 Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I have an alumni back with me and a new guest joining us. Devon Reed is back with senior director of product management at Dell Technologies. Devon, welcome back to theCUBE. Hi there, Lisa, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here. Yeah, virtual or not, it's great. And Sanjeev and Matal joins us, the senior director of cloud product marketing at Dell Technologies. Sanjeev, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, happy to be here, Lisa. So we're going to be talking about APEX. This was a big announcement at Dell Technologies World 2020, also a digital experience, just about six months or so ago, talking about the future of Dell and transitioning its platform to the as a service model. We want to dig into that, see what's going on there. So Sanjeev, you start us off embracing service, rather the as a service model, that was a huge transition, huge step, bold for Dell for its future. From your lens, what does it mean, what's going on? And with regards to the cloud, talk to me about some of the impacts. Yeah, no, it has been a multi-year journey for us and it's really exciting to be part of this journey. We have done a lot of work to establish modern commerce and APEX models, it really plays to our strength. We have led the infrastructure space for a number of years. So I really think with as a service, what we are doing is doing what we do really well, but delivering more value to our customers at a much faster clip. So it puts us in a great position to continue to be that technology partner that our customers come to rely on and frankly count us as their true essential partners for their success. Devin, talk to me about what it takes to engineer solutions like this. We mentioned this is a big transformative strategic direction, directional shift, but how does this as a service model with APEX differ from traditional models of infrastructure solutions that are in the data center? Yeah, sure, Lisa. So I think at a very high level, it differs a lot. And if I think about three major differences from how we build our traditional APEX business and our technology versus what we're doing as a service, the first thing that comes to my mind is that we're trying to build outcomes for customers. And what that really means, if you look back to how we sell infrastructure gear for the longest time, a customer would basically have to pick the technology, price the technology. They would get a quote with a lot of different line items on it with different pricing and then they would purchase the product outright and then they would have to manage that product themselves. And what we're really trying to do here is go to an outcome based model where the customer doesn't need to focus on the technology, they just need to focus on the business outcome that they're really getting. And the case that we're talking about here today is really around our APEX cloud services. So they just have to choose whether they're getting a hybrid cloud service or a private cloud service and then pick their instances. And then we ship them infrastructure right to their door. And that's another thing that we've had to do is we've had to change our processes because we need to make sure that these services are up and ready to be used in a very shorter amount of time. So we're targeting two weeks from the time that the orders dropped until the time that they can actually start operating on the gear to shrink that time to value and really improve that value statement for them. And then the third is that we really have to really partner with our customers on security and trust because we're managing this infrastructure for them as opposed to just sending the infrastructure on-prem and having the customer deal with it all. So we need to be a trusted partner in all of these infrastructure services. So there's a lot of differences in the way we engineer here. Outcomes, time to value and security. I want to pivot on that security front for a second. We've been talking about it for a long time. So can you talk to me as the Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing where are your customers with respect to security, comfort, confidence in APEX and as a service? Yeah, no, I'm glad you asked that question, Lisa. In fact, that is by far what we are seeing from a customer eagerness to learn perspective. We are seeing a lot of customers that are very cautious and are measured about their compliance needs. They are really thinking about, hey, how do I meet? How do I continue to deliver on my business outcomes but also be compliant with the regulations that I'm responsible for? And we are seeing customers as public cloud became a mainstream thing, a lot of customers moved to public cloud but quickly realized that it wasn't end all be all and they had to think about their workloads differently. They had to think about the risk around some of their critical workloads differently. And this is where APEX hybrid cloud and APEX private cloud are really helping them meet those compliance and regulatory needs for their business. And so with these offers in market, that's been a big part of most of our customer conversations that we are seeing today. Did you see any acceleration as we've all experienced a very disrupted market in the last 13 plus months? We saw a huge acceleration in digital transformation out of necessity, businesses that were pivoting multiple times to try to survive and now thrive as this hopefully becomes a post-pandemic world. Sandeep, just a question for you. Talk to me about some of the things that you saw in the market with respect to customers, maybe certain industries that really leaned heavily on this. Yeah, yeah, like within a day or two, most businesses had to pivot and most of their workforce was trying to access their company information and company data from which was not part of what they had planned for. They probably thought about it but they didn't have plans in place. And so over the last 12 plus months, I think what the customers have found themselves is the digital transformation became real for them and these solutions are no longer just an idea but are really getting to a place where they are starting to assess which workloads do I really use the private cloud and hybrid cloud environments for so that I continue to meet my needs, I continue to have the right performance that I'm looking for. And frankly enable my workforce to continue to be productive while they are in this mode of working remotely quite a bit. So if anything, the last 12 months, we've seen a heightened interest in these solutions because it's become real as opposed to an idea. Right, that reality set in overnight for so many organizations. Devan, I want to get to you. One of the things that we saw this, we talked about the rapid adoption of cloud, assess applications like Zoom being critical to personal life, professional life. Talk to me about the explosion of what we're seeing at the edge and what's going on in the data center and where Dell Technologies sees prime opportunity. Yeah, I mean, the edge is definitely what we see as the next battleground for the infrastructure. So if you think about what's really happening, there are millions and millions of sensors and applications that are distributed throughout the world and throughout non-data center applications, especially at the edge and the far edge and the near edge. And there's large, large volumes of data being created that need to be processed, analyzed and then basically brought back into premises to make actionable insights onto it. And what we've done, we're excited to announce that we have a manufacturing edge solution partnering with parametric technologies and leveraging our Apex private cloud to offer a private cloud solution for manufacturing edge solution. So it's extremely important to us. That's huge as we have all seen and felt during the last year, the challenges that the manufacturing industry has faced has been problematic globally. Talk to me more about that, Devon and also the impetus for starting there. Was the pandemic an impetus to go with the manufacturing? I actually wanted to rewind the tape here a little bit and talk about the impact of the global pandemic on this. As a service prior to the pandemic was definitely something in high demand. But as we started to progress through this global pandemic, it just started to explode. And really you had a spectrum of customers on that cloud, that transformation journey from a cloud perspective and it really started to accelerate. And every time we started, we kept looking at, what are people predicting for adoption of as a service? And every few months, it was getting more bullish and more bullish and it was really not only from a cost savings perspective but definitely the global pandemic has been driving a lot of this demand. And we see it in some of our use cases from our customers, not any particular customer in particular, but we do have a lot of customers that are doing that digital transformation to the work from home. And they're finding they need that flexibility not only on-prem for their desktops but on the off-prem for their desktops as well. So they need a truly hybrid cloud solution and our Apex hybrid cloud services are perfect for those types of use cases. So we're definitely seeing acceleration in this space. Yeah, a lot of acceleration. Go ahead. The one thing that I would add Lisa, you know, Devin talked about the manufacturing solution. Think of it as it's a start of a journey because that same scenario of, you know, like we talked about manufacturing and their scenarios where they need that support on the edge and being able to connect to the private cloud, that same scenario or that similar scenario exists for other industries as well, whether you think about retail or healthcare, you know, so that same model of building these edge solutions that connect into a cloud environment is something that Dell will continue to invest in. Manufacturing is the place where we are starting with. Got it. You bring up a great point about all of the other industries that have been so dramatically affected and continue to be, even though there's been multiple pivots surviving, surviving again, pivoting again. I want to talk to you guys about the customer conversations. You talked about the time to value, Devin being really quick. We're talking about from order to in production in a couple of weeks. But I want to talk about how you in that time in conversations with customers help them identify which workloads are best suited for APEC solutions. Talk to me a little bit about Devin starting with you. Yeah, so first and foremost, 14 days is just where we're starting. And 14 days is a starting point and we will continue to shrink that over time. We have aspirations to get to much lower than that for on-premises. We also announced a partnership with Equinix today where we will be providing these services not only on-prem in the edge, but also in near cloud facilities, in co-location facilities. And at that point, we can get to near zero instant time to value from that perspective. So we will be increasing the lowering the time to value for our customers for those types of solutions. So that's just, yeah, the 14 days, just the starting point. And the follow-up to the second part of your question, Lisa, can you remind me please? Oh, just how are you helping customers with their decisions on workloads? Which workloads are best suited for this or that hesitancy has been? Has that changed? Talk to me about those customer conversations. Yeah, I think we are talking to a bunch of analysts today and it really kind of varies. People are asking like, are there any particular customer types, vintry verticals that are really, and it's really broad-based. In terms of really helping customers, what workloads really are well-suited, we have a bunch of tools in our Apex console from a sizing perspective, workload perspective, that not only help our sales teams, but also customers really decide which of the best places to put these particular workloads and help them size their infrastructure for these solutions. Yeah, the one thing that I would add Lisa to that is it really comes down to the, every customer is unique and different and their tolerance for risk and their objectives is different. And so I really believe there is a continuum and you will see customers lie across it where customers that are willing, because a lot of customers jumped right into public cloud when public cloud was the big phenomenon, but they realized they were being risked, they were okay with taking on the risks that they did, but now that they have a little more ground beneath them and have some experiences, they are able to sort of right size how they think about public cloud relative to the hybrid cloud environment and be able to think about which workloads are they willing to take the risks on and which workloads they are not willing to take the risks on. I come back to that compliance and regulatory risk is a big risk that customers are weighing it against. And so I think those are the variables that the customers will think through as they think about investing in a hybrid cloud environment is really thinking about how much am I willing to take the risk on a particular workload and how much am I willing to give up the control by putting it in a public cloud environment? Those are the decisions that customers will make as they think about their workloads. Right, big decisions and to your point, Sanjeevi, every customer obviously there's a unique experience there. We're almost out of time, but Devon, I wanted to go to you and talk about from a go-to-market perspective. So you talked about the new Colo agreement with Equinix, congratulations on that. Giving customers choice here. Give me just give the customers one idea where can they go to start this discussion with you guys? The first and best place to go to start having this discussion and start learning about Apex is our Apex console. So our Apex console will be the end to end unified user experience that a customer will interact with these services. And from the time where a customer just wants to start kicking around the idea of an Apex service, what are the services? What's the catalog to actually sizing it, quoting it, getting their bills there, see what their metered subscriptions are and to actually operating their gear. It's all about the Apex console. And of course, no better than the relationships that you have with your customers and partners. I encourage you to reach out to our sales folks and our partners to get more information on Apex. Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining me, this virtual experience to talk about what's going on with Apex. Very short time, it was announced, a lot of progress. Looking forward to the next Dell Technologies World that's hopefully in person and we can sit down with some customers and really talk through this. But Devon and Sanjeev, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much Lisa. Thank you. For Devon Reed and Sanjeev Meetal, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the digital event experience.