 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante joins me, Dan O'Brien joins us next. The Senior Vice President of Technology Solutions at Presidio, Dan, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to be here, great to be in Vegas too. Is it great to be back live in person, three-dimensional? You have no idea. Oh, I know. Seeing people again and the vibe here, day one is already fantastic. Talk to us about Presidio and Dell's relationship. What's going on with Presidio? Yeah, so I'll tell you just Presidio as a whole and part of why I joined about a year ago and I'm still just as excited as I was on day one. We're digital services and solutions provider with deep engineering expertise in networking, cloud, security, collaboration and modern technologies and we'll help our customers acquire, deploy and then operate and manage the solutions that we have. So we're a Dell, titanium black partner, we just got that, we're super excited about it and they're a critical part of how we deliver solutions to our customers. So you joined during an interesting time during the pandemic, what are some of the challenges your customers are facing now? Aging infrastructure, labor shortages, supply chain, what are you seeing from the customer's lens? Yeah, you know, all of the above. I think when the pandemic first hit, every customer that we spoke with basically said, cash is king, we want to preserve it, we don't know what the future holds. So all of the spend that happened was on the things that drove their business forward. So I got to distribute a workforce, how do I go invest in technology to make them productive? You know, a lot of them had to take a digital agenda that was five years long and do it in three months to survive, so they spent it and that generally meant cloud. But what they didn't spend money on was infrastructure inside the data center and now what they're finding is things are old, maintenance bills are going up, the cost to get it is going up and sometimes supply chain is over 12 months long to be able to actually do something about it. You know, when the Cube first started in 2010, actually it was EMC World 2010, now of course Dell is really our legacy here. So we said that companies that sell, it's kind of a pejorative, but sell boxes are going to be in trouble because of the cloud. Interesting, right? It was partly true because the cloud disintermediated a lot of that sort of box selling business. We said they have to become more value-added players, identify, and so when I watched Presidio, the transformation that you guys went through and you relatively knew, cloud has actually become an opportunity and you're doing stuff around digital, a lot of stuff around security and cyber, probably automation, life cycle management. Talk about that transformation and I'm interested in why you joined Presidio. So I'll tell you why I joined Presidio is I was talking to a lot of customers every day in my old role and I loved doing that part and the conversation started with Dan, I can't spend money on my data center right now because we're in a pandemic. I've got to innovate faster and the answer is to cloud. I don't know how to actually make my workforce productive because they're all over the place now and we didn't invest in technology and now I've got a threat surface with people working everywhere in workloads in different places, I don't know how to approach that and I looked at what Presidio had built and I'm like, that's exactly what we did. So, but what's been fun for me is been the answer to most of our customers is it's and. It's not the public cloud, it's not the private cloud, it's you need to do both of them really well and have the skills and expertise to leverage them for the right application or workload or use case and that's why I'm super excited to be here because we're really helping our customers in both areas. You mentioned security, we've seen a number of announcements today from Dell Technologies with respect to cybersecurity. We know the stats are what they are, it's no longer a matter of if we're going to get hit by a cyber attack, it's when most organizations are going to get hit by 2025. Where is security in the conversation? Now, how high up in the priority is it? I would say it's we don't have a single customer meeting without having that conversation and what we're finding is you look at the stats and say 30% of companies that have a cyber attack don't come back from it, 20% pay the ransom and then they don't even get their data back. So while we want to stop the attacks, I think you're right on that the answer is it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when but that's what's great about Dell Technologies. We have a complete portfolio that can meet any SLA of our customers, it's in backup technology, it's in primary storage, they can do immutable backups and recoveries everywhere but what happened this week where they announced partnerships with the cloud, that's huge because the same resource constraints that customers have in their data centers today are the same ones, you have to deploy infrastructure to be able to make this work and be able to accelerate recovery. So the partnership and the integration with the public cloud really gives a great integration point for a lot of our customers. In the analyst event today, we had a meeting with Jen Feltz, the CIO of Dell and I said to her, our survey data from ETR shows that security now number one priority it kind of always was but it's distance itself from the number two which is cloud migration and I asked her, I said obviously cloud migration is not your number two, security number one, what's number two and she said, let me help you interpret that data because for us, we have the scale, we can do our own cloud essentially. What her interpretation was, what those customers are really saying is modernization. Now you must see that, now of course, you're leaning into cloud, Dell is not defensive really anymore about cloud, like hey, we could take advantage of it as well. So what are you seeing in terms of the changing priorities of IT kind of pre-post pandemic? Is it like a rubber band that goes and then comes back to where it was or is it kind of permanent? I think that the both worlds together are absolutely permanent and there's no way, there's no way we're going to go back from one of the, and then we're always going to have a world where you might lean more into one to innovate, you might lean more into one for a disaster recovery but I truly think the world and the answer for us in our perspective has to be both but you said something interesting earlier is the key I think to what customers are doing is you can't just pick up a workload and move it to the cloud, it doesn't solve a problem, you use that term modernize and we've invested acquisitions and continued engineering resources that we're hiring around modernization because the economics and the true benefit of actually running a workload running right at the right SLAs and meeting your customers objectives aren't going to work right if you're just picking an application up and moving it over there so we're really focused there. So couch base just ran a survey, we did a power panel on it with a bunch of database analysts and it was a survey of 650 CIOs and CTOs and it was really interesting because it's an IT bias but they said like two thirds of the survey base said that IT is responsible for setting the digital transformation strategy of the company and I went well I wonder what the business guys say to that but that was sort of a red flag to me but I wonder what you're seeing because it's obviously you get a difference when you talk to different worlds so I guess what is modernization was kind of one of the big questions that came out of it and who's driving the agenda? So it really depends upon the customer, right? I think but the key to what you said and there was an article that came out you know I won't say where it was from but it really kind of opened my eyes but the article was titled it's time to get rid of the IT department and for someone like me and a lot of customers that kind of scares people but the whole underpinning of it was they were studying customers that took IT and actually disparaged like broke them apart and put them into business units so they said it's your turn to you know wake up every day and figure out what that business unit needs to be successful because the answer is you need, Dave it's both, right? You need both parties on board, right? Where you know you've got a business stakeholder that clearly knows what they want to do and understands technology's the answer but you need IT to be able to go make it work and be a true partner and help go actually make it work. It reminds me of when Nicholas Carr wrote that article if you guys are probably too young to remember but does IT matter? It was kind of post Y2K, right? And then everybody went crazy all the CIOs went nuts and in fact IT matters more than ever but it's a different context as you're saying. Question on things like skill shortages, supply chain I mean obviously top of mind are you helping people with that and so how so? Yeah so two ways I would look at this is the when you look at the supply chain I mean Intel I think spent $100 million on standing up new silicon plants we won't see a benefit from that from 2025. So it's real so a lot of what we're doing on a supply chain is how can we help a customer reach in and have certain targeted ways to leverage the cloud because we can't physically solve for the physics issue. The other part of it the people shortage I mean it's real I mean everyone's sitting at home they're pondering whether or not what they're doing is fulfilling their dreams. Now geography doesn't matter you can do a job from anywhere and technology is the heart of everything so the people shortage is real. So we're finding that our focus on managed services we're essentially allowing our customers to run and deploy things across every technology aspect is something that we used to have to drive to our customers and now we can't get out of a conversation without them asking for it because they just don't have the people to be able to grasp. Yeah they're pulling you into that need. Can you share in a customer example that you think really articulates the value of the Dell technologies that Presidio is delivering and it's really been able to truly modernize in the last couple of years. Yeah so you know looking specifically to Dell I mean for us one of the taking technical debt out of the data center and modernizing their HCI portfolio together with VMware is a complete home run. It can takes multiple products brings it into a single common solution uses a common tool set for all the operators that are there so you don't need the number of people to run it but if you do it right it solves for the portability issue and some of the public cloud options especially with things like VMC where you can have an on and off-prem and an automation between them so you can pick and choose dynamically. That so for us has been a home run and driving modernization strategies. From a multi-cloud perspective it's going to be a big focus of this event the next couple of days. What are you seeing from customers perspective they're probably in multi-cloud environments for a variety of reasons that's going to be persisting the hyperscalers are all growing what's going on there how are you helping customers to manage the multi-cloud environment with just much more simplicity? Yeah so I think there's a couple parts to that I mean obviously Dell together with VMware has a great set of technologies to be able to manage the deployment of that but what we're trying to do is number one help a customer determine which workload should be running in which place understand application dependencies but as we work through a migration strategy with a lot of our customers the key part that a lot of people don't realize is we all think security but the networking is probably the hardest part if you want to have portability in a well running cloud so having years and years in network heritage it's been a great synergy on us kind of moving in that direction to help our cloud customers make sure that the right SLA, the right connectivity and the right availability to make that world work. Yeah so multi-cloud obviously a big topic of discussion this morning with Chuck Whitton and that's another one of those well what do you mean by that I have sort of a premise I want to test on you Dan I've always said when it comes from talking to customers multi-cloud is kind of multi-vendor I got run some workloads in AWS I run some on-prem I run some in Google some in Azure and many of them that's a handful like the big banks for instance they say well we're building our own abstraction layer so we can control the policies, the securities and it seems like that's a direction that the industry generally in Dell specifically is headed Do you buy that and what's driving that need? Yeah so I would buy it based on the size of the customer so when you take a big bank a lot of what drives them to go to one cloud or the other is that the big cloud providers they're innovating constantly every day there's a new tool or capability that exists there and certain ones of them are going to match ready use case that that large customer has You can't resist So they're going to end up with multiple clouds so it makes perfect sense when you get into a smaller customer they really have to want to be successful they've got to pick one, right? They can't afford the people and the scale and the process so I think that's, the answer would depend based on the customer, the larger ones I think they're going to build a full orchestration stack and the smaller customers are going to look for one and someone maybe with managed services to help them augment the skills and staffing to make it work For a while, and I haven't heard it much lately but you'd hear about repatriation people come up, Dave you've got to look into this repatriation thing and I did and I was like eh, I really see it a little bit, little pockets but I do see hybrid I mean that's very clear and I do see a lot of people went into the cloud they didn't have a great experience and okay, so there's some of that going on I guess you could call that repatriation but what are you seeing in terms of both of those? Is repatriation a trend or is it really in hybrid? So I've interesting perspective coming from Dell, right? We're very infrastructure focused in there I see a little bit of repatriation in like a workload like virtual desktops we picked it up and you threw it in the cloud to make your workforce productive but generally speaking, what we're seeing is not repatriation which is, hey I move things my cost is out of control, I don't know how to manage it can you help me get better controls on cost can you help me automate a lot of the things that are running here so I've got better control of cost and where things are running in my security posture so it's much more about optimization that we're finding that it is, let's bring it back So it's fine tuning the knobs, right? And that seems to be the trend over the next couple of years 110% yeah Have you seen any industries in particular the last year that you've been with Presidio really leading edge in terms of modernization? Yeah, I mean it's so interesting enough I mean I could give you a few examples, right? When we look in our public sector business a lot of the educational institutions had to invest in new platforms that interact and engage with students our financial institutions believe it or not continue to innovate, I mean what people don't realize is the mainframe still has the transaction where your money lives in the ledger but all the supporting ecosystem is digitized and right is completely modernized to interact with you and of course retail for us, I mean retail was I mean they had to change their business model in many cases overnight not even to survive but to serve the communities they were working in so Yeah, I think one of the things that we've all learned in the last couple of years is the access, the e-commerce, the access online we expect that now in the brick and mortar stores to be able to deliver that connected store make sure that they have the inventory that I'm looking for with a frictionless experience Yeah, and I'd say my favorite one is you look at the healthcare industry and while obviously with loans and healthcare and billing all had to change but what was really exciting for us I mean as consumers, right is the fact that we can interact with doctors online at the click of a button now I mean that part for us has been super exciting Everything's at the click of a button now Oh my gosh, well Dan thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today sharing what's new with Presidio what you guys are doing together with Dell and how you're helping companies in every industry to modernize Perfect, appreciate it, great to have you Likewise, for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest