 In today's fast-paced business world, organizations are constantly seeking new ways to optimize their IT strategy. Cloud computing, of course, has emerged as a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, offering on-demand scaling, quick provisioning, and enterprise-class services. However, with the ever-expanding range of cloud providers, many IT operations teams are turning to a multi-cloud approach to meet application and business requirements. While multi-cloud has clear benefits, it also presents unique challenges. For example, according to the Dell Innovation Index, management complexity and siloed experiences are among the top five roadblocks that prevent organizations from fully embracing multi-cloud environments. So before making the leap to multi-cloud, it's important to find a solution that provides greater simplicity and scalability that's required for multi-cloud success. Dell Technologies is attempting to address these challenges with its Dell Apex Navigator for a multi-cloud solution. Now, according to Dell, it's Apex Navigator for multi-cloud, provides centralized management and eases data mobility, provides operational consistency and gives strong performance, while at the same time enabling organizations to achieve their business goals in a multi-cloud environment. So Apex Navigator for multi-cloud is a case strategy for Dell that they're pursuing to really try to unlock the potential of multi-cloud and of course compete more effectively in the market. And they're promising a consistent experience across clouds. Essentially, it's what I call Dell's silo buster strategy. In today's episode, we're going to dive deeper into Dell's new multi-cloud offerings. The CUBE research analyst, Rob Streche, is going to be joined by Allison Langen, who's the director of product marketing for Dell, along with Maggie Kapoor. She's the director of product management for multi-cloud at Dell. But first, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Shannon Champion, who was the VP of product marketing to discuss how Dell is addressing customer needs in this evolving and ever-changing multi-cloud world. So thanks for being here. We're going to learn how to elevate your multi-cloud experience and you can decide for yourself what Dell Apex Navigator can do for you and your business. The latest installment of our series where we're discussing Dell's multi-cloud strategy, our research and conversations with customer shows, the disparate nature of operations across multiple clouds creates significant challenges for organizations, securing and deploying apps, data portability, operational silos and other barriers create impediments to implementing a cohesive multi-cloud estate. The complexity brought on by multi-cloud deployments creates frustrating and unproductive experiences for IT pros. And today we're here to talk about some new innovations in Dell's Apex storage for public cloud family that help address these challenges and enable customers to achieve a more facile cross-cloud experience. Something Dell refers to as multi-cloud by design. Back with me in studio is Shannon Champion, Dell's VP of product marketing. Shannon, good to see you again. Always a pleasure. Likewise. All right. So Shannon is what I just said, we're going to look at what's happening with customers. So what are you seeing with customers? Maybe you can start by recapping what customers are telling you with respect to their multi-cloud initiatives, maybe some of the main challenges that you see that they faced with multiple clouds. Yeah, well that was a really great intro and we're hearing a lot of the same. I think the reality is we know that we are in a multi-cloud world and the exponentially growing data and the dispersed nature of that. We know 92% of companies really identify as multi-cloud, meaning they're in two or more public clouds and they're also investing in private cloud infrastructure. And in talking with customers, we're seeing a consistent set of challenges sort of emerge, which is like keeping them from really innovating with multi-cloud and you hit on many of them, but one that kind of rises to the top is the unpredictable cost. We hear from customers that say, you know, it's really hard to forecast my budget requirements and plan when I'm faced with these sporadic unplanned cloud costs. A big one that you hit on is management complexity. So customers are really grappling with like how to get control of their management when you have data spread across so many locations on-prem and in the public cloud. And we're also hearing from them that the cloud inconsistencies are really creating some challenges for them because each different public cloud has different security models. They offer different enterprise-class storage software, feature sets and capabilities. And all of that really exacerbates this skills gap that customers are telling us they're still dealing with, right? Like how do I make sure that my IT staff has the right skill sets and familiarity with the tools in the public clouds that we want to be in? And the last thing I would say that we hear quite a bit is this concept of limited visibility. Customers are just really struggling with getting a holistic view of everywhere their data lives, which is kind of scary and leads to security and compliance challenges. Yeah, I mean the initial allure of, hey, don't have to pay CapEx, great. But then at scale, the percentage that it fluctuates creates problems. So what are you doing to help customers with these challenges? Well, that's where Dell Apex comes in. So Apex was created to deliver multi-cloud by design, a seamless modern cloud and consumption experiences in all locations that bring simplicity, agility and control. And when you think about the Apex strategy, there's really three main elements, right? The first is how do we help our customers go from ground to cloud? And we're doing that by bringing our leading enterprise-class storage software across block file and data protection to the leading public cloud providers. And we call that Apex storage for public cloud. The second part is how we take those cloud ecosystems that our customers are choosing and bring them on-prem with consistency and control. And we're doing that across the common cloud stacks on-prem with our new turnkey Apex cloud platforms. And then the third leg of the stool, if you will, is how we're simplifying those multi-cloud experiences for our customers in a broad set of dedicated IT landscapes across the board with subscription and as-a-service offers. And when you look at that from a storage perspective, all of this together really creates that universal storage layer, this common set of software-defined storage services everywhere. Yeah, so we've been kind of waiting for this day for a while, and so really appreciate that. And we're here to really dig into some of the specific announcements related to what Dell calls this, what Shannon just talked about, ground to cloud strategy. We want to know more. I mean, can you maybe provide a little bit more detail, Apex storage for public cloud, the family, the offering, and really, I'm really interested in how Dell differentiates from all the other noise that's out there. Yeah, so the ground to cloud is delivered through the Apex storage for public cloud family, as you mentioned. So the family really consists of two parts. You have your storage endpoints in the public cloud combined with consistent and centralized management, right? So it's a comprehensive set of storage services across block, file, and data protection, which does set us apart in the comprehensive nature of the broad set of storage supported in the public cloud. All of this creates part of that universal storage layer, which is so important. And then we give customers control, visibility, and management of that universal storage layer via the SAS control plane that gives them operational consistency from on-prem to public cloud, it gives them extreme performance and scalability so that they can confidently run those mission-critical applications and workloads in the cloud that they might not have been able to do before, and all of that comes with improved TCL. We're seeing some major cost savings with these offers, and part of that includes being able to optimize your costs by leveraging pre-committed cloud spend or Dell TLA's. Okay, so, and that's the other thing I mentioned, CAPEX upfront, okay, yeah, it's alluring, but then you get all these other hidden costs, and that's what you're trying to address, but what specific cloud storage offerings are included? Yeah, so it's block, file, and protection storage, so let me just kind of unpack each of them. I'll start with Dell APEX protection storage because that's where Dell started with this game, bringing our enterprise software to the public clouds, and today we are protecting over 18 exabytes of data in the public cloud, and over 1,800 customers are really trusting Dell with their data and protecting that in the public cloud. Also, Dell APEX block storage is really a game changer. This is a highly disruptive technology, and we're really excited to see how it transforms our customers' environments. It's the most scalable cloud block storage, also the most resilient and flexible cloud storage offering. It can offer over 100 times better performance and 87% cost savings versus the native public cloud block storage services. I think what people oftentimes don't appreciate is the cloud storage is pretty basic, right? When S3 came out, it was like a nice, cheap and deep object storage, but companies like yours have had deep, deep stacks for years, experience on recovery, on whether it's the space efficiency of snapshots and the security pieces of it, so the capabilities that you're bringing to the cloud are just they're more mature and they're more substantive from a feature standpoint. Earlier you talked about the universal storage layer. So can you elaborate on that and give us sort of a double click on really what's in there? Yeah, for sure. So earlier I talked about the Dell APEX multi-cloud strategy and the universal storage layer is really how we deliver multi-cloud by design. So to have true multi-cloud capabilities, you need to start with the same storage architecture deployed everywhere, and that is universal. So that's where that word comes from. And that universal storage needs to be modern, it needs to be software defined, it needs to support VMs and containers, and it needs to be architected with standardized open APIs to support that management automation and flexibility. But it's not enough just to have that universal storage everywhere. You also need a consistent cloud ecosystem, right? You need to have the same runtime application environments in the public cloud as you do on-prem. So it's really taking that concept of common software defined storage services combined with that consistent and common cloud ecosystem environment together that we call the universal storage layer. Got it, okay. And then it sounds like APEX Navigator is like a linchpin of your multi-cloud strategy. What specifically is that all about? What's the offering there? So how do you take the universal storage layer and bring the management control and visibility to it? That's exactly what we're doing with Dell APEX Navigator. It's a SaaS control plane that delivers intelligent, automated management that really orchestrates the seamless workload mobility and improved service levels for our multi-cloud assets. Okay, so what you're building here is you're hiding all the complexity of the underlying clouds, you're making a consistent experience across those clouds, including on-prem. Like I said, this is a day we've been looking forward to for a number of years. We're hearing this more and more from customers that it's problematic, the hidden cost, different skills required. Really appreciate your time here. Any final thoughts you want to leave the audience with? Yeah, I mean, there's lots of good reasons that customers are choosing multi-clouds. Some of them are looking for the best tool for the job and the various public clouds that are offered. Some of them have stringent regulatory guidance that around where their data can be for certain times, periods of time, and some are just looking for more options and flexibility. So regardless of what the reason is, we know multi-cloud is here and with APEX Storage for Public Cloud, including the introduction of APEX Navigator, we're really helping elevate our customers multi-cloud experience and delivering improved TCO. I talked about some of those really compelling numbers. We are bringing them centralized and intuitive management, seamless data mobility, which we're hearing is really important to our customers, operational consistency across on-prem and the public cloud, and then that unparalleled performance that I talked about. So solving, hopefully, many of those challenges that you set us up with here, the one exciting thing that I did want to announce is that we are really excited to get our customers trying out this technology, and so we're offering a no-cost risk-free 90-day evaluation. So there's really no reason that they shouldn't go try it. Yeah, nice freebie, check that out. And this is a great example, as Matt Baker from Dell likes to say, it's not a zero-sum game. The meaning of the cloud is you're building on top of all this wonderful CAPEX that the cloud players have built, you're adding value on top of it, and that's just a win-win, particularly for customers. Thank you, Shannon, really appreciate your time. All right, stick around to hear from Maggie Kapoor, who's the Director of Product Management, and Allison Langen, who directs product marketing from Dell Technologies. They're going to dive deeper into these offerings with our Rob Streche, but first take a look at this cool video. Welcome back to elevate your multi-cloud experience with Dell Technologies on theCUBE. I'm Rob Streche, Managing Analyst with theCUBE Research. We just heard from my colleague Dave Vellante and Shannon Champion from Dell on an overview of APEX Storage for Public Cloud. Today we're going to talk about a new standard in multi-cloud management and operations from Dell. Let me welcome to theCUBE Maggie Kapoor, Director of Product Management for Multi-Cloud and Allison Langen, Director of Product Marketing from Dell Technologies. Welcome both. Thanks for having us here. Well, thank you for being here. I think this is a lot of fun. I think multi-cloud is really the standard. I think cloud operating models are really where it's at, and I think it's more than just a place. It's how you actually go and build it out and operate it. So I think this is a really timely discussion that we're going to have here. So let's kind of really jump into the announcements. Allison, can you share with us what was announced? Sure, so essentially we are delivering, continuing to deliver on the promise we made at Dell Technologies earlier this year, of delivering seamless management and data mobility between on-premises and public cloud, and continuing to extend our best in class storage software into the public cloud. And with that, today I'm excited to share that our first set of management and operations capabilities within the Dell Apex Navigator family are going to be generally available with the announcement of Dell Apex Navigator for multi-cloud. And with this offer, it's essentially going to deliver improved TCO, centralized management, seamless data mobility, operational consistency between on-prem and your public cloud environments, and unparalleled performance. Today specifically, what we're announcing availability of is our Dell Apex Block Storage for AWS that will support Navigator. And we are also going to be delivering our Dell Apex file storage for AWS early next year. No, this is, I think, super exciting stuff. And I think, again, it's really timely in where you can go with this and how you can get cost savings. Because I think everybody's looked at it and been stunned with their bill that they get at the end of the month from one of the big hyperscalers. So, Maggie, why don't you really kind of drill down a little bit further into some of the compelling features that are being announced in the product? Sure. Yeah, so, you know, our goal when we started to engineer and architect our product, we wanted to simply bring a centralized management tools that for our storage customers. That is not just centralized, but also provides a very secure environment for our customers, right? So, really, the key characteristics of the top things that we're bringing to market with this first release, as Allison said, it's Block Storage on AWS. And it revolves around five things. First and foremost, security. I just mentioned that, and I'm going to keep mentioning that because... You have to. Right, it is so important, right? And so we bring in that zero trust framework as we started to architect the product. And really, how do we deliver a secure way of operating in a multi-cloud environment? The second being deployment. As we're bringing our storage endpoints to the cloud, how do we easily automate the deployment process? Not just of our storage endpoint, but also the underlining public cloud infrastructure. And then the third piece, as we move on, is the management aspect of it. How do you manage securely, but also do life-cycle management on your endpoints across the board? And so doing that as a sash portal is what we're bringing. Moving on, after management, it's all about monitoring. So how do you monitor your endpoints once they are deployed in the public cloud? But I do want to call out that it's not just monitoring off your cloud endpoints, but also bringing in that on-prem aspect of it. And finally, the fifth tenant, which is data mobility, which we're super excited to bring to our customers, which is the seamless ability to move data, move workload between on-prem and the public cloud, depending on whether your business needs change or upgrade or your workloads change, right? So those are the key things that we're bringing to market. Yeah, I think it's huge to bring that together. Again, multi-cloud is, I think the standard. We have some research that says it's kind of hidden equilibrium between hyperscalers, meaning in-cloud and on-prem. And they're really, I think this is critical for people to be able to, and especially that last point about the data mobility, and we'll kind of dig in on that in a little bit. But Allison, what are some of the outcomes that customers can expect with this and from this updates? Right, so with Apex Navigator for multi-cloud, we're essentially empowering our customers to be able to unlock a new standard of excellence with multi-cloud management and operations. Through this centralized SaaS-based intuitive experience, customers are gonna be able to get up and running quickly through the self-service Apex console or through APIs. They're gonna be able to optimize workload placement more easily with purposeful data and application mobility. Maggie touched on security. You're gonna be able to reduce risk with secure operations and zero trust adoption. And you're gonna be able to do all of this from that single centralized user interface. And so all of this value just builds upon the value of our storage emplaints in the cloud as well, which are essentially bringing enterprise class storage capabilities into a public cloud environment. So things like thin provisioning, data reduction, encryption, you name it, these are enabling customers to power even the most demanding and mission-critical workloads in the public cloud that they weren't necessarily able to do before. Yeah, I think that's part of the key is really about how do you bring these workloads up there? Because there's still a lot of applications that are on-prem that people want to burst up or maybe modernize as they go along, but the data has weight, it has gravity, so being able to do that, let's dive a little deeper because I think it is what it is this year and cost optimization is a big thing. So what type of cost optimizations can and cost savings can organizations expect? So this is a huge value prop for these offerings. We actually completed a recent study where we benchmarked our Apex block storage for public cloud offering with Navigator against native public cloud storage just on its own and to see what the TCO is gonna look like and I'm telling you, the results were astounding. You're not even gonna believe these numbers, but essentially through this study, our Dell solution was able to deliver up to 87% cost savings compared to just a standalone native public cloud storage offering. So what we're allowing to do here, and this highlights what's possible with these offers and what thinking big of what customers can actually realize here is when you pair our offerings with their preferred public cloud provider, we're just elevating that overall public cloud experience for them. Yeah, and I think that's the key is that customers are looking to understand how does that impact themselves? So do you have a customer example that you could share with us around that that really how they saw or how they could see Apex storage for public cloud really help them bring in those savings? Yeah, absolutely. So obviously this study is showing huge, huge numbers, really big savings and even though this is a new family of offerings, we're already seeing real world examples of customers of what they can realize in specific scenarios. So for example, a large financial institution recently completed a four month proof of concept with our Apex block storage for public cloud offering and the results were incredibly compelling. It really checks the box from technical, operational as well as financial. From a technical standpoint, they were able to see a 44% peak latency reduction, 46% improvement in their data transfer speeds, 29% better data reduction. From an operational standpoint, they were able to create a universal storage layer. This concept that Shannon talked about more in the previous segment where creating that consistent common storage between their on-premises and public cloud footprint, they were able to deliver this consistent experience which creates operational simplicity as well as not having to learn new skillsets. So their IT admins are able to leverage like knowledge they already have. And it really also helps with streamlining, like maintenance costs and things like that. So finally we're talking TCO. So financial, that's the big one you're waiting for. They were able to see $14 million worth of savings over a five year TCO and are gonna be cash flow positive by year two. That's insane. Because I think when you start to look at it, I mean, a two year payback is just unheard of, especially with this. And I mean, most people are still trying to get their applications up and running in the cloud at that point in time. But we'd be remiss if we didn't dive in a little bit deeper on the security aspect of it. Security and everything security is top of mind and organizations particularly in cloud and public cloud for that matter are super hyper aware of what's going on with their security and really picking it apart. So Maggie, could you help us understand how does Apex Navigator really help customers with that? Absolutely and you're so right Rob, right? It's not just cloud, public cloud, but multiple public clouds, right? So it's so important to kind of make sure that we build that confidence in our customers. So as we were building the product, we wanted to make sure that when we're building there were two things that were absolutely important for us from a product standpoint. One was to keep security front and center and second, making sure that we're not just bringing the product from a UX perspective to our end customers but also have an API first approach to it, right? So as we were building the security tenants, you know, we wanted to make sure that we give our end customers full control but also confidence in the ability to use a SaaS portal especially because we know they're looking to manage their storage assets and to, you know, data management capabilities using a SaaS portal. So keeping that, you know, data and security in mind was extremely critical to us. The way we did, if you break it down into the Zero Trust framework, you can see that, how do you bring that? And the reality is to really give the end customers the full control over the operations that they're trying to do, right? So controls not just over the users, the roles, the permissions, the groups, certificates and the keys bringing it all in the hands of two users was very important. So if you are an IT ops user who are starting who's starting to use the multi-cloud navigator for your organization, you can then decide which users need to be added to from your organization and what roles do they need to have when they're added to this, right? So really bringing that notion along with also how those companies and organizations can bring their own identity and access management and federate that with Dell's identity, right? Which is so important and I think this was one of the hardest things for us as we were bringing the product to life because you're looking at the functionality that I'm talking about doing that functionality maybe simple enough or it might sound like but doing it with that security-centric thing in mind is extremely important to us. Yeah, I like to say yet not another SSO, not another single sign-on that I have to go and configure, it's federated in, which is I think key when you start to look at, it probably also helps them from a perspective of getting it adopted inside that organization because they don't have to go and standardize on something else. Exactly, you're absolutely right. And then when we talk about operations like data mobility, for instance, once they're in there, you're not asking users to reenter your credentials every single time. You want to probably automate those things using APIs and plugging it in with automation tools like Ansible or Terraform, and the users can just run those scripts for data mobility, for instance, and if it is federated, it just signs on and moves forward. I think that's a great, because I think the integration with those, the Terraforms are open tofu or whatever comes next in there and Ansible and stuff like that is really, I think key because I think that infrastructure as code integration is huge for anything that's going to be in public cloud or have a cloud operating model. And with that, kind of let's take it down a level and kind of look at kind of the workflows such as deployment management and monitoring and kind of give us a flavor for that as well. Absolutely, this is, it's so exciting on things that we're doing. So let's talk about deployment. Our deployment, we're extremely proud to kind of bring this, it's a very complex task of not just deploying enterprise storage in the public cloud. So you're not just deploying your storage, but also the provisioning, the underlining public cloud infrastructure that goes along with it. So our deployment is really a four step, pretty easy four step process. You know, you log into your Apex console, you find your way into the navigator please. Once you're there, you pick your storage type. Today we're talking about block storage, but as Allison mentioned, file is coming pretty quick. So you pick your storage, you pick your cloud off your choice in our first release at AWS, then you go about picking your region, entering your public cloud credentials into the system, and then you get into a place where you get to pick the options. What kind of storage are you looking for a balanced profile or a performance optimized profile, adding the capacity that you'd like to do. And then the other excellent part about our product is that we give an option to do not just single availability zone, but also multiple availability zone. So you get to customize your storage endpoint that you want to deploy in the cloud. Once you select those things, you basically hit deploy, you know, and it's really as simple as that to kind of just do that. And then we take care of all the magic behind the scenes of provisioning the public cloud infrastructure and deploying our software in the cloud. So that's about deployment. Moving on to once it's deployed, you are in, you know, you're ready to kind of manage and monitor your environment. And we talked about single sign-on capability. So once you have deployed and up and running, we actually have the ability to continue to manage your, using your existing storage management tools. And you have single sign-on into that capability. So, you know, we're not replacing our existing element managers. If our storage admins, IT ops folks are used to the tools that have been available, we just make them available in a much more integrated and easy manner for them to kind of go in and do their day-to-day activities. And then for monitoring, we have our tool, Cloud IQ. So it's really powered by the same capabilities of Cloud IQ, but extending it to monitor the license inventory, the health, performance, capacity off your storage end points, not just off your cloud end points, but also your on-prem systems that you may have in your environment from before, for instance, right? So you go about doing your day-to-day activities of managing as well as monitoring of your assets. Yeah, so you see the full estate, which is I think critical in being able to understand where should applications live? Where does the data need to be? And I think that to me, and I said to circle back around on this because to me it's one of the biggest pieces to the puzzle for really enabling true cloud operations is really data mobility. And I think what your core value prop that you're providing is, hey, it's all the same and it talks to each other and you have that data mobility. So why don't we kind of go another level down and kind of help us understand what's enabling that? Yeah, so one of, as we talk with our customers, we hear that when they're moving into the public clouds, there are two sets of, some are figuring out which workloads need to move to the public cloud and others are, they all started in the public cloud and probably are realizing that not all workloads belong in there, right? And then now you deal with the egress charges of bringing workloads down. But one of the things, pain points that we hear is, how do you do that in a more seamless manner? And Shannon talked about our universal storage layer, which is so important in bringing a capability like data mobility that we're talking about, right? So it's really using the native replication technology that our products have, leveraging that to have the ability to move your workloads because we do know that there can be a shift in business strategy, for instance, oh, we need to move certain workloads to the cloud or there might be that certain workloads don't belong in the public clouds and you probably need to bring it back to the on-prem world. And so it's really driven on those key pain points of our customers that we're bringing to market. Yeah, I mean, even I think some of them, you know, could have been, like you said, not arc it had just lifted and shifted to the cloud because somebody said this is where a cloud first strategy just put it up there and then, hey, you know what? We're going to actually bring it back down, re-engineer it properly, but you still need to move the data, which is I think one of the biggest pain points that when I talked about the organizations that they have is really how do I do this in a way that my people can understand it in the tooling that they can understand it as well. So why don't we also kind of delve in a little bit, Allison, with some of the use cases that you're seeing from customers and really looking what they're trying to do to implement this type of solution. Right, so there's really I would say four high level strategic use cases that we're seeing customers implement with this family of offerings are APEC-stored for public cloud. So that's the combination of our endpoints across file block data protection as well as our management capabilities with Navigator. And so the first of those would be extending existing on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud. So taking your on-prem footprint and being able to use that same consistent operating model and extend it into the public cloud where it makes sense. We have an example of a customer who has an existing PowerFlex customer who had a significant on-premises data footprint, our storage footprint. And we're looking to move some of that out to the public cloud. And we were able to do that with our APEX block storage for public cloud offering, being able to streamline and make it really easy for them to implement disaster recovery option in the public cloud and free up some of that space on-prem and enable a true hybrid model. As Maggie mentioned, it's not an either or. There's some workloads that make sense on-prem and some in the public cloud and creating that hybrid model with the common storage is a nice seamless way to make that real. The second one is being able to run mission critical workloads in the cloud. So that's something that historically has been a challenge for some enterprises is really getting the performance, the latency that they need and just the lack of enterprise storage capabilities essentially in the cloud to power those demanding workloads. With our storage in the public cloud, they can do that. I've touched on this earlier, but the unparalleled performance, our block storage offering, for example, delivers up to 100 times the performance of native block storage from the public cloud providers by itself. So again, elevating that experience by adding our storage on there. So then, for example, we have a customer healthcare company who when they saw these performance characteristics, they were able to be confident in moving some of their clinical apps and database into the public cloud and know that they can run that. So that's an important one. And then the third is being able to integrate with public cloud services. So obviously one of the benefits or why customers like the public cloud of many reasons is the plethora of data services and application services available. And we are able to make it easier for customers to get their data into the cloud to leverage those and marry them. So that's the third. And then finally, it all comes back to optimizing costs. So I already talked a lot about the TCO. Again, I don't mind saying those numbers. Again, I love them. Up to 87% cost savings they can realize from a TCO perspective, but it's not just that. It's also ways to optimize their costs. So if customers have pre-committed cloud spend with their preferred public cloud provider or they have an existing, their existing Dell customer who has the Dell CLA, they can apply those credits to these offers and help spend down that pre-committed cloud spend. They're streamlining an optimization from that standpoint as well. Yeah, I mean, AWS customers are always looking how did they optimize their EDP and it's the same in Azure with those programs as well. Knowing those programs very well, I think it's very, I think critical for people to be able to understand how to optimize their cloud bill. Because again, staying in that cloud operating model have the same tooling, same navigation, same monitoring and management and optimization. I think that's really key to them. So what about, you know, what's next? What's, why don't we start with you? What's next on your to-do list here? Well, you know, really excited about today's announcement, but this is really just the first step, right? We're going to, you know, we have Block on AWS supported with Navigator today. As I mentioned file coming early next year and we're just gonna continue to expand from there to more, you know, supporting more endpoints, more public clouds. We're just gonna continue to grow our ecosystem and as well as new flavors of our management capabilities. So for example, you know, today we're talking about our Navigator for Multicloud, but coming on the heels of that, which we also talked about at Dell Tech World last year, will be our Navigator for Kubernetes. So essentially that's gonna be the next flavor we're looking at there. Absolutely, but from your point, I mean, what do you have on the roadmap there that's coming next, what are you excited about? There's a ton. I talked to my engineering team saying there's no limit to our backlog. But in it, you know, in terms of what capabilities we're gonna build, the capabilities, you know, expand those five that I talked about and add more capabilities to the functionality itself. But you know, what I would really like to call out is that everything that we talked about, the Navigator plus the Apex Block Storage, is available today and users can go in and try it because we are bringing a free 90 day trial with all of our products. We want to know, we know this is new, right? And we do want to build that confidence with our customers. So the ability to go and try it out before having to really commit and buying the product is important. So my thing would be, go check out what we're building. We're super excited about it to bring to market. And we think it's going to be a game changer. Yeah, and to that effect, I think, you know, for where they should go next, we'll put a link to that right in the description here so that they can go and find it very easily and you know, don't have to go searching around. It'll be right there in the description. So I want to thank you both for coming on board today. You know, welcome to theCUBE and being on here. It's been fun. I mean, I know how huge this is and having been at a hyperscalar myself that getting that layer stack right and making it look the same for multi-cloud is huge. It's a lot of effort. So thank you for coming on board. Thanks for having us. Thank you. And thank you all for watching this episode of Apex Storage for Public Cloud on theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise analysis and coverage. Thanks very much. Thank you.