 Brandon Canada come on in good morning product marketing director storage solutions. Good morning. Good morning. I'm great Brandon, thanks for joining us here today. I'm happy to be here. Yes. Thank you for the opportunity to spend time Oh, of course our pleasure. We're thrilled to have you. I'm thrilled to be here. What do you think of the conference so far? The conference so far, you know, I can compare it to the conferences I've been to over the last eight to 12 years with Dell. Yeah, and I've been to sales conferences I've been to customer conferences have been to partner conferences. This is Right now by far really The one that I think has been the most beneficial for me really It's the one where I've seen the most passion Not only from the Dell folks. Yeah, but from the customers, you know, because they seem to really be connecting with a few things You know one is they're connecting with the vision Number two, they're connecting with the people from Dell and our channel partners who are driving the business and So the combination of building these new relationships and a really strong vision that they see they'll executing on That has a very compelling story and value prop. I think it's just the foundation for phenomenal success you know, this is our first year with the inclusion of compelling and bringing together the Ecologic users conference and I think we'll continue to build on this and it's just gonna get better and better. This has been phenomenal And so you think it is the change and all of the acquisitions that they've been making that's created such an environment I do I think it's a I mean, I think it's a real transition That if you look at it from the Dell inside out perspective, it's a transition We're having to make from being, you know, pretty product-centric to being very much more solution-centric And so if I look at what that means we talked from a sales perspective to customers at the time at which they're trying to make a Product decision But in solution selling we need to be engaged with them much earlier in the process You know from pre-sales to help them discover what their problems and opportunities might be it's more about relationship building Understanding the business and so we're having to make that transformation Customers are making that transformation because of the market and the requirements that are being placed on our customers And so you're seeing it now show up in the way we execute our, you know our annual users conferences, right? In terms of you know solutions being involved earlier. Yes, is that causing problems in other areas or yeah costing more Well, it's it's not so much the cost per se It's for me because my team owns the development of Solutions, okay, we define the requirements for data management solutions And so if I'm developing a product I've got Engineers in place typically my costs are around preparation of the sales field fairly close to product launch And so a lot of our costs Are actually sunk costs as well Solutions on the other hand require that we be out in the field Greasing the skid so to speak yeah well before a product solution or a solution stack is going to launch these sales cycles can be long You know, it's not a a couple of days or weeks or months. It could be six nine twelve months So we have to shift a lot of that activity to the left. Are you bringing on a different type of sales? Yes Person talk a little bit about investment here. Yeah, you bet if you look at where we started With opportunities that were rich for instance in health care as an example We started based on a couple of things one of which is customers at a very distinct Pain point that we could solve with our unified clinical archiving solution that was differentiated. So that made sense We also already had a significant amount of investment in the health care vertical Okay, so you are we already know the customers through our pro acquisition as an example a significant amount of Capability there already So we knew that would be a quicker time to market quicker time to revenue now fast forward We launched the email and file archiving solution, which is a fully integrated stack I Leverage integrates and do which email products? Well, what we do is we support predominantly Microsoft and Linux email as well as file systems NFS and civs We leverage a combo some pond and nine and semantics enterprise vault platforms Those are the two key platforms now the integration is this The there's an API between those applications and our storage device the DX object storage platform the API makes sure that the applications features are fully leveraged and Complimentary to the DX object storage features for data management in addition to that We have a fully integrated set of services So that for instance if you buy the email and file archiving solution from bill you have a full Staff of support from delt. It's a single back-to-pat As opposed to having to buy multiple components from different people and having multiple services contracts You change the language yourself throw to choke. It's back to back to back to back to back. Yeah, I prefer to focus on them Yeah Yeah, but it's one way or the other. It's good. You know good relationships You want to have that person that you can rely on yeah, right? The traditional model is you buy your application from your application partner. You have a services contract with them Hardware from your hardware partner services contract with them with our integrated solutions. You have the full suite of capabilities Better together integrated to make sure that the right features are leveraged across the infrastructure But then for service and support and pre-sales You know delt and eventually the enabled channel partners will be that one back to pat in the route to market on the medical Some of the medical systems. So you've got furrows systems out there who's sort of conditioning the market It's a good subject But but are but some of that goes out under a sort of non-paro I mean not del branded sort of solutions, right? Do these solutions go out del branded and they're or they're embedded in I would I would consider the integrated solutions to be more Co-branded because the software application in a lot of cases is going to continue to maintain the brand of the application provider Yeah, are you selling them directly or your application providers or so? We sell directly So that's another part of the integrated stack is that even the application licenses are sold through del and so we Price the solutions on an integrated basis so that we can optimize around del's you know scale Advantages and so we negotiate with those partners to make sure that the pricing is is right And we develop reference configs around the right kind of customer environments then the beauty beyond that is a lot of our customer environments do demand some sort of Customization and we have the ability for instance to apply DX object store if that's the right solution for the customer We can deploy equal logic if that's the right solution for the customer or a combination of the two So we have that flexibility built into our delivery model So one of the things that does been noted for on the PC and server side is sort of custom-built order Rapidly, so yes, I think we have at home. I think I counted seven Dell computers You know all It's really bad for a family of four. It seems like a lot No, no, no, I have a few and I'm looking forward to replacing them So but but so for some of these solutions that you're putting together. It's also Sounds like it's very much custom-built order, but again integrated custom-built order integrated in the in the difference I would say is that del's PC business was built specifically for online customization You or I could go to the website pick the right drive sizes Some of our hardware components can be customized online like that the solution stacks right now are bundled through basically a an interference layer with our Sales specialists So we actually get involved in the configuration to make sure that it's right in most cases Yeah, now if a customer comes in and buys for instance a backup to disk target device That already has the media embedded those are a little bit more Straightforward less complex and they can be customized online So, you know, we try to offer online customization where we think it makes the most sense for our customers Because a lot of our customers don't want to have to go through that It's not like buying a server where you know, you need a certain amount of memory and a certain processor We're talking about sizing analysis so that you understand what Sizing requirements are for your storage environment. How many licenses you need on the media server What raid types you want to support etc. Yeah, so it's just not always Right for online customization, you know, I used to manage del's Product data groups and so this was the bills of material. Okay. Yeah bills of material engineering change orders, right and Because we never built Fixed config units We had many many modules that were represented by bomb component part numbers Yeah, that then had to be configured and validated together to make up that in unit what that ended up doing was creating Billions of permutations of possible configurations, right, which is great for choice But in some cases you could say maybe there's too much choice So, you know, we think in the solutions area, it's best if we can help Consult with customers to come up with the right config and we'll go configure it on the back end Right, so it's making it simpler for the customer. All right. So yeah, so you talked about email archive You talked about pack systems are Back up to desk are there any other sort of solution sets that you can talk about that? Yeah, that you bet I'm real excited about an extension of our email and file archiving solution You know email and file archiving is focused on unstructured content But the reality is customers still deal a lot with pains associated with structured content databases. They're getting heavy. They Bloated We're finding that a lot of our customers have applications that are no longer being used, but they're still taking up space. They're still paying Licenses on it. And so an extension of our email and file archiving solution will be to focus on structured content It gives customers the ability to reduce fairly significantly the size of the database that they do have through unique Ddupe and compression technologies is this from the ocarina Partly from ocarina, which will be on the back end inside the storage device But that's not really on the database side, right? That's correct Right, we we have a partner in our ISB ecosystem. In fact, they presented with us called rain store rain store Yes, we announced a reseller agreement with them earlier this week as a part of this show It's not yet a fully integrated stack. It's a more loosely integrated stack. Let's call it an enabled solution But the idea here is if we can help customers to deal with storage complexities the growth challenges not only on unstructured data But with structured data bring differentiation to the market associated with things like Ddupe compression ratios The the neat thing about the the rain store enabled solution is that you can either retire applications completely or offload database content without Eliminating access to that content so you can still have essentially Real-time access to the database even though that content has been archived to a much more efficient platform for preservation and long-term retention So there are we with with Phil you were talking about how there seems to be another little sort of boom in Investment investment, right? Particularly the storage space around certain storage functions that may be feature or markets not necessarily systems Yes Some advice for people who a lot of people's I think it was Darren Thomas says his phone is ringing off the hook Yes, but any advice on how someone gets your attention to say hey, this is Yeah From a customer's Supplier I'm from a startup. I'm a startup and I want to get your I like the equal logic platform I think I've got some unique functionality. How the heck do I get your attention? Well, you know, we Internally, even though Dell is a 60 billion dollar plus company, you know, I started with Dell when it was only 15 and a half billion 12 years ago and Today we operate very similarly to the way we did that we continue to maintain kind of this entrepreneurial spirit and You know, my team prioritizes the development of relationships with our partners We rely on partners because for instance in the application space They have expertise around certain data management practices that can complement what we do and vice versa But it would be silly not to leverage that as much as I can so in spite of being big I'm a person. I build relationships my team promotes the same types of Things and if a cuss if a partner for instance has a differentiated product that we can sell to a customer They're willing to pay for that differentiation Then I want to talk okay, and we've done it. We've got an ISV ecosystem right now that is 19 or 20 In terms of having already been launched a lot of it's focused around an API integration with our DX object store But also some qualifications with equal logic and eventually compelling so it's going to be a storage ecosystem Not a DX ecosystem the DX just so happens to benefit greatly from API development and We have a roadmap of over 30 so we're continuously building partnerships Okay, so if I'm a potential partner then what you want me to do is write my application to your API Yes I do Would you like to? Do you have an app? I know a few people who have apps Yes So they need to make some upfront investment to do that There is some upfront investment And what's the level of effort there? Well it's Let me back up a little bit because I think this is a great topic The DX if we just focus on that because of the API You know other forms of file-based storage traditional file storage the NFS and sys protocols are ubiquitous, right? So the standards are one of the the benefits of kind of traditional form there are Costs and complexities associated with it and the DX and object-based storage fills a lot of that space And you know if we get a chance to talk about that it'd be great It's all HTTP HTTP front-end the power of the web powers your storage device to make it short and simple Think of the DX as a clustered solution where you've got web servers Right That are tied to the internet and you've got a controller Yeah And you basically have unlimited scale So some of the proven successes of the web accessibility, ubiquity, the ability to manage content regardless of where it's located But to still be able to access it efficiently The fact that the devices on the internet don't have to have comprehension of one another And so you can have a very globally distributed footprint There are lots of things that just if you look at the power of the web Object-based storage is similar And that's why you see object-based storage is the foundational technology for all of the private public clouds I mean there are advantages So you know traditional file still has a place inside a corporation or a small and medium business Predominantly if you have highly transactional content If that content is changing a lot It's good to be optimized around performance Raid protection in case you lose a bit or a block But you're giving up some things as a result You're giving up simplicity You're giving up scalability Object-based storage is optimized around preservation of content that's predominantly fixed It's not changing So if you think about inside of your organizations I would guess that 80% of the content that you have stored hasn't been looked at in a while I mean let's face it All those deaths Your videos are viewed all the time, come on Well no, not locally, not through the company That's right Or if it's viewed today It may be viewed a lot over the next week It might go dormant for a while And then it goes hot again at some point Exactly So you need to be able to manage the content Not necessarily manage the infrastructure when it comes to this type of unstructured content Object-based storage is optimized for things like longevity We want to keep content around for a long time But I don't want to have to pay all the costs of management and so forth It's optimized around the management of the content based on the content itself Because an object is nothing but a file plus it's metadata So the fact that you have metadata stored inside the storage device Now means you have the ability to manipulate the data Because you know exactly what it is Unlike in a file system where maybe you have a file name and who created it So the combination of unlimited scale The ability to know what your content is Deployed on an architecture like the DX That's optimized through x86 commoditized storage nodes That sit on the Ethernet network That are unencumbered by file system hierarchies With a flat address space that can store billions and trillions of files I think the number on the Twitter post I saw was 10 to the 38 power But the number is undecillient as the number But it's so big we can't even comprehend it And then all those features combined allow you to manage this content automatically So you don't have to deploy your resources to do it Let the storage device do it And so your resources can now be deployed to manage the primary storage data The stuff that's highly transactional Changing a lot, your sands, your fiber channel infrastructure, whatever And let the dormant content that continues to get bigger and bigger Would it manage itself? Free up all those resources to go do some really cool things Like figure out what you can use your data for In terms of extracting value from the organization That's what we all really want with data, right? Figure out what it is and what I can learn from it It opens up a value prop I talked to customers today a lot about freeing up storage resources To help them better manage storage growth and reduce costs That's cool Eventually though wouldn't it be great If we were using that content for real strategic business value Better decision So Michael talked about that in his keynote And so the question is what sorts of search technologies Mining technologies, data aggregation technologies Are going to go in to help people make better decisions Either for their businesses or for their selves and their health Absolutely We have an ecosystem of partners that are also search and index providers That may be your classic web-oriented search Or are more oriented around enterprise search And they're really two different beasts We believe that the ability to really understand the content As opposed to just for instance basic text search Is going to be paramount So you see a lot of our technologies are content aware Ocarina as an example Content aware It knows exactly what type of content it is And applies a different algorithm To achieve optimum compression or dedu What we believe is right Is to leverage content aware indexing and search engines That have built in intelligence for doing things quickly Because you're going to be doing it with a lot of data You don't want to necessarily take up And have to add as much cost in processing power As you're saving in storage You want to be able to get to this insight quicker And more efficiently But also more effectively So you want the search to be able to do things like Understand the difference between Dog and man's best friend But also realize that they're related And pull back things that are similar And we believe that the power of search index Along with the ability to bring content aware technologies To the market together Create a lot of value for customers So people say well How much money am I going to save On object store versus traditional file And we go through that argument But then we say Think of all the strategic opportunities That you can open up If you really know what your content is And have the resources available to go Do things that make your company better So that consultative part A lot of companies don't know how to do that For themselves They know that there's technologies out there But they don't know what they are And they don't know how to apply them So Dell can create a set of services around that Your partners might be able to create a set of services How do you see that playing out With the Dell community? It's going to be a transformation Just like the one we're going through now Because it takes time For instance you asked about investment earlier We're investing a significant amount of money In hiring solutions, sales, resources These are people that know industries, know markets Know the product well enough But can have the business conversation with the customer All the way up to the C levels And to hire those folks takes time You know, especially in the quantities That we're looking for So if you look at my solutions roadmap as an example Our email and file archiving solution as a proxy It can take six or nine months Just to hire the people you need And then the sales cycles can be You know, six to nine months We couldn't just out of curiosity Because we all care about jobs How many people are you looking to hire? You know, across the solutions organization Which just doesn't just include Data management solutions Because we have other solutions pillars Around next generation data center And networking and Next generation end user computing But if you look across our solutions business We're hiring thousands of new people To help man the pre-sales and sales activities And some of that activity is tied Specifically to solution launches Some of it's trying to get us caught up From where we need to be And we went out and acquired some capability Through a pro a couple of years ago You know, I think that that's a viable option To potentially do If you want to hire a thousand people right now You may be more cost effective to hire a company To buy a company And in the meantime, there are strategies that we employ One is the channel is extremely valuable We've got to figure out as a solutions organization How to enable a channel around solutions Which is different than enabling a channel around products Which is still going to need to be able to do That sort of deal registration process To buy on this deal And the beauty is a lot of the deal registration stuff Is transferable The ability to train those folks Takes different resources The collateral they want is different So there's a whole backend thing that we need to enable But the other thing is Our application partners bring a heck of a lot Of expertise to the table If you look at our archiving partners Semantic obviously, Commvault We have other HSM partners Across various industries And they all know their businesses And so we partner with them especially early on To enable sales Cooperative selling is kind of the way we refer to it But we can't do that forever Because number one, it's not scalable, right? And number two, we need to be able to Have those discussions of a customer calls Having a challenge with archiving Having a policy requirement We don't want to have to hand them off To somebody else, right? We've got to build the capability And it's hard, it's a challenge But we're a good execution company So I'm confident we will be successful So with all this hiring You're pretty involved in the management Of the people to help them Go through the transformation Absolutely Obviously challenges are there But what are you finding is the most exciting And the most frustrating part? What's exciting is everybody that I've hired in And who my colleague teams have hired in They're really passionate around The direction that Dell is moving in Mostly because they've already been out there Talking to customers They are solution sellers to begin with And so they see that it's valuable To get something customers want They're excited to see a brand like Dell Coming to the enterprise space With the same approach With a proven approach But they also like the fact that Because it's Dell And with the technology moves We're making that it's a differentiated approach So they feel compelled to go out And have those conversations Because they're confident that they can win Their passion and energy when they come in is great The other thing I like is that It's forcing us to look at processes I mean we have product oriented launch processes And it's forcing us to look at How can we do things differently To enable solutions And you know some of the things That are great for solutions Are actually going to be really good For product launches I'll give you a great example Product launch it's typical To kind of keep things quiet All the way up until the end All the collateral and the training Comes together at the end And you do a big splash And then you launch the product In a solution market it's much better To grease the market with proofs of concept It's much better to grease the market With customer proof points and references Well it seems to me like Going out and doing that with products Would be really beneficial too Let's do it earlier As opposed to waiting until Our launch date So I think we're going to learn A lot of really cool stuff It's going to be hard work And we go back and figure out How to leverage it on the product side The combination of two is like One in one equals three So that'll be good Now the challenge is that it's just In the midst of trying to bring on Compellant In the midst of trying to bring on The other acquisitions In the midst of integrating those things To create the better together thing There's just a lot of work to do And you're a 60-ish billion-dollar Revenue company And the PC business represents What percent of that? I think it's about half About half of that So you're still The enterprise business then Is 30 billion Takes a lot to move the needle Well the needle That's an interesting comment Because that is a challenge And if I look at it At the standpoint of solutions marketing My team comes to the table With solution concepts And we look at the market Where the opportunities are Where Dill can be successful Where the market needs differentiation Etc To move the needle On a 60 billion-dollar company Is a lot bigger than to move the needle On a 30 billion-dollar company But even on a 30 billion-dollar company Just looking at the enterprise part of it Moving the needle is a lot Yes it is And so the bar is way up here My personal opinion is that you make You move the needle with a lot Of smaller opportunities I mean if you look at the acquisitions we've made They're very sophisticated organizations That do, you know When we pick them up in the 150 to Maybe just south of 200 million dollars a year I mean that in and of itself To me is representative of the type of needle That you want to make and then scale it out So you've got very significant growth Like we did with Equalogic Where it starts out at 140 million But within four years it's a billion-dollar business Now that's great, you bring Dill's scale to it But you've got to realize I think And be realistic that you're starting smaller You're going after markets that are 100 million a piece In terms of accessible revenue And then you scale out from there Personally Well listen, it has been great having you on Appreciate the perspective Good advice for start-ups Who want to partner with Dell And good insight into those sort of directions We do have our SDK as an example On the DX object store Is posted online On our Dell partner site Partners can register And we have a full team of people That will engage with them To make sure that their hands are held And that we do the business case assessments Technology integrations go well As we move forward this ecosystem Really becomes a data management And optimization ecosystem So eventually I hope to see Some sort of compelling position From Dell where we'll encourage The development of new capability Because once you can use Metadata richness With content Eliminate complexities of having To manage constantly the association Between the app layer and the storage device You can really bring features To market that can be compelling For customers in terms of unleashing Value that's in data So I think we'll see a whole new set Of investment around data management Types of features that we don't even know Today and so I'd like our team To be a part of it as well as our channel Partners and customers so I look forward to maybe talking to you guys Again in the future Absolutely, thank you so much Have a great one