 Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here for CUBE Conversation with Devan Reed, Senior Director of Apex Offer Product Management Dell Technologies. Devan, great to see you. Congratulations on Apex on the momentum and the big news. Yeah, thank you for having me here, John. It's a pleasure to be here with you and I can't wait to talk to you about the stuff. So we chatted last Dell Technologies World about Apex in great length. First, give an update on what's the new news and two, where's it come from since Dell Tech World? What's the big update on the product and the news you're launching today? Yeah, so it's been a fantastic journey here, John. And, you know, since Dell Technologies World, we've learned a ton from our customers and the reception has been extremely positive. We're seeing a ton of interest from our customers, we're building demand and we're learning a lot. But I think if we boil it down to what we're really learning here is that customers are living in a cloud-first world. And what that means is that customers want to move, you know, to the public cloud because the public cloud brings simplicity, agility, the ability to pay for only what they use and they don't need to manage their infrastructure. However, what we're hearing from our customers as well is that they're a little hesitant to move all of their workloads to the public cloud because there are certain performance requirements, latency requirements and security requirements that are still held from on-prem infrastructure vendors. And that's the beauty of Apex, to bring that the simplicity of the public cloud and the security and the performance of the private cloud in one with Apex. You know, I want to get your thoughts real quick before I move on to the news because this comes up a lot in conversation. In fact, I just had a conversation this morning on camera and also off camera around virtualization of data, right? So, and how on-premises, the bare metal growth is there, right? So you're starting to see from a performance standpoint, I mean, security, we get that. There's a lot of on-premises reasons why to be on-premises for the security reasons. But performance, you brought that up. Talk more about that real quick because I think this is really becoming quite more traction than people thought. There's a performance gain on-premise with some of the new tech. What's your reaction to that? Yeah, exactly. I think that's a, it's a great call-out, John. And especially as you get into some of these new applications where the computation needs to be directly next to the data in which it's processing, latency and performance is extremely important. We hear that day in and day out from our customers. And that's why it's really, it's really important to focus on, not only on public cloud environments, but on-premise infrastructure. And that's what Apex really, really helps customers bridge that gap. Awesome. For the folks watching, there's a great interview, search is name, Devon's name, and look at last year's announcement. We covered it in detail with Apex. So some great content there, go check that out. I got to ask about the news. You had some new announcements at VMworld earlier today. What can you tell us about the news? Yeah, yeah, we did, John. This is an amazing year for Dell at VMworld in general. There's a ton of announcements that have come out with collaboration with VMware and Dell. But for Apex specifically, and that's what I'm here to talk to you about, is that we're introducing a new offer to the Apex portfolio. And this offer we call Apex Cloud Services with VMware Cloud. And what this really is, is it's a full infrastructure as a service stack, and it's utilizing Dell's hyper-converged infrastructure. So it's integrated storage, networking, compute, and we combine that with the virtualization stack from VMware, the virtualization stack in the services. It's a solution that's managed by Dell. It's designed for six nines of availability. And again, going back to what customers are asking for, it allow customers to performance the security, and it also provides those consistent operations across their multi-cloud environments. What's the driver behind the customer requirements on this? Is there a specific use case that jumps out off the page on the managed service? Could you share why the traction? Yeah, you know, this space is growing really rapidly. And it's the new space. And as we talk to more and more customers, we learn there's a ton of different use cases, a ton of different deployments that are really coming to the forefront. But if I really boil it down, there are a few that are kind of rising to the top here. And I think first and foremost, we see a lot of deployments in VDI. And really the driver behind that is some of those environments are complex. And what the customers are trying to do is really offload those IT administrative tasks and have companies like Dell manage it. And that's what we're doing for them. Another one is really around that latency and security, really trying to drive applications to not suffer from that latency and security kind of benefits. Now, what we've seen is we have a lot of interest from very large enterprises that actually want to build and modernize their data centers. So they're either consolidating their data centers or they're trying to move to a fully automated hybrid cloud situation, right? And I'm talking very large deployments of VMware based private cloud capabilities. And I'd say one other place that we're seeing a lot of interest in these sort of capabilities is large distributed kind of edge use cases. So think use cases where you have hundreds of remote office locations or thousands of retail locations that is very difficult for customers to manage. And we take that burden away from our customers. Thanks for laying out the customer scenarios and the use case, good stuff. I got to ask you about the solution now. Appears that it was jointly developed with VMware. Is that right? And if so, can you tell me more about that? Yeah, yeah, exactly, John. This is amazing. The amount of collaboration that has gone into this solution with VMware is incredible. And really it's based on customer feedback. And we saw, based on this feedback we saw a real need to basically take the best of VMware software and their services capabilities and our Dell's world leading infrastructure capabilities and really combine it with the simplicity and agility that Apex provides. So we've been working with VMware very tightly over the past year and more to really develop the solution. It's been a great journey, been spending a ton of time with the VMware team building this. And customers really love what VMware cloud enables and customers love Apex. So it's a really powerful combo. And we think it's really the next kind of rocket ship for the combined companies here. Yeah, and I think the VDI piece in these use cases you mentioned only get more relevant and complex at the same time with the whole shifting and the working environments. The work from home, the future of work, you have the blurring of the lines between private home versus corporate network. It's like, I mean, we thought it was hard before it's going to get even more complicated. So the pressure's on to abstract away the complexity. So totally relevant. Yeah, and demand for these kinds of solutions we're seeing, you know, the interest is doubling. Seems like almost every six months, you know, there's a lot more interest, especially as we progress through this pandemic and this environment that we're living in here. So. Okay, so I got to ask you going forward again, great progress from our last time we chatted at Dell Technology World's last year, 2021. What's ahead for Dell and the VMware partnership? Tell us more, how does that look extending? What's the trajectory look like? Can you share any specifics? What can we expect? What's the headroom? What should customers expect? Yeah, you know, we get that question a lot, John. And really, you know, nothing is really, although we're going to be separating as different entities, you know, the collaboration and the level of joint development that we have between the two companies couldn't be stronger now. And we do not expect that to change. And we're just getting started on this thing and there's a lot more to come for sure. What's the biggest thing that you're excited about? Obviously Apex has been a good trajectory. The progress has been great. The market's in your favor. What's exciting for you right now? Where do you see the action? You know, where's the fun for you in this? What's your take? You know, it always, for me, the fun always comes down to customers and understanding what the customers want, understanding where the solution works, where the solution doesn't work, really working with our customers to really understand their problems and really try to work. So that's where I get my energy in this whole thing. And to see the pipeline grow and the sales coming in, that's just, it's really exciting for me, you know, as we're kind of embarking on this new, as a service world for the multi-cloud world. It's just, it's fantastic, John. You know, the one click, buy as you go, consumption-based, this is the trend and infrastructure as code, which is a cloud ethos, and you may be on-premises with security and now performance. It seems like we're seeing this second wave of virtualization kick in on-premises where now that you're in a cloud operating model from storage, compute, networking, kind of almost a reboot, almost a reset or extension or a relife, it seems like it's another second life of innovation. What's your reaction to that? Yeah, I definitely agree with you, John. And, you know, from a vision perspective, we're just starting to, you know, we're just starting out there. And we, you know, if we think about the power in the breadth of the portfolio that Dell has, it is unmatched in the industry. So first and foremost, you know, there's a lot more from a solution perspective that we can bring to the floor. So I think that's really exciting. I like the position that we have there. And in terms of collaboration with VMware, we're just getting started there too. And I spend almost half of my day with VMware employees, which is an incredible amount of collaboration. And there's so much more that we've talked about in our roadmap to really build out this vision when you start thinking about not just virtualization, but you start to talk about, you know, these new operating environments, including Kubernetes and Tanzu capabilities. And, you know, how do you hit different use cases with not only hyperconverged infrastructure, but different types of infrastructure as well. And then you start to span not only the prem, but the co-location facilities and the edge. And you bring this all together under the Apex console and I like our future. Yeah, console-based provisioning, easy. Congratulations on the big news, Apex cloud services with VMware cloud for the folks watching that's going to come in and maybe adopt the solution, the managed service. What can they expect from Dell? Oh, what you can expect is a very simple experience. So everything starts and ends with what we call our Apex console. So a customer from the time they want to learn about our services to, you know, getting quotes on them to actually transacting the service, to operating the infrastructure from that. And then we provide a full set of services under the cover where a customer doesn't need to worry about the actual infrastructure management. And we provide customer success managers for every account. So we are there with you along every step of the journey to make this as seamless and easy as possible. So it's a fantastic experience for our customers. And that's one of the things that they really love about the Apex is that, you know, kind of white glove service that we're providing. Devon, great to see you. Devon, I mean, Senior Director of Dell Apex Offer Product Management. He's our new product. Great to see you. Congratulations on your success. Apex Cloud Services with VMware Clouds. The big news here at VMworld with Dell Technologies. I'm John Furrier, CUBE Conversation. Breaking it down, bringing the news to you. Thanks for watching.