was just gateway and you'd get the gateway and you send the data to the cloud. Now it's a form of a new compute that has also GPU capability and other things to process the data. So very important. And I think Dell, especially, we are very focused on that because it's really where the customer need to extract the value. Thank you. Agil, I want to get to the unique value proposition of Dell and what makes you distinct. And I infer from your comments your strategy you said is to simplify. And so I see two vectors there. One is to simplify at the Edge. The other is to where needed connect that Edge, whether it's on-prem, a public cloud, cross-cloud, that kind of simplification layer that abstracts the underlying complexity. Maybe you could talk about your strategy and what makes you guys different. Sure. We've been talking to our, well, we always talk to our customers and we've been doing business at the Edge for many, many years. Let's call it coincidental. We're a very large company. We have reached reserve our customers. So when they decide to buy something for their Edge environments, they come to us as well as other vendors and we win the percentage of the time based on our market share. But when we decided to take another look at how can we be even more relevant, we started talking to a lot of them in great depth. And what we discovered was the problem I talked about before, the problem of complexity, the problem of security and the problem of choice. And so our focus is to do what we do best. We, at the end of the day, were an IT company. And our customers for the most part are IT people and we see them dragged more and more into Edge projects because customers need to connect Edge to their network and they need to security. And that's how it starts. And so those worlds of IT and OT are coming together and they're coming together or applying IT best practices, which is exactly what we know how to do. And so because of that, we think that they need to think about architecture versus unique, silent solutions. Architecture can support multiple use cases that can grow with time, consolidate more and more use cases as they grow, simplify what they do by applying tried and true or tried and true IT best practices in a secure manner. So the dealer approach would be doing that, taking a more architectural approach to the Edge versus a use case. And then just like you predicted, meet the customers where they are from an application standpoint. And so we know that a lot of applications are growing and be developing on a hyperscaler or public clouds. We would like to connect to those. We would like to allow them to keep working as they have, except when they run it at the edge. Think about environments that could consolidate multiple workloads and not solve it for each one at the same time. And so that will be our overall approach. That's what we're working on. Yeah, so okay. So that horizontal layer, if you will, to serve many, many use cases, not just you're not going to go a mile deep into one and be the expert at some narrow use case. You want to be that horizontal platform. But at the same time, Perluca, I wonder does that call for more programmability as we over time of the products to really allow people to kind of design in that flexibility, if you will, build my own? Is that something that we can expect? Yeah, absolutely. So we spoke a little bit about this before the interview and the things that is very important is a composability starting from a very small from factor to the cluster and then expand to the cloud is the fundamental things and the trend that we see. The fact that you can compose the infrastructure starting from a small gateway that is changing in this market, right? Up to the cloud and be able to use the same layer that allow you to run the same application is a fundamental things. And we are working on that. We are working on this vision and our strategy is really to be able to be transparent but provide the right building block to do all the use case that they are required where the data are. So we, again, not only meeting the customer but meeting where the data are produced what the customer wants out of those data. So that's a fundamental things. And we have project Apex. So obviously we are plugging in the project Apex from an edge point of view will allow the customer to have this unique experience to go in Apex and also deploy the edge infrastructure that is needed. So that's, we're starting right now with that. So we will touch later but that's the first building block of that journey. Actually, let's touch now, right? You got some news around Apex and talk what are you announcing? So we are very exciting because as I said our team it's pretty new and it's a very important investment that Dell makes not only in us as a team but as a motion. So we are announcing a reference architecture with PTC. PTC is one of the biggest company for actually based here in Boston for manufacturing and reference architecture will be run on based on Apex private cloud. So the customer can go to the portal or the order Apex private cloud and deploy PTC on top of that. So very important things is the first step in this journey but it's an important very, very important step. So we want to thank you also PTC to allow us to work with them. We have other stuff as well that we are announcing. I don't know if you are familiar but we have a very unique streaming data platform, streaming data platform that can stream multiple data collected from gateway and from every place and it's a need. Obviously when you need to process data in real time very important to have a streaming. What we're doing with the new streaming data platform approach is the ability to deploy the single node so it can be very appealing for the edge and up to three nodes. Awesome, that's great. So a couple of comments on that. So it's funny, we did the live work show on theCUBE a couple of years ago, PTC's big event and it was like, it was the edge and I remember looking around saying, where's all the IT vendors? And so that's great to see you guys leaning in like that. Perluka, the streaming platform, tell me more about that. What's the tech behind it? So the streaming data platform is a project that we start a couple of years ago is actually start from open source, Pravega. It's a very interesting technology where you can stream multiple data. It's not a traditional storage. Use a technology that can really collect 1000 of different streams. And that's very important when you need to mine the data, bring the data in the structure of data in a fashion that you can process them at the real time, it's very important. So there are very cool use case of that. But now that we look at the edge, this is make more and more tangible sense because we have a lot of partner that they're working with us especially to extend when you have all this sensor, you bring the data to the gateways and from the gateways, then you can use data streaming platform to collect all these streams and then you can easily process them. So it's a very fundamental technology. We are very proud of that. As I said, our enterprise version is getting more and more. And now we can land these on different architecture. So it can be backed up by an Isilon. It can be also on different storage type now. And as I said, we're looking now to bring from a, what was a data center kind of structure down to the edge because now we can put a single node up to three nodes. It makes a lot of sense. Is this like a Kafka based thing or open source or is it something you guys built or a combination? So it's a combination. We actually project, the project is an open source project, but we did that. We start this many years ago and it works with Kafka, but he's not Kafka. So it's, he has plugin that can work with Kafka and all the other things. And it's very easy to deploy. So it's a very, very, very important. And the other things is the scalability of this platform. That sounds like the kind of thing you had in the labs and you said, okay, this is going to be important. And then boom, all of a sudden the market comes to you. What is it about manufacturing? Why did you start there? I can take this. We looked at where the opportunity was from two perspective. One is where the opportunity is to sell. They even the other one obviously comes with it because there's a good opportunity to help. And manufacturing today at the edge is about 30% of the opportunity in sales according to IDC, but more so it's been around for the longer time. And so it's very, it's maturing. It's the most demanding. And you know, it's got very long horizons of investment. And what we did was we figured that if we can solve problem for industry, we can then extend that and solve it for everybody else because this would be the toughest one to solve. And we like challenge. And then so we decided to focus and go deep. And you said it before, well, our approach is definitely horizontal approach. We cannot take an horizontal approach without verticalizing and understanding specific needs. So nobody can avoid doing both at the same time. You need to understand but you also want to solve it in a way that doesn't proliferate the silos. And so that's our role. We will understand, but we will make it more generic so other people can never do it later on. And Dave, if I can add, I think the manufacturing is also very exciting for us as a technologist, right? And Dell technology as in the name, the technology. So it's very exciting because if I look at manufacturing, we are really in the middle of industrial transformation. I mean, it's a new era. If you think about nobody care in the past to connect their machinery that they have PLC to the network. All of this is changing because the life that where we live right now with the pandemic, with the remote working with the fact that you need to have a much more control and be able to have predictive maintenance. So you're not stopping your manufacturing is pushing the entire manufacturing industry to connect this machine. And with the connectivity of this machinery, you get a lot of data. You get also a lot of challenge. For example, security. So now that's the place where connectivity brings the IT aspect in and the OT guys now they starting to speak with the guys because now it's a more complex things, right? It's not anymore computerized, computerized only to one machinery specifically is the entire floor. So it's a very interesting dynamics. Is the connection between that programmable logic controller and the Dell solution is, you mentioned to secure it, better security. And I presume it's also to connect back to whatever the core or the cloud, et cetera. Is it also to do something locally? Does it improve? Is there value add that you can provide locally? And what is that value add? Absolutely. So the value add, as I said, if you think right in the past, right? You have a machine that probably stain the manufacturer for 20, 25 years, then you have an hardware attached to that machine that is the PLC about 11 year. The guy that he knows better about that machine is actually not the softer component on, but is the guy that is being working on that machine for 15 years. Now, how you translate that knowledge to a learning algorithm that actually can do that 4,000 of machine. And that's really the key, right? You need to centralize information, process those information, but not in the cloud, not in the central data center, but on the manufacturing floor. And you need to have a way to represent these things in a very simple way. So the plant manager can take action or the guy that is responsible for the entire line can take action immediately. And that's where the change is. It's not anymore to, it's trying to extend the knowledge to multiple machine, multiple floor and try to get this change immediately. So that's really important. So the PLC doesn't become a general purpose computer or even necessarily an Uber computer, it connects to that capability because that enables data sharing across clouds and the like. That's enabled the entire things. You know, you can't do a model just with one source. You need to have multiple sources. And also think about the manufacturing is changing not only for the machinery, but people that they build new manufacturing, right? They need to be smart building. They need to have a technology for being more green, solar, energy consumption. So the manufacturing itself is mean five or six different things that you need to solve. It's not just the machine. So this idea of the silos environment is starting to collapse in one. And that's why it's important for us to start from a vertical, but also in the manufacturing, you already see this will expand to multiple things also like smart building and other thing because they need it. Yeah, the right guilt to your point. Manufacturing is like the big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere and you've got adjacencies that you can, you know, you can take the learnings from manufacturing and apply them to those adjacent industries. Gil, give us the last word. Look, usually when we talk at Bell Technologies World, we talk to an IT audience. And we were thinking this year that the way to talk about Edge, at least with the people who traditionally buy from us is exposed to the fact that they are more and more going to be responsible for Edge projects. And so our advice would be our hope that they would partner with us to think ahead, just like they do with data center with our cloud strategy, think ahead as they think about their Edge and try to set up some architectural guidelines. So when they do get the request, they're ready for it. And think about what they know, think about the IT best practices that they applied. All of that is coming to them. They need to be prepared as well. And so we would like to partner with all of our customers to make them ready and obviously help them simplify, secure, consolidate it as they grow. Well guys, thank you. I learned a lot today. You've made a lot of progress. You know, this is the hallmark of Dell, right? It's a very high, let me make sure I get this right, very high due to say ratio, right? You guys talked about doing this a couple years ago and you've made a lot of progress. And I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE to explain the strategy. It makes a lot of sense. So congratulations and good luck in the future. Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's ongoing coverage of Dell Tech World 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, right back.