 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me today. Adam Glick is here, Senior Director of Portfolio Marketing for Apex at Dell Technologies. Adam, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa, it's great to be here with you. Likewise, and Andrew Glinka is here, VP of Competitive Intelligence at Dell Technologies as well. Andrew, welcome to you as well. Thank you, glad to be here. So the last Dell Technologies World was only about six months or so ago and sadly, I was sitting in the same room doing that. We're not in Vegas at the convention center, but hopefully one day we will be soon. But a lot of news there, Adam, was about Apex and this big transformation about what Dell wants to do. Give us a little bit of a history in what's transpired in the last six months. A lot of things have happened in the past six months with what we were calling Project Apex before. Probably the first and most obvious one is we've removed Project from the name as we've made the offering generally available. We've also added a lot to it. There's a lot of new pieces of technology that are part of Project Apex now. We've talked about bringing in the cloud, bringing in the custom solutions. Hear a lot about that at Dell Technologies World this time and really packaging that all up together in a single experience for customers, giving them something that's super simple, agile and gives them all the control that they want to use their infrastructure where they want it. All of that as a service. Big changes. Andrew, let's go over to you now. Talk to me about some of the players in the market. Well, the As-of-Service market is growing incredibly fast and will continue to go over the next number of years. And what we're seeing is a lot of players trying to enter that market because it is growing so fast. So you have some of the traditional infrastructure players that are entering like HPE has their offer out in the market and pure storage and that and many others. And you also have the public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft Azure that are starting to develop on-prem tech capabilities to kind of validate this hybrid cloud as a service, all things everywhere model. So rapidly growing market, a lot changing and a lot of players entering this space very quickly. So a lot of acceleration we've seen with respect to digital transformation, Andrew, in the last year. So talk to me about how Apex compares to those infrastructure players you mentioned, Pure Storage, NetApp and HPE. Talk to me about the comparison there. Yeah, so one of the things as we continue to develop Apex is we're gonna offer the broadest portfolio of as a service solutions for customers, all with different consumption models. So we'll be offering outcome-based, metered-based as well as custom solutions, which is a little bit different than what others can provide. All delivered using market leading technology and all Dell supported. So we're not using third party to deliver any of the as a service. It's all Dell supported. Some other very tactical things like single rates. So we don't charge for over usage or charge extra, which is different than some. And also it's all self-service. So through the console, you can place an order for a new system or an upgraded system. And so you're avoiding the lengthy sales cycles and all the back and forth. So just a couple of questions and you can get the outcome that you're looking for. Adam, talk to me about how Apex compares to the public cloud providers. Customers obviously have that choice as well, AWS, Google Cloud Platform. What's the comparison contrast there? So when we think about what's going on with public cloud providers, we really look at them as partners and people that we work with. There's a Venn diagram, if you think about it. And the reality is that, although there's some overlap between it, there's also a lot of differentiated value that we look at, that we bring there. And it's how do we work together on those pieces? So the most obvious of those is when you're thinking about things like a hybrid cloud and how people work together to make sure that they've got a cloud that meets their needs, both on-prem in their colo locations out at the edge, as well as whatever they're doing with public cloud. And so we're looking at, how do we bring all those pieces together? And there are certain things that work better in certain places, certain ones that work better in others. We do a lot of things around the simplicity of billing to make that easy for customers, giving them really high performance ways to work well that really meet the needs of a lot of workloads that might need regulatory needs or might have specific performance mapping, high performance computing, things like that. But it works together. And that's really the point is that what customers tell us is that they have needs for on-prem assist. They have needs for things in their private cloud and in colos. They also have needs in the public cloud and how do they bring that together? And so we're working to say, how do we bridge that gap to make the best possible outcome for customers? We work on partnerships with the partnership that we announced with Equinex to bring together colocation facilities around the world and bring APEX services to customers easily when they want to say reduce the latency between what they're running and what they control within their own hardware stacks and what might be running in the public cloud. It's kind of a merger of both that really helps customers get the best of all that they need because at the end of the day, that's the goal is helping our customers get the best IT outcomes for their businesses as possible. Right. And you mentioned hybrid cloud and we talk about that so often customers are in that hybrid world for many reasons. So basically, Adam, what you're saying is there is partnerships that Dell Technologies has with APEX and the other hyperscalers so that when customers come in, if they're most likely already using some of those other platforms, they actually can come in and work with APEX to develop a solution that works very synergistically. Yeah, we're helping them pull together what they need. I mean, if you take a look, 72% of organizations say that they're taking a hybrid cloud approach. They want to be able to bring the best of both worlds to what they're doing and really choose what's right for them. Where do they need to be able to really control what's happening with their data? Where do they want to be able to maintain and control the costs that they have and also be able to access the other services that might be out there that they would need? And so how do they bring those together and those ways that we work together for the benefit of customers and we bridge those two pieces is really what we're aiming to do here. Excellent. So, Andrew, let's go back over to you. I want to talk about workloads here because when we look at some of the numbers, the 80-20 rule with the cloud, 80% of those workloads still on-prem. Customers needing to determine which workloads should go to the cloud. How does Apex work with customers to facilitate making those decisions about the workloads that are best suited for Apex versus cloud? Well, I think that's the beauties that's very flexible. And so some of those traditional workloads that are still on-prem can be run as a service without a whole lot of change. So you don't have to re-platform, you don't have to re-engineer them and you can move them into an as-a-service model and continue to run them easily. But then there's a whole lot of new development like high-performance computing and AI and machine learning, particularly at an edge, where Gartner says by 2025, 75% of all data will be processed at the edge. So as these new capabilities are being built out, customers have been asking us to start to run that infrastructure in these new workloads in an as-a-service model. And so high-performance compute, AI, ML, these edge workloads are fantastic use cases to get started with as-a-service and can certainly extend back into some of the more traditional workloads that they've been running. Adam, can you talk to us a little bit about what's transpired in the last six months from the customer's lens? As we talked a little bit about, we talked a lot in the last year about the acceleration of digital transformation and so many businesses having to pivot multiple times in the last year, lot of acceleration of those getting to cloud for to survive. Talk to me about the customer experience. What have you seen in the last six months? So what we've heard a lot from our customers is that they're really looking for the benefits of consumption as a service, that especially as you see the financial impacts that happened over the past year, people are looking at ways to preserve capital and what are the ways that they can go and maintain what they wanna do or perhaps even grow and accelerate, take advantage of those new opportunities in ways that don't require large capital purchases and the ability to go in and purchase as a service is something we've heard from multiple customers is something that is really attractive to them as they look at, hey, there's no opportunities they've opened up and how do they be able to expand on those as well as how do they be able to preserve them, capital they have, be able to continue with the projects that they're looking at but be able to take a more agile approach for those things. And so the as a service offerings that we've been talking to our customers about have been really something that they've been excited about and they've come to us kind of, hey, what do you have? What's the roadmap? How can we have more of those kinds of things? And that's why we're so excited Dell Technologies World to be talking about how we're bringing even more Apex services as a service available to our customers. And I'm just curious in the last year since we've seen so many industries, every industry really rocked by the very dynamic market but some of the things like healthcare and government I'm just curious if you've seen any industries in particular really take a leading edge here in working with you and Apex. One of the most interesting things that I've seen from the customers that I've been talking to is that it really is broad ranging I've talked to customers who are governmental customers who are interested in expanding what they're doing with IT but very concerned about things like data locality and data sovereignty. That's very interesting to them. I've talked to manufacturing organizations they're looking at how do they expand their operations in Asian manufacturing for instance and they're going from how do they operate within the United States to how do they expand their operations be able to do that in a more quick fashion of what they're doing. Talk to healthcare organizations they're looking at how do they be able to bring digital healthcare? And as you think about what's happening more virtually that people are doing what does that mean in terms of healthcare both from people who are actually doing virtual visits with their doctors as well as even things like digital surgery. So there's so many things that are happening. I mean really I could talk to you about dozens of industries but the takeaway that I've had is that there's no real one industry it's really something that has impacted just IT operations globally and different folks look at different things in different ways. I talked to a company that does train they're actually a trained company they do logistics and they're looking at edge scenarios and how do they do train inspections faster to be able to provide better turnaround times for their trains because there's a limited amount of track and so if they miss a maintenance window like that's time that they not only have to wait for the next window but they have to wait for all the other trains to pass too. So it's really breathtaking just the scope of all that's changing in IT and all the opportunities that are coming up as people think about what consuming IT services as a service can mean for them. Yeah, amazing opportunities and you talked about the virtual and there's so much of it that's going to persist in a good way, silver linings, right? Andrew, I want to go back over to you talk to me when we talked about Apex at Dell Technologies World 2020 six months ago this was kind of revolutionary and really looking at it as a really big change to Dell's future strategy talk to me about that. Well, it's a change for the entire company so having to kind of rethink how we deliver all these services and outcomes to customers so it's not just about the product the product is now the service and the service is the product so it's very different in how we approach it thinking more about how we can help our customers achieve these outcomes and help deliver these services that get them there which is a little different than just developing the products themselves and so that's been a big thing that we've been taking on and making sure that we go deliver these outcomes for our customers. And then Adam, last question for you talk to me about kind of same perspective of looking at this as how Dell intends to compete in the future and what customers can expect also how can they engage? Is this something that is available with channel partners, Dell Direct? So this is the beginning of a huge journey in transformation as Andrew spoke about like this is a transformation of not only what we're providing but a transformation across all of Dell we're looking at how do we expand the Apex portfolio to bring a portfolio of options to our customers we're starting with storage and cloud and some of our custom solutions but we really have a vision of how do we bring all of Dell's business products and into services for our customers it's a huge transformation it's something I'm incredibly excited about because it really aligns what we do with what our customers do we've never had an opportunity to be so closely connected with our customers and create great outcomes for them so the transformation like we're just at the beginning of this and it's an incredible path that we're on that's providing amazing value for the people that we've already started working with for people that want to find out more about it you can certainly come to our website delltechnologies.com slash Apex people who have a relationship with Dell already contact their sales representative we'd be more than happy to talk to them about what their current needs are and what Apex can do to help them continue their digital transformation and create better outcomes for their organization Excellent Adam, Andrew, thank you for joining me today to talk about what's going on project Apex to Apex the tremendous amount of opportunities that it's helping customers in any industry uncover we look forward to seeing down the road some of those great customer outcomes that come from this I thank you both for joining me today Thank you very much Lisa Thank you For Adam Glick and Andrew Glinka I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021 the digital experience