 Hello and welcome to the future of Multicloud Lands Now, a discussion with Dell and Microsoft. We just heard from Dave Vellante and with Shannon Champion, VP of Product Marketing at Dell, where they were discussing the Apex Cloud Platform family. Now, we're gonna take it down another level here, really delve into that family, the Apex family, and we're gonna go into the Apex Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure. Let me welcome two guests who really know their stuff about this and are really gonna help us unpack it a little bit more. We have Caitlyn Gordon, who's the Vice President of Product Management, Multicloud and DevOps at Dell, and Dean Perrone, Executive Director of Product Management, Azure Edge at Microsoft. Let's jump in and really unpack this and understand the market and what's going on today. I understand that today's a really exciting day for both of you, that Apex Cloud Platform from Microsoft Azure has become available to customers to purchase today. So Caitlyn, let's get an update and understand what are the customers saying about this? You know, we've been talking to a lot of different customers, all shapes and sizes all over the world for a long time, and there's a lot of key themes, right? They're struggling with being able to innovate fast enough, being able to really keep up with the pace of business, getting the visibility into things, keeping things as simple as possible so they have the resources to do what they need to. And what we've heard loud and clear from our customers, which is really exciting, is that they are so happy to hear that our continued partner with Microsoft is coming to the next level now with this new platform, and that we're really coming together to simplify hybrid cloud operations with Microsoft Azure. No, I mean, you both have been very partnered up for a very long time, so I think that makes a lot of sense. Dean, you know, what are you hearing from the Microsoft side and your customers? Yeah, thanks. We're hearing really similar things. I mean, you know, they say that in this industry change is constant, but we live in really interesting unique times, whether it's changes that have been brought to the society writ large because of the pandemic or the emergence of new technologies like machine learning, what we're hearing from customers across different industries is they're really being asked to innovate more quickly than ever. And we're hearing they're really excited about this new platform because it gives them a simple, easy to use, easy to deploy platform, and it helps them really unlock some new capabilities in the cloud and bring them out as into the real world, into their edge locations, into their data centers, and lets them unlock just enough power of the cloud to enable new capabilities for them. No, that's super interesting. I think from the customers we talk about, it's really about bringing it to the edge. And I think it's really super exciting that you guys have partnered up for this. And I really want to delve a little bit further and deeper. Can you kind of give us an idea of what's new? What this new platform is about? Why is it different? And what have you been seeing from Dell and Microsoft in the past? You know, why is this different? Why is this different from what you've brought out before? Caitlin, why don't we start with you? Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's really exciting because this is a new on-premises appliance. It is jointly engineered, and it's really all about bringing the best of what Microsoft has in their edge and data center technology with what now Dell has brought together with that, with kind of the Azure Stack HCI software. And the whole magic of this is that we have integrated the full stack from the firmware all the way up to the Microsoft software, and that's fully automated. So that really the secret sauce from Dell is of course the combination of our compute, but it's really our automated management and orchestration really making that a seamless and simple experience from top to bottom. And though what's really exciting is that besides the fact that Dean and I talk all the time now as proof of our partnership, we've actually now are the first partner in Microsoft's new premier category for Azure Stack HCI, being able to partner to a level where we can bring such meaningful innovation to customers and really being able to be the first one in this new category of Microsoft, I think is really representative of the level of partnership here. I think we'll unpack that in a minute because I think that's super interesting. But Dean, what does it mean for this from a Microsoft perspective as well? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Microsoft and Dell have been partnering together on solutions for a long time. I started at Microsoft in the mid to late 90s and some of the first product lines I worked on were Windows NT and back office server and those were collaborations between Microsoft and Dell. So we've got a long history over decades of working together to bring new products to market. What's different about this particular solution is really how far we've pushed the envelope on the integration, the things that Caitlin mentioned, and also that it's a hybrid product, right? We've really taken the best of Dell technologies on hardware, on storage, on operations and married it with the best of Microsoft Cloud technologies from Azure and Azure Arc enabled services like Azure Stack HCI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Services and really brought that together into one real cohesive deeply integrated product that's really easy for customers to use. To get there just required a tremendous amount of collaboration between Microsoft and Dell. We had to do things like align our vision and our strategy and our roadmap and get the teams we joke internally that the teams have been working like one big joint engineering team to make that happen. And that's why I'm so excited to have Dell here as one of the first partners in this solution. Yeah, I think you, for the customers we talked to, I think you've nailed it, right? I think you have to be simple. It has to be that cloud experience. I think cloud used to mean somewhere else or somewhere but now it means all the way to the edge and everywhere and it has to be just simple. But let's kind of dig into what it means and go a little deeper what it means into being a premier solution for Azure Stack HCI. Dean, can you provide us some background on why Microsoft created this new category and what the benefits are to the customer? Yeah, so the Azure Stack HCI OEM partner ecosystem is categorized into tiers that each cater to a different segment of the market. And this new category that we're announcing today, the premier solutions tier really represents our best and deepest integration with our top OEM partners like Dell. And just to give you some examples of what that means, when you get one of the Dell Apex Cloud Platform for Azure Systems and you plug it in and you turn it on, there's a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be set up between Dell stuff and Microsoft stuff. All of that happens through one deeply well integrated end-to-end experience across the entire stack. Once it's up and running, you have to update the system. We have integrated updates that not only do the software on the box and the cloud services, but they go down into the box itself and they'll upgrade the drivers for the drivers and the firmware for the system as well. And then if you think about what customers are looking for, they're really looking about extending some of these concepts that we've gotten in the cloud where you've got this great reliability and you can just count on these resources to always be available. These systems, we have running in Dell Labs, we have running in Microsoft Labs. There's this huge integration between the teams and they're continuously validated so that we can get these systems to have a reliability profile that is as close as possible to what we've got in the cloud. It's really exciting to have Dell as the first partner in this tier of solutions. Yeah, no, I think that's pretty, it's a huge undertaking and I think again, the simplicity can't be overstated. They have how hard it is to get that to really happen. I think that the engineering effort that goes into it is pretty massive. So congratulations, Caitlin. I think that on being the first to be able to bring this new, first one in this new category, I think that it must have taken just a ton to pull this off. What was that like? It did, it took a lot of work. In a lot of ways, it's decades in the making, right? Everything starts with our customers and we really needed to help our customers accelerate their application deployment, simplify operation, meet increasingly stringent security and governance requirements, but be able to do so in a way that actually offers simplicity that meets the reality of what their skills are in their data center today. And that's really what forced us and encouraged us to come together as two big companies to yes, take a partnership we already have, but really go to the next level with that. Yeah, and how did the engineering teams work to ensure that Apex Cloud platform was really aligned with premier solutions for Azure Stack HCI? It really comes down to what we call the Apex Cloud Platform Foundation software. That's that magic automated management orchestration software in the platform. And it does incredibly powerful things that really make that time to value in an unprecedented way. Specifically, you can now reduce the steps required to deploy Azure Stack HCI down by 88%, which I mean, there's barely anything left at that point. So you have that really great automated, really simple deployment compared to what you have before with previous integrated systems when Dean was talking about the tiers of products. That's why we have a whole new level of offer, but that's day one, that happens once. So it's great that it gives you that value, but the day two operations benefits is even more important. Our engineering teams, as Dean said, really have been operating as one. It's been really amazing to see these companies come together and collaborate, and that doesn't stop when the product starts shipping. That continues. So we're continuously working together to validate that software stack we have in this product, what we call a continuously validated state, which ensures that whole software stack firmware up through the operating system is all validated to work together. But even better, when there's an update, when there's a patch, you don't have to go and search for it, you don't have to wait. We will have in as few as four hours that those patches are gonna show up natively in the UI, and they're gonna be ready for you as soon as you're ready to apply them. That's huge because I think everybody knows and gets the CISA updates and things of that nature and security and we just heard what happened to a major casino and things of that nature. This is super huge and it's a huge lift as well and I think that's a big piece of it. So there was a piece in it that I wanted to dig into. You kind of included your software defined storage as part of the Apex Cloud platforms. Why did you go down that route? Well, it comes down to two things. One, what are our customers asking for? And two, how do we have a consistent experience? Now, Shannon talked about this as really a family, which is an exciting thing to introduce a family and one of the tenants of that family is consistency. So to have that consistency, we wanted to make sure that we had that same scale, linear scale, high performance software defined storage in our Microsoft offer just as we do in the rest of the family. The reason for bringing that though is to give our customers choice. So we have storage spaces direct in the platform and then by adding our own software defined storage, which is built off of the PowerFlex technology, we can really support model these data intensive workloads, be able to scale the compute and storage separately and really give our customers a choice of using the native integrated Microsoft or leveraging this storage from Dell, that software defined storage from Dell that can give you that better linear scalability. And that really ultimately unlocks new workloads and even more transformation for our customers data centers. That's gotta be exciting for the customers at the edge to be able to have that opportunity to bring new use cases and new workloads. But Dean, Caitlin just discussed a number of the unique capabilities with Apex Cloud platform. What do these unique capabilities mean for Microsoft customers? Yeah, I mean, when I look at this from the Microsoft customer perspective, this release is really all about extending the power of the cloud, the operational constructs of the cloud, the simplicity of the cloud and bringing those outside of our Azure regions out into the physical world where customers are expecting and demanding, frankly, those same sorts of experiences. And so all the things that Caitlin mentioned plug right into that, right? So we're thinking about how easy it is to plug the box in, get it set up, the 88% reduction in the number of steps required to do that, the simplicity in things like updates and ongoing validation. Really, that's about just letting customers operate or they wanna operate, which is up the stack. They wanna worry as much about solving their business problems as they go forward as you think back to what we heard from customers. And so the other part of that is really, how do you bring the power of cloud services to bear on solving some of these modern problems that customers are looking to solve? And through Azure and Azure Arc enabled services like storage and data services and combining that with things like the Dell storage, customers are really enabled to just harness the power of all the data that they've got and really start to unlock just a new level of solution and value that they've got out in the real world. It's a really, really exciting collaboration. No, that's huge. I mean, time to value is everything for these organizations, especially, and I think also doing more with less people because we all know the budgets really have been tight in that personnel part. But everybody likes that really ease of cloud, ease of deployment. So what they also like is being able to get the product. And I think Dell recently announced that you're moving to more of a partner-led, go-to-market motion. What does that really mean for customers and for partners when you think about that with the Apex Cloud platform? Our partners are really excited about this. I was just with one of our partners yesterday talking about this new cloud platform and it's very exciting now that we can talk about it as shipping and they're really excited because it takes what they can already offer their customers to the next level. One of our joint partners, both strategic, both to Dell and to Microsoft is Kindrel. And actually with this announcement, they're expanding their solutions to support this new platform and this new family because they already see the demand from customers and they're excited to offer their services portfolio with this offer as well. No, I think I can understand that and I think it totally makes sense where they're the front line for these customers, helping them with these new workloads and are both partners of both of you. So it totally makes sense. So as we get to the end of this, where can people find out more information? Caitlin, why don't you kind of give us a little plug for where they can find it? Yeah, absolutely. So easiest thing to do is really to go to dell.com slash Azure or you can of course reach out to your Dell representative or partner representative for more information. And Dean, from the Microsoft side, where can people find out more information about this? Yeah, two places I'd ask folks to take a look. One is we've got a blog post up today on the azure.com blog that discusses the new premier solutions category. And then two, I'd ask folks to check out the new HCI catalog where you can learn more about the Dell Apex Cloud Platform solutions for Azure. Now that's great. And I want to thank you both, Caitlin and Dean, for sharing this exciting news. It sounds like it's going to be a huge opportunity for your customers and partners alike. Again, thanks for coming on with me to announce this. And we're really excited to hear more about it in the near future. And with that, I also want to remind you that those resources that you were talking about, there's a tab below called the resources tab. Funny enough, we've actually updated it with all of that information so you can go right there and it'll take you right to where you need to from a Dell or a Microsoft perspective. We really thank you and look forward to helping you understand how this evolves and how this product set evolves in this market and bring simplicity to customers in the future. Thank you and join us again.