 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience not in person, like nothing this year, 2020, but the digital experience allows to do a lot of things that you couldn't do in person. And we're excited to have our next guest. He is Deepak Prasad, the Director of Product Management for Dell Technologies Cloud. Deepak, great to see you. Hello, Jeff, nice to meet you as well. You too. So let's back up like 10,000 square feet, because cloud came in with a big giant rage, I guess it's been a while now, with AWS and public cloud and people were putting their DevTest on there. And we've seen this explosion of public cloud and then we have hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. And then basically people figured out that not everything can go to a public cloud. A lot of stuff shouldn't. Some stuff's got to stay in data centers for all different reasons, but basically it's horses for courses. So we're a little ways into this. How are you guys at Dell really thinking about cloud and helping your customers think about what cloud is beyond kind of the hype? Well, that's a great question, Jeff. At Dell, we think of cloud really as an operating model and as an operating experience rather than a destination. So it's interesting that you bring up public cloud and private cloud, but we take a step back and think of what does that experience really represent? So if you think of what defines that cloud operating model, it's a democratization of technology, access of resources through APIs, through self-service portals, ability to pay as you go in a very simplified commerce experience and the agility of cloud, the promise of instant availability and infinite scalability. Now, if you look at the landscape around this, until now, that has only been delivered in a consistent way by public cloud vendors, which leads people to believe that really cloud is a destination, not an operating model. But we think that we are capable of bringing those experiences, those tenets of the cloud operating model through the on-premises experience and really taking location out of the conversation. So this really allows our customers to focus more on their workloads, the innovations they want to drive and then they can fit their requirements, their application requirements to the location where those resources are, regardless of having to worry about if this is public or private, they will get the same operating experience. They'll get the same scalability, the same simplified commerce, the same access to resources. Right. Well, let's talk about some of those things. Cause as you said, there's a lot of behaviors that are involved in cloud and cloud operating. Well, you know, one of the behaviors that I think gave the public cloud an early leg up was just simply provisioning, right? Simply, if somebody needs some capacity, they need some horsepower. Again, traditionally it would be test dev in the early days. You know, they didn't have to provision, they didn't have to put in an order with IT and wait for so long to get a box assigned to them or purchased or whatever, right? They just swipe the credit card and went. How have you kind of helped people have that kind of ease of use? Ease of, I don't know, ease of spin up, ease of creation, I don't know what the right verb is. Because I think that's a really core piece of what enabled early cloud adoption. No, absolutely, you're spot on. And that was a big part of it that if somebody needed resources instead of waiting for weeks and months, they could go and sign up for those resources and get almost instantaneous access. And we believe that what we're doing in this area is really transforming the business. Today we can deliver resources to customers in their data center in 14 days and really are aggressively looking to cut that down further. So what this really means is not just shipping resources in 14 days, but actually delivering a cloud experience in a customer's data center or a colo location, whatever location of their choice in 14 days. And making that available to the customers, not just through the traditional procurement process, but we're actually very proud to announce the cloud console, the Delta technology cloud console through which customers can in a self-service way order those resources and have it show up and be operational in their environment in 14 days. So we're really bringing that speed of cloud to the on-premise experience. So how does it actually work? Do you pre-ship some amount of capacity beyond what you believe is currently needed just to kind of forward cue if you will capacity? How does it work from both the implementation strategy in terms of the actual compute and storing capacity as well as on kind of the purchasing piece? Cause those are two kind of very different workflows. No, that's a good question. So for us, our strengths are really in supply chain management that allows us to build capabilities across the world in areas from where we can ship to customers almost on an on-demand basis. So as soon as we get an order that the customer needs a private cloud deployment in a certain location, we're able to mobilize those resources from those locations and have it instantiated in customer's environment. So it's really built to strengths over the years of optimizing supply chain, if you will, and just taking that to the next level. Okay. So we don't speak to customer environment. Yeah, no problem. I was going to say another great characteristics of cloud, right, is spinning up, which we hear about all the time, versus spinning down, right? The easiest example is always use if you're running some promotion. If you're a pizza hut, you're running a promotion for the Super Bowl, obviously write your demand for that thing is going to be huge. You want to spin up to be able to take advantage of all the people cash on their coupon. And then when the Super Bowl's over, you want to spin those resources down because you're not going to necessarily need that capacity. How do you guys accomplish that type of flexibility in your solution? So in our subscription model, we have different ways to address customer environment. So we allow customers to start very small and then grow the subscription as their requirements grow. And the key thing of our subscription, which is really unique is the ability to co-terminate. So for example, if a customer started off on a three-year subscription with resources for say 100 virtual machines and somewhere along the way, they needed to add resources for 50 more virtual machines. So they will pay for the 150 virtual machines, but that extra 50 virtual machines does not create an orphan or a child subscription. At the end of three years, everything terminates together. So it really give them flexibility with ability to start small and not have to worry about vendor lock-in. And now we started off with a sort of a reserved instance type of subscription model, but we're definitely bringing usage-based models as well, which allows even more flexibility with respect to speeding up and speeding down. Right. And then what are some of the real specific reasons that people go for this type of solution versus the public cloud? What are some of the real inherent advantages of doing this within my own infrastructure, my own data center, my own kind of virtual four walls, if you will. Yeah. We strongly believe that the decision should really be guided by workload requirements. There's certain workloads that work really well in an on-premises environment. For example, you could take virtual desktop environments, BDI. That works really well from a performance standpoint in an on-premise environment versus a public cloud environment. Similarly, there are other workloads. We're not public cloud deniers that are best suited for public cloud, but it really should be something that comes from understanding your application, understanding the latency requirements, understanding the data requirements for those applications, what are your egress issues or the profile of the workloads that you're trying to implement. That should really be the driving force in where the workload is placed. And then tell us a little bit about the partnership with VMware, because that's a huge asset that you have now, basically side-by-side, and you can leverage the technology as well as a lot of the assets that are in VMware. How has that changed the way you guys have taken the Dell platform to market? It really is a differentiating factor for us from a technology standpoint. It allows us to bring the best of both worlds, best of the hardware infrastructure, as well as the best of the cloud stack, the cloud software infrastructure together in one cohesive and well-developed package. So the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform from a technology standpoint is implemented with our VxRail appliances, which is a hyper-converge infrastructure, as well as VMware Cloud Foundation from a software standpoint. Now the code-developed and jointly engineered capabilities allow for a unique feature of VMware Cloud Foundation where it can do lifecycle management of the entire stack, both the hardware and the software, from a single interface. So it understands VxRails, it understands the different firmware levels and VxRail manager software versions, et cetera, and then it would automatically select what is the best and well-tested and supported software bundle that could be deployed without causing typical issues with version mismatches and trying to chase down different hardware compatibility matrices, et cetera, all of those that are limited. So it's an integrated lifecycle management experience. That's great. I don't want to go too far, sorry. I'm sorry, I have a little bit of a lag here. So I apologize. I was just going to say, you've been at this for a while, you're in product management. So you're really thinking about speeds and feeds and you're thinking about roadmap and futures. I wonder if you can share your perspective on this evolution from kind of this race to pure public cloud to this big discussion I think we had, Pat Gelsinger talking about a hybrid cloud back in VMware 2013. So then kind of this hybrid cloud and multi-cloud and really kind of this maturation of this space as we've progressed for a while now, probably 10 years. And the majority of our customers live in a multi-cloud world. They have resources that they consume from one or more hyper, sorry, public cloud vendors. And they have one or more on-premise vendors as well for their resources. And managing that complex environment across multiple providers with different skillset, different tools, different SLAs. While it sounds really interesting to have workload drive your deployment and place the workloads where they're best suited, it does prevent, it does present a challenge of managing a complex and getting even more complex by the day, multi-cloud environment. And that's where we think we have an advantage of based on some of the work that we're doing with the Dell Technologies Cloud Console to bring a true multi-cloud experience to our customers. Not one of the benefits of not being a public cloud provider is that we are agnostic to all public cloud providers. We are fully accepting that certain workloads need to live in those environments. And through our cloud console, we will make it easy for customers to manage not only their on-premises assets and on-premises cloud resources, but also cloud resources that reside in multiple public cloud vendors. That's good, yeah, because it helps, right? Because they've got stuff everywhere. It's like, you know, there is no Dell technology, right? There's a lot of people that work there. There's a lot of projects. There's a lot of, you know, kind of pieces to that puzzle. I wonder too, if you could share your perspective on kind of application modernization, right? That's always another big, you know, kind of topic. Should you take those little legacy apps and should you try to rebuild them in a more cloud-native way using containers and all this flexibility and deploy them? Or, you know, which one should you just leave alone, right? They're running fine. They've been running fine for a while. They've got some basic core functionality that maybe do or don't need to kind of modernize, if you will. And maybe those resources should be spent on building, you know, new applications and new kind of areas of competitive differentiation. When you're working with your clients, how do you tell them to think about app modernization? You know, we look at it from a business requirements standpoint of how and what end goals are customers trying to achieve through that application. And in some cases, you know, and you covered the spectrum right there, some cases modernization just means swapping out the hardware and putting that application on a more modern, more powerful hardware. At the other end, it's, you know, going to a SaaS model of, you know, everything available through a cloud application. And in between those two extremities, there's, you know, virtualization, there's refactoring, there's containerization and microservices-based implementation. But it comes down to understanding what that application is meant to deliver for who and what business requirements and business objectives it fulfills. And that's how we use as a guiding principle on how to position application modernization to customers. All right, that's super helpful because I'm sure that's a big topic. And, you know, there's probably certain apps that you just shouldn't touch, right? You should probably just leave them alone, they're running just fine, let them do their thing. All right. Yeah. I'm sorry. No, it's just interesting, I was on the station with the customer just earlier today where they have a portion of their infrastructure, some applications that they actually wanted to leave alone and just change out the underlying hardware. But there are other applications where they really want to adopt containerization and refactor those, rewrite those applications so that they can have more scalability and more flexibility around that. So it really is determined by the needs. Yeah. So last question. Dell Tech World this year was a digital experience like all the other shows that we've seen here in 2020. Just, but it's a huge event, right? A big, big show. And we're excited to be back to cover it again. But I'm curious if there's some special announcements within such a big show. Sometimes things get lost a little bit here and there. But any special announcements do you want to make sure that get highlighted that people may have missed within this kind of sea of content over the last several days? Two major things that I'm very excited to share with you. One is Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. We are actually discussing and talking about Dell Technologies Cloud Platform in the concept of instant capacity blocks. So in the past, we talked about it with respect to nodes of Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. You can have so many nodes in it to power your on-premises cloud resources, but really have changed the conversation and look into how cloud customers are consuming those resources. And we really want to drive focus to that and introduce the concept of instance capacity blocks. Instances are, think of it as a workload profile, a CPU and memory put together. And then in different combinations in a predefined way to address different workload needs. So this really changes the conversation for our customers, but they don't have to worry about designing or specking out the hardware platforms, but really understand how many resources they need, how much processing power, how much memory, how much storage they need. And they define their requirements to us in those terms and we will deliver those instance capacity blocks to them in their data center. So behind the scenes is built by best in class hardware from VxRails and best in class software from VMware, but it's really delivered in terms of instance capacity blocks. The second interesting thing that I wanna share with you and I've prefaced it a few times is Dell Technologies Cloud Console. We're building this single pane of glass to manage our customer's entire journey from on-premises to multi-cloud hybrid cloud with consistency of how you can discover services, how you can order services and how you can grow and manage your footprint. So those are a couple things from a Dell Technologies endpoint that we're really excited to share with people. Well, congratulations. I know you've been busting your tail for quite a while on these types of projects and it's nice to be able to finally release them out to the world. Well, it's my pleasure. All right. Thank you very much. Well, thank you for stopping by. Again, congratulations and we'll continue the ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience. I'm Jeff Frick. He's Dipak Prasad. You're watching theCUBE. See you next time. Thanks for watching.