 Welcome to Dell Technologies World. It's the premier technology event of the year. Join John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin as they talk to the trailblazers and trend setters of future technology. Dell Technologies World 2023 and theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging high-tech coverage. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We're so excited that you're joining us on theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are live at Dell Technologies World. This is night one of our coverage. We're here tonight. We're here tomorrow and Wednesday as well. Dave, we've had some great conversations so far. This is only day one. Action-packed keynote this morning. Jam-packed with people. Lots of hot topics, AI, security, edge. You nailed it in your breaking analysis. Well, one of the things I wrote about was, are we going to see Project Alpine actually become a product? And the last year was one of the more exciting conversations we had because we've been talking about SuperCloud for a while as this sort of metaphor for the future of cloud and multi-cloud. And now we're seeing it happen. We are, we're going to be unpacking it. We've got two alumni back with us from Dell Technologies. Brian Payne joins us, the VP of Product Management and it's a Gregus-backed VP technologist in ISG. Guys, it's great to have you. Thank you for joining us on theCUBE tonight. Yeah, thanks for having us. Do you guys, you and your teams, you're on the front line with customers every day as they're evaluating new emerging technologies, new use cases. I'd like for each of you to talk a little bit about your teams and that customer touch that you have and then we can kind of expand on some of the announcements and how customers were really involved in driving that. Brian, we'll start with you. All right, well, it's, my team engages a little bit later down the stream than Ethic. We're at the point where as we're developing an offer, we've got it pretty solid, let's say 70% solid. We'll actually go and engage and do beta programs with our customers and we'll let them test, give us feedback, the good, the bad, the ugly, we'll discover issues early, fix those problems so that we don't have it as we roll things out. This is all part of just the overall big ears idea that just is like in the DNA of Dell. And I think it is what makes us tick, it's what makes us different because anytime you bring in the information from one of these early customer engagements, everybody is chomping at the bit. We're just ready to say, all right, well, what do they mean by this? What do they mean by that? And once we crystallize the issue, more customer engagement, we go and fix it and resolve it and make our products better. And so. So Brian, you're saying you're further downstream than Ethic. Yeah. So Ethic, I think in a lot of ways you have the really hard job because you have to decode what the customer's going to tell you, I need this. And it's very short term a lot of time. So how does big ears work further upstream, I guess? So we actually interact a lot with customers during the sales campaign and we ask them like, what's your requirement for the solution? Well, what do you really after in terms of the solution itself, ignore product name or anything like this? What are you trying to achieve? And back with those requirements, we go back to our product team, which we are a member of and we formalize those into product request, feature request. And then after that period, if the product feature makes sense, we go back to the customer and ask them, does that actually working for you? Right, from a productization of the feature themselves. And then when it goes to the better phase, then this is where Brian's team comes in and get the request and see if it's actually working as per the customer imagine the solution to work. And the hard part for you, Brian, is if the market changes, right, and you've done all this work, I'm sure that's happened. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, the market is always evolving, right? And we're always, there's also a lot of nuance. I mean, so if we just take what we talked about today with Apex file storage for AWS, as you begin to roll that out with our customers, they begin to spin it up, you discover things around integration with the public cloud that maybe is different in AWS than it is with Azure and different in these spaces. And so it's not just market changes, but it's also just discovery that you're not going to have until you get in and start playing with a product. And then you realize, and this is the best part about putting this technology out there, the use cases you anticipated are just scratching the surface of what's possible, right? The innovation that happens on top of that uncovers new things that you hadn't thought of and you got to go address that. And so that's exactly what we've done just most recently. Talk a little bit about, I love, you guys, I think your jobs sound great, that you just get so much customer interaction, upstream, midstream, downstream, seeing it actually come to fruition. But it's a talk about the multi-cloud by default. We heard a lot about that last year, Dell really doubled down on multi-cloud by design. And we heard a lot about that this morning from Michael, from Chuck. What are some of the main challenges you're hearing from customers where they're saying, we're living in multi-cloud, how do we make it strategic and by design so that we can be a competitive business that does well and performs? Right, so there is a multi-cloud by design at the cloud level and there is the ground level as we call it today, right? So let's start with the ground level. Up until now, we have many distributions within Kubernetes and we have some customers running VMware, some of them running Microsoft, and we started to get a lot of customers telling us, hey, we actually want to work with other distributions such as Red Hat OpenShift or Suzy Rancher. And so based on that feedback, we've already started to develop those features for example, OpenShift, but eventually customer wants an engineered solution. So this is where Dell Apex Cloud Platform for Reddit came up from for this specific requirement. Customer wants an engineer solution that they can go ahead, install Kubernetes is hard enough to install. They don't want to mess with the installation part, just want to write code and that's it. Now also when you think about the audience, the audience for containers is different. It's not a traditional system administrator or not even the storage administrator, it's the DevOps persona or the other new personas, right? They don't care about storage, nor do they care about compute. They want to deploy code, right? So we're trying to make it the easiest possible way for them to go ahead and do it. So that's the ground level if you will, the ground cloud platform, but there is the cloud above the skies, right? So the cloud providers, customers are telling us, I don't want to use just a single cloud provider. I want to be able to first mobilize my data from on-premises to off-premises and back because in many cases I just want to do cloud bursting, GPU bursting, CPU bursting. So that's one use case and the other use case is also move between different cloud providers. It's hard for them to actually go and move their data for one cloud provider to the other and they're telling us why don't you as the largest storage provider in the world build this super layer, super cloud infrastructure right there you go, that will allow you to mobilize the data between on-premises to off-premises and between different cloud providers as well. So you can't please all the people all the time but you have to try, right? And you have to figure out, okay, what's the right balance that gets most of the market? And as you say, Brian, that changes very quickly. So where are you with that? Because you want to have simplicity, you want to have that abstraction and then you get some developers and well I want to go deeper. How do you accommodate all those needs? What's your sort of methodology to do that as part of Big Ears? Well, I mean, I think it's just, it's rolling up your sleeves and asking why, then why again, then why again. So I'll give you an example. So... It's like when you measure something. You measure three times before you cut. Exactly, exactly. So with a recent example with Apex file storage for AWS, you know, we had great feedback from the customers and of course, one of the things that you got to do is make sure you don't mess up the things that you got right, right? And so the feedback we got was, hey, this is performing incredibly. It's performing better than anything we've tested from your competitors, anything that we've tested on-prem. So, you know, that's great feedback. The deployment was super simple, simple to do, easy, keep that going. And then though, this is where the never satisfied piece comes in. It's like, hey, I love that I can scale up to six nodes but I want to scale beyond that. And oh, by the way, I know you validated it with these instances but I wanted to change the VM size dynamically to tweak the performance. It's when you get those questions that you have to understand, okay, what is the use case? Why is it that you want that? What is the business need driving that? And then ultimately decide, is this going to be a persistent need? And if so, then you go do it. If it's just a nice to have like, hey, that's interesting technology, you got to avoid that. And it's an art. I mean, that's all it is, it's an art. Speaking of an art, it must be an art, Brian, to actually select customers for this Big Ears project. How do you go about doing that? We talked a lot about enterprise today but we also talked about SMB and all of those customers that need to work with them. How do you formulate the right group and the right end of customers to help make these technology huge decisions? Yeah, so I mean, a big piece is just developing relationships through the years. So it's a balance of the same people who really understand your technology testing over the years and then mixing that in to your point from different segments, different size customers and you get a mix of both into the process so that you're constantly getting new ideas but you also have the familiarity and it really is just developing relationships through the years and maintaining those. This is what's critical. In my years of following markets, I've learned that it's one thing to get it to work. It's another thing to get it to work after something goes wrong, recovery. Now you multiply that by three clouds. You've got different security models. You've got different compatibility models, different ecosystems, et cetera. So how have you dealt with that challenge? And where are we? How mature, I mean, is it first inning for this multi-cloud vision that you guys have set forth? And how much legs does it have? I think we're still relatively speaking in early days. We're starting to see customer moving data and moving it also back and forth, back and forth. The hybrid cloud mobility between moving data between different cloud providers running off-premises is still very early days, but we're starting to see some other requests coming from the ground level where it comes to cloud and recovery. We're starting to see customer that are telling us, I'm starting with a specific Kubernetes distribution, by the cloud distribution, but then maybe I want to move to another vendor. So for example, from OpenShift to Susie or vice versa, maybe from Susie to OpenShift or to VM or Tanzu, how can you as Dell help us do this mobility? So one of the things that we did is we developed this thing called CSM, Container Storage Modules. And one of the modules is Application Mobility, which allows you to move for free any Kubernetes port data from any storage to any storage, from any distribution to any distribution on-premises and off-premises today. What do you mean for free? For free. So you're, what's that, I reach around on egress charges? I'll give you an example. No, let's talk about the ground, for example. Let's say that the customer want to move Kubernetes ports data from vendor X to vendor B. Ignore the underlying storage platform. We can actually do it on the Kubernetes layer. For AWS, for example, we don't force the customer to use PowerFlex in AWS. Of course, we have an opinionated stack. We would rather the customer use PowerFlex in AWS, but I can actually move it natively to AWS. And we are the only vendor that allow the customer to do it. It's all about choices these days. Okay, so where did that requirement come from? If you're the only vendor doing it, it's like your competitors didn't maybe have big ears or something, I don't know. So the net specific instance, I don't know if you can talk to it, but what was the epiphany that led to that? Was it a single customer conversation, a pattern of customers? The epiphany is that we live in an open source. That's the open part of the source. And especially in the Kubernetes and the container ecosystem, customer want to have the choice to do what they want to do. You may have an opinionated opinion on where you think they should go, but you should meet them where they are today. And that's coming back, by the way, to the announcement that we've made today. Some of them wants to have it with VMware. Some of them wanted to have it with Azure Stack. Some of them want to have it with OpenShift who are the only vendor that does it all for them, including moving the data to the cloud. It's all coming back from the same place. We think that if we'll provide the customers all of these options, they will eventually go after our opinionated stack because we provide the best platforms out there, but we are not going to force the customer to do it. And that's the big difference. If the world is open, then unless you have an opinionated and significant competitive advantage, then the world doesn't need you. You have to work hard to get that. I think there's another reason why we have access to the insights that lead to the innovation. It's our presence in server storage, networking market where we've got those relationships to hear all the different points of view. We've got the leadership positions, and so how do we build on that and take those inputs and turn them into innovation? So I mean, a little bit of it is just the privilege of where we are in the market to get the insight. I mean, it's very strong too. We basically want our customer to choose us because we are the best vendor for their specific use case, not because we are forcing them to go that way. It should be, like you talked about their choice, but it also sounds like from a relationship perspective, Brian, you touched on that in the beginning of our conversation, how incredibly important that is and how that's actually driving some what we're hearing as competitive advantage for Dell versus the other folks who maybe don't have the big enough ears or enough ears. It's actually drive decisions. Yeah, it's big ears and thick skin, right? Because you got to take the hard feedback and internalize it and realize, all right, we got to adapt in the market. What I'm hearing is you could do open as a check box. That's not your operating mantra. You do it because you think there's a market there, customers need it and you can be the best. Yeah, exactly. That's the open source part of it. The customer can choose doing what they want. So for example, with Kubernetes, some of the largest deployments in the world, by the way, I would argue that the largest Kubernetes deployment in the world outside the cloud provider is running on Dell PowerFlex, but it's just Kubernetes. They don't run anything on the top of it because we are not forcing them to choose a specific distribution. Think about the Kubernetes ecosystem. It's a wild, wild west outer. There are so many different distributions, so many ecosystem partners around it. You cannot dictate your opinion on the customer today. It's still very, very early days. Eventually, I think the dust will settle and there will be some clear winners and probably losers as well, but this is not today. Are you doing commits to those open source platforms? Yeah, I mean, heavy? Everything is in the Docker app and GitHub, and by the way, we also have a developer portal called developer.dell.com where all the developers can go in and contribute with it. And what's the nature of, where are you sort of placing your bets on those commits? Is it to make that cross-cloud compatibility up-level upstream APIs? Is that all of the above? All of the above, between different off-premises distribution and on-premises as well. All of those, we're going to be in a state where basically a developer is going to select, I want to deploy a container. I don't care where it is. I don't know where it is. I just want to select the container location based on the SLA. Performance, availability, they don't even know what the application is, so availability plays into that factor. And based on that, we will orchestrate the base location for them. That's the promise that comes with Apex Navigator, by the way, so that's exactly this world. Well, explain that because the navigator is a linchpin of this whole thing. I mean, that's what the customer's going to see, right? And so that console, if you will. So it's what the customer is going to see, but eventually it's also going to be the customer will orchestrate the entire data platform from, and it can be on-premises or off-premises and all of the above, including data movement. That's more than you see, it's driving. Exactly. Last question, Brian, for you. What's some of the feedback that you've had? Obviously, we're only day one of Dell Technologies as well, but we've seen so much progress from last year, which is what you predicted that we would see a lot of alpine we talked about. Thanks for that shout-out. Oh, shucks. You know, one of your biggest fans. What's been some of the feedback today from customers going, you're listening and the proof is in the pudding? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I think, I mean, just even walking around here, right? Seeing the technology being demonstrated, where they can go and go into hands-on labs, actually test drive what we've talked about and feel it real-time. The GPU platforms that Michael talked about, the only product he talked about on stage yesterday, being here for the customers to take a look at. All the feedback has been, this is great. The innovation is still alive, a love that we're here in person to see it, and yeah, it's just, it's electric, it's exciting. It is electric. That's a great description. I love that, guys. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about how you're really innovating with customers and kind of the fuel, the rocket fuel that they're injecting into Dell. We love to hear that. We appreciate your insights. Thank you. All right. Thanks, guys. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE live from day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Our next guest joins us momentarily to talk about some really cool topics like AI, security edge, you name it. Stick around, we'll be right back.