>> Dave: From around the globe, its theCUBE.
With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World,
Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies.
>> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World,
The Digital Experience, in 2020.
I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to welcome back
one of our alumni on theCUBE.
Joining me is Gil Shneorson,
the SVP of the edge portfolio strategy
and execution for Dell Technologies.
Gil it's great to see you even virtually.
>> It's great to see you again Lisa.
>> It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World
if I didn't get a chance to talk to you,
we didn't have you on theCUBE.
So we appreciate, and you are very socially distant for me.
I am in California, you are in Israel,
so we're following guidelines.
But one of the other things that's changed
since I've last seen you is you're now in this new role
with respect to edge.
Tell me a little bit about that.
>> Well, a few months ago, the Dell Technologies Management
asked me to look after Edge Strategy and Execution,
and they put me in Israel to execute on the strategy
that has been developed for a while.
Look at the market, looking at the opportunity
and also, you know, based on where I came from
with VxRail, looking at similar concept
that could be implemented across the board.
And so here I am today, in the process of setting up a team
that would help the company
to capture that future opportunity.
>> Well, congratulations on that.
So we've been talking about The Edge for a while.
It isn't anything new, but talk to us about what's going on
from Dell Technologies' perspective.
What are some of the things that you're seeing
with respect to the value that The Edge will provide
to businesses in any industry?
>> You're right, Edge is not new.
We've been at The Edge all of us, the industry,
definitely Dell Technologies forever.
What's different is that for the last few years,
a lot of the applications that are there
to capture information and make real time decisions
have been in data centers or in the cloud
and we used to connect all sorts of sensors directly
to those data senders or clouds.
Well, now we have too much information.
That information is very costly to move.
It takes time to move it,
sometimes you don't want to move it to a cloud
or even your own data center.
And so the industry is starting to move more and more
compute storage networking towards the edge.
So it's nothing new, but you know, there's use cases.
Some of them are all use cases that need to migrate
towards where the data is created.
It would be a manufacturing plant, or a retail store,
or a minor or utility company.
And there are new use cases that are just being enabled
by technology, or by better connectivity,
computer vision, you know, it used to be there in the store.
There was a point of sale
while now where there's a self checkout
sometimes where they front detection capability.
So all of those present a fairly drastic change
where some expectation as at 75% of the world's data
is created outside of the traditional data center
or a cloud by 2025.
And that's why we need to be working
towards being the best choice for our customers
for their edge applications.
>> So, yeah, you quoted Gartner saying that 75%
of that cloud enterprise data or the enterprise data
is going to be processed outside the formal data center
or the cloud by 2025, as you said,
that's in five short years,
hopefully short years when we return to normal.
So tremendous amount of change going on,
but do you want us to talk about some new use cases?
I'm just curious since the world has so dramatically changed
since we last saw you in person,
are any of those use cases driven by the pandemic
and how many businesses have had to pivot so quickly
and change their way of operating?
>> Well, that's a very good example
of how edge applications are being leveraged.
Obviously computer vision, thermal imaging,
in some places though, that's a very loaded term,
you know, some social distancing applications
are being created around the world.
The world has a new way to respond to this pandemic.
But this pandemic, you know, will hopefully go soon,
go away soon when we get a vaccine.
But even day to day has changed.
We do more in a digital manner.
We leverage more sensors
and all sorts of electronic fillers out there.
You know, I talked to an agriculture company recently
that have a robot that looks at their plants every day
and decides which one are healthy, and which one are sick,
and what to do about it.
They've a robot that follows the other one and takes action
and I suggested that they should have another robot
to just eat the fruits and, you know,
none of us would be required anymore.
But(Lisa laughing) the point is
a lot of new applications(chuckles)
are being created because we can.
And that requires realtime decision making
and that's why compute and storage and networking
are moving towards where the data is created
and hence the growth in edge applications as we see them.
>> That real time implication is absolutely critical
and that's something that businesses,
whether it's agricultural, or construction,
or retail for example in manufacturing
that needs that real time insight.
We talk about that all the time.
We also talk about the term, you know,
businesses need to get actionable insights from data.
And that's one of those terms like data-driven,
that can mean multiple different things.
From Dell Technologies perspective,
enabling a business to get actionable insights from data.
What does that mean from Dell Tech's perspective
and how is the edge a facilitator of that?
>> Well, I think we need to look at our value and our focus,
which is in the infrastructure on there.
And so if somebody has information created at the edge,
they would have their own way to analyze that data.
Sometimes it's going to be people,
data scientists with another DevOps application.
Many times more and more, it's going to be machines
through machine learning that will analyze the situation
and make recommendations.
Either way, this environment needs to be up and running.
It needs to be resilient.
It needs to be outside of the data center,
which presents a lot of challenges.
It's, you know, fragmented technology
that is moving from different places to the edge
in multiple physical and environmental constraints,
those environments are remote and distributed,
it's not in your data center,
which means that you need to make sure
that you have reliable service and support.
You also need to secure it better.
Suddenly there is more entry points
of things that people could touch
and create problems for the organization.
So our job, in my opinion, is to solve those problems,
is to say, "Look, you know, you need to move
towards the edge to analyze your data, to make decisions.
We are here to solve that problem and allow you to do this
without making a significant trade off, you know,
versus doing it in your own data center or in the cloud."
>> Yeah I was talking to one of Dell Technologies' customers
the other day, who has tens of thousands of sensors
and cameras all over the world.
They do great work there, and I was thinking
all of the challenges with respect
to the environmental implications or right?
Physical implications, and I'm just thinking, you know,
of the businesses doing edge in California
in the last month would have been very challenged
with things like the smoke.
How do you help organizations to enable that infrastructure
to be reliable under different physical
and environmental conditions?
>> That's a great question and I will just say
before I answer specifically,
that while the physical constraints
are something that we usually talk about
when we talk about the edge,
I actually think that the bigger problem is management.
But we are not unaware for the physical requirements.
So we are busy delivering ruggedized, short depth servers.
We just launched recently the XR2 platform,
highly ruggedized, short depth Mil-Spec server
that can go from minus celsius to 55 celsius in temperature.
Or, you know, the ability to connect those through,
you know, software defined networking.
Or if I talk about a little bit of my heritage
taking the same XR2 with the VMware vSAN, VxRail stack
and putting it out there as a ruggedized,
but also remotely managed in full stack solution.
So you will see us putting out and have been, you know,
different form factors, front and serviceability,
different temperature ranges, different kinds of CPUs,
all of those, but I will also tell you
that we're going to focus heavily on the way to manage those
and secure them and update them.
Because I think that's where the simplification comes,
not just from the form factor of themselves.
>> Yeah that has been the heterogeneous
and very widely distributed nature of the edge
has been a barrier for businesses for quite a while.
Can you unpack that a little bit more
in terms of the simplification of the management.
How is Dell Technologies and going to enable a business
to achieve that?
>> Well, let's start with what we have out there
in the market today.
Somebody could have a cloud native application developed,
you know, maybe even all containerized
and they could run it on Tanzu TKG on the VxRail,
and they could run it in thousands of locations
around the world, centrally managing all of those.
And with the form factors being, you know,
regular server or ruggedized server,
the ability to run your edge application
as an extension of your cloud model is also very important.
Getting to consistent operations.
So for example, somebody is using VMware cloud foundation
in their data center could leverage
the recently large capability
of multicloud multi cluster manager.
So now you have a central VMware cloud foundation
managing multiple cluster out there.
And so we bring together the physical attributes
and the management attributes all at the same time.
If you expand on that, I also think
that there will have to meet customers where they are,
with the ability to simplify
and automate solutions for their choice of applications,
where they are today.
And so that's what we're going to be working towards.
>> So when you're talking with customers
who are either looking to expand their edge operations,
simplify them like you were just talking about,
or even those businesses that are looking to explore
and exploit the edge for operational improvement
and maybe being able
to deliver a better customer experience,
I'd love to know how you approach those different customers.
For example, I know that Dell says
don't consider the edge a separate problem.
>> That's true, and I don't think
I sort of look at the edge as a separate problem either.
In other words, the most conversations today
would look at an architecture
that has some cloud and some edge.
That cloud could be at their own hybrid cloud solution
in a data center,
or a hyperscaler solution that they're running on.
If you think about the most generic problem at the edge,
it's an analytics problem, right?
So we know.
So we know that data is created at the edge,
it's going to be analyzed by definition
if you know about machine learning, for example,
parts would happen at the edge,
part would happen in the data center or in the cloud.
If you look at any other type of analytics,
you'll make some real time decisions,
but save some of the information back in the cloud.
So it's not a separate decision anymore.
It's got to be somehow connected to your infrastructure.
And I think that also lends to more and more organizations
are putting together the OT, what we call it,
operational technology and the IT,
and they're trying to leverage IT best practices
in the OT space.
And I think that's how they're coming together.
You have to transform,
you need to do something with the data.
You look at a new architecture,
and IT brings that cloud or hybrid cloud,
or distributed compute architecture
into those more traditional environments.
>> Talk to me a little bit about that.
We've (indistinct)
and we've talked about the IT-OT convergence
and relationships in the past many times on the queue,
but that's an essential component here
so that not only can a business really face those barriers,
confront them and eliminate them,
but it's also sometimes a bit culturally challenging.
What do you see when you talk with customers
and you recognize that's one of the things
that they need to do is align IT and OT.
What's your recommendations there?
>> First of all is I always wonder
if OT people know we're calling them OT people.
I certainly know that IT people are identified as IT people.
I think OT people are head of engineering,
head of production, you know, they run their businesses
and they've been doing things...
And it's not like they haven't been doing even the analysis,
nothing really is new here,
but they would use the machine manufacturer,
on-prem solution or a cloud solution to manage specific.
So solutions were more bespoke, more specific
(mumbles) specific machines, specific problems.
The advent of edge computing
and those environments moving closer to the edge
and the architecture enabled to consolidate,
by the way, one of the strength that Dell Technology has.
And so instead of just solving a, I don't know,
machine maintenance schedule or improvement in a plant,
we can have an environment that solves that
and possibly the video surveillance
and maybe they have plant ERP,
there is no need anymore to solve any problem specifically
with a specific solution.
That's where IT comes in,
because that's what IT has been doing for a long time.
So that conversation, that bridge
between solving a specific problem
and putting together an architecture
that could consolidate multiple use cases
and be part of an overall cloud,
or data center to its strategy
is very helpful for both sides because it's very effective.
I think more and more customers are realizing that
and those conversations are happening
and IT is being pulled in to recommend a solution.
And I think in fact, there's some research
that shows that that is happening
and that sets us up to have the right conversation
with the right owners in those accounts.
>> That's excellent, but that brings up another question.
I heard, you mentioned the word bespoke a minute or so ago,
and I thought, you know, so many of the edge deployments,
there's complexity there, there might be unique requirements
depending on the business, depending on vertical,
what's Dell Technologies approach
to tackling the edge consistently like,
they are the top three things that you go to
with every opportunity, every deployment
that you know these three things fundamentally
must be part of the foundation.
>> I think we touched on those.
I think the recognition
that it's part of a larger strategy is one.
So it's got to be playing along in that strategy,
that data center to edge or cloud to edge strategy.
The other one is the management that you put in place.
And so, by the way, even a few things
that we are gap today,
which is why we are investing in the edge.
Like the ability to provision, you know, with zero touch,
simplifying that experience.
Though we are very good at (indistinct)
for example, which is the next thing.
So it's that consistent separation between core and edge,
which is very important.
It's the physical constraints that have to be addressed
and I think more important than anything
is the ability to get support
because you can't be everywhere
that is considered for you as an edge.
You need somebody to be there Intel, you know,
there's people almost everywhere around the world
that can be there on a short notice
to take care of problems.
Moreover, many of our technologies dial home.
And so we know when things happen even before they do.
So I think sometimes people mentioned enterprise grade,
it's a very important consideration to look at those edge.
Sometimes people think that edge is small
and possibly not as
requiring as a data center application, in my opinion,
the workloads that are now going to the edge
require enterprise grade treatment end to end.
And so, you know, it's the management,
it's the physical environment and the support
that you may require that are very common.
>> Excellent, thank you.
So last question for you,
since we don't get to do a physical
Dell Technologies World this year,
hopefully we will again, one day soon,
I want to know in this new role,
what you're excited about with respect to edge
when you're engaging with customers,
presumably over a video conferencing,
what are some of the things that you see
that you're really excited about,
say for the next like 12 months?
>> Well, from a business perspective,
clearly the pendulum is swinging our way
in the sense that customer need what we have
which is very nice 'cause you can solve customer problems
with (mumbles) experience, in an amazing portfolio,
though it has some gaps that we're going to work on,
which is why we're investing.
From a personal standpoint, it's kind of a rare opportunity
to touch real life things, if that makes any sense.
Every conversation is about tangible things that people do.
They manufacture, they save lives, they are growing plants.
It has a very physical element
that makes it so much more interesting.
And also, the edge is the one area that we deal with
that has a pun almost in every sentence.
So you can go for in a conversation without anybody
or (indistinct)(laughing)
>> Can you give us a pun now?
Let's end there with a great pun about the edge.
>> (laughing) So, well no,
I'm just thinking, maybe I'm living on the edge,
who knows?
>> Ooh, nice.
Yeah living on the edge.
I think that's what we're all doing during this COVID-19.
Well Gil, it's been so great to have you back on theCUBE,
thank you for your time I look forward to seeing you
hopefully at the next event in person.
>> I hope so too Lisa,
good to see you. >> Likewise.
For Gil Shneorson, I am Lisa Martin,
you're watching theCUBE's coverage
of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience.