 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. And welcome back here live in Las Vegas on theCUBE at Dell EMC 2017. We're live from the Venetian. Continuing our day one coverage here on the show, along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. You have a good lunch? I'm ripping and ready to go, John. Excellent, excellent. It's all about data protection right now, and with us to talk about that, is Beth Phalen, who's the president of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC. Hi, John. Thanks for being with us. And Jim Clancy, the SVP of sales and data protection as well. Jim, good to see you. Thanks for having us, guys. All right, so big news for you today. Let off of a couple of key announcements. Beth, take us through those. What was the news that you're making from the stage? Yeah, absolutely. Two big announcements today. First is the Integrated Data Protection Appliance, which is an end-to-end appliance that gives you box to back up in less than three hours. All the customers are looking for simplicity, but they still need the fantastic Ddupe up to 55 to one, the performance, the scale that they get with our data protection suite, our data protection portfolio. So now we're bringing it to them as an integrated appliance. Couldn't be happier about it. Great, so big news there, and announcement number two. We had a second one too, which was cloud data protection. With a special focus on cloud disaster recovery, our customers want to leverage the cloud to have their DR site in a cloud, a public cloud, or perhaps a separate private cloud. And they also want to be able to run data domain in the cloud environment. So as of today, you can run data domain virtual edition on AWS or Azure, and soon you'll be able to also run it in virtual stream. So Jim, put that into practice for me now. If I'm one of your partners, and I know that I've got some extra layers or extra opportunities now, what does that mean to me? Well, first, if we start with our partners, I think we've had such an incredible journey together, supporting our customers' requirements. Well, those continue to change and they struggle with things like the amount of information that they need to recover from, they need to back up, they need to store. And for us, we're giving them that next conversation with their customers. So the new challenges are being met by data protection from Dell Technologies. And our partners are going to benefit from that because they are the trusted advisors in their accounts and they want to be able to go to, you know, work with their customers on the new challenges and deliver on it. So Beth and her team have, you know, delivered from a technology to allow us to go and capture that mind share with our customers working together with our partners. So Jim, backup appliance, very hot market. A lot of investments and a lot of startups in that market. What differentiates this solution over those competitors? Well, first off, we're in the position, number one position in this market for a reason and it really comes down to our technology. So our customers have been pushing on us saying, we need to be simple, make it simple, make it simple. You know, because then they're running out of time every day on what they can do. So I think what's taken our industry leading technology and bundling it together as a simple, high performance solution is the first thing. The second thing is the total experience that Dell brings to the marketplace. So our customer is always accounting on us that if there ever is a challenge, who's going to be there to help us, right? If I ever need, you know, that next application comes online and how am I going to protect it? And who can come in and design that? That's what we deliver. So the things that we deliver are the experience versus a point product. And by the way, from a point product with our new announcement, we're going to be able to take on any competitor in this marketplace. But it's a full experience that separates us from, from anybody in this marketplace today, which is why we're number one and we're going to continue that leadership. So Beth mentioned the second announcement, Cloud, which is a huge part of our new hybrid portfolios. What cloud services are we compatible with out the gate with your new solution? What cloud services are we developing right out of the gate? So first of all, if we take a step back, the cloud is really multi-steps for customers to take advantage of it. Some customers are extending to the cloud. So they may have a full on-prem data center that they want to leverage the cloud for perhaps long-term retention. That's one thing you can do. On the second is a lift and shift when they may choose to move some of their applications to the cloud, and now for that, they can run DDVE with NetWorker and Cloud Boost and still have that same operations for the data protection that they did on-prem. So the first is extend to the cloud. The second is lift and shift to the cloud. And the third and something they'll hear talk us more about is beginning to refactor their applications to be more cloud native, which is another area that we're very engaged in working on. So for a little lift and shift scenario, one of the things that we're concerned about on the customer side is cost. So when we are backing up to the cloud, the cost must get it there about getting it back. Do you guys help with that scenario? We do, because first of all, a lot of the data is going to be de-duped before it gets sent out to the cloud. So it's a small amount of data that needs to come back. And second, with this most recent announcement, if you're using the Cloud DR capabilities, you can bring that application back up in the cloud itself without having to bring the data back. So the data is stored in object format on the cloud. That's certainly best value. And then you can actually bring that application up in AWS as an example. So let's talk to, from a staff and staff retention perspective or staff training, rather, what do my staff have to learn new of these solutions? If anything. It's a great question, because one of the things we pride ourselves on is making them seamless extensions of the products that we already sell, so that you don't have to introduce a brand new product to your environment. You can manage from an app or a network from the data section suite to initiate the long-term retention or the Cloud DR. Yeah, so the look and feel is what they're using today. What we've done is we just extended the use cases that our customers are coming to us on, saying I need to move data to the cloud. I want to make sure that I can leverage my existing technology and get that done. And that's a big advantage to us, right? Because our customers are comfortable understanding the tools that they leverage today. And if they can just extend it instead of bringing something new in and learning something new, because everyone of our customers does not have time to learn new tools, new products. To last thing they want. Well, they don't want that. Yeah, they don't want that. That's the last thing they want to do, right? Yeah, and I think what I wanted to add on to what Beth said, we've been selling in the cloud for well over a year now. So this is just another few use cases that we're adding to our customers' requirements. So we have hundreds of petabytes that are being protected in the cloud today, whether it's some of the ones that Beth had mentioned or Virtustream. So we're already in the cloud. This is just a more thought leadership. This is more of a technology leadership that we're announcing today. So we're extending our leadership as we extend our customers to the cloud. So what are the big picture stuff? And we're talking about people moving more work. You've got tons of data, right? We have so much more, how is all of this coming together in terms of where your section of the business is going? How you're responding to those kinds of trends what do you see coming down the road? Yeah, it's a great question. So one of the things we talk about is people moving away from data centers to centers of data. I mean, when you look at with IoT, with all the distribution of where data is stored or coming from right now, it becomes more and more of a challenge to make sure, A, you know where all of your data is and B, that you're confident that it's protected. So giving capabilities in more and more distributed services, giving people the ability to see where all of their data resides and the protection state is one thing. I think the term data fog has been getting to start coming to the conversation. You've been mentioning it. I kind of like that. I like that. And it makes a point, right? It's not in one place anymore. It's not a lake. It's all over the place. And think about the challenge for CIOs to have the confidence that it's still protected and that they could get it back. So with all of this distributed data, one of the challenges that we have is metadata around that data. Knowing what's where, analytics around that, do you guys help solve that challenge? We do in a few different ways. One thing in particular is as of last year, we have a SaaS offering, which is ECDA, Enterprise Copy Data Analytics. And that lets you have a global view around where your data is. And it's really moving into more machine learning. So it's not just reporting. It's allowing the customer to get smarter and smarter about where his or her data is maybe not as protected as it could be and where they might want to take some actions to increase their levels of protection. So, and we're pretty excited about it because we've gotten overwhelming response from our partners and our customers that this is where we need to go. So everything we're talking about has been things that we've been going through with our customers for years saying, okay, we need to get here. We need to get here. And how do you help us get to that path versus doing these individual things, right? There's a strategy behind all of this, but it really comes back from our customers and our partners saying, this is what we need. We know you're going to get us here, but let's try to get this sooner than later. And I think Beth and team have delivered on that again. So digital transformation, again, big theme of this show. Help us with the big picture. How does this copy data, secondary data market that you guys are helping us with solve or support that digital transformation vision? Yeah, I mean, you know, we heard Michael talk about it on stage today, right? The ability of what we can do, having a greater amount of leverage around the data that we all have right now is mind-blowing, right? In terms of accelerating medical diagnosis, driving more capability around awareness, around risks in some types of security. There's a level of knowledge that is we become more adept at mining the data that we have and then leveraging machine learning to analyze it. It's going to give us leaps and bounds of acceleration in whatever business objective where we're looking out to achieve. So, if you have to pick a use case you're most proud of when it comes to your solution set, give us the best one, like the best story. I'll let you go first. I love the new things that we've done with the cloud data protection. Giving people the agility to be able to extend seamlessly is something that they've been asking for. And to have it now and be able to offer it is really fantastic. I'd have to agree. You know what, our customers want data protection everywhere. They don't care what that data sits. They don't want to be handcuffed on where they can actually protect their data or recover from that data. And so they're working really strongly, tightly with us because we are the leader in this market and we just proved it again that we're going to keep up that leadership. So, data protection everywhere is important. I think the cloud extension and leadership is what puts us in that position. We're really excited about that. It's an asset no matter where it is. So you've got to protect it. That's right. Data fog though. I think I live my life with data fog. I like that. I like that. That's true. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time on theCUBE. And best of luck to the rest of the show. Thanks for talking to us. If I can meet you over there. We'll continue live here from Las Vegas where Dell EMC will 2017 and you're watching theCUBE.