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>> Welcome back to, "theCUBE's" coverage
of Dell Tech World 2022.
My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here in our CUBE studios
in Massachusetts getting ready
for the first in-person DTW since 2019.
You know, Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor,
and former Oracle exec once said on, "theCUBE,"
"Friends don't let friends build data centers anymore."
It's just not the best use of capital for most companies
unless you happen to be in the data center
business like Cyxtera.
Organizations want to make hybrid connections to the cloud.
They need a partner that knows how to build
and manage world-class data centers
that are both efficient and resilient.
And in this segment, we're going to talk
about the importance of hybrid strategies for organizations,
how they're approaching hybrid, and why a partner strategy
is important to support the next decade
of digital transformation initiatives.
And with me are Randy Roland, who's the COO of Cyxtera,
and Holland Barry who is the field CTO for the company.
Gentlemen welcome to "theCUBE," thanks for coming on.
>> Thank you.
>> Good to be here. Thanks for having us.
>> Hey, Randy's a relatively new player.
Unlike a lot of data center operators, Cyxtera,
you're not shackled by decades of technical debt.
Tell us more about the company.
>> Yeah, so as you already discussed, Cyxtera is a data
center company, and we're one of the few provides
that can provide colocation globally.
And so that allows our customers to scale across the globe.
As our business scales, we operate in 28 markets.
We have over 60 data centers and we continue
to add more dots to the map based on customer demand.
And the primary way we differentiate is that we've built
a true global data center platform, and what do I mean
by that is that we have a combination of 2300 customers,
enterprises, technology service providers,
government agencies.
We're a leader in interconnection.
We have a commitment to carry neutrality and to provide
low latency access to all the different cloud platforms.
And we've made major investments in developing
our own technology in house, and this will come out
as we talk about hybrid cloud is to make our data
centers easier to consume.
We live in a cloud-first world, and so we've got to be able
to be responsive and be able to deliver capacity on demand,
and to allow our customers to dynamically connect
to each other so they can start to consume
these valuable services.
And so that's really what we're doing at Cyxtera.
>> Randy, just a follow up is because
when the cloud-first came out everybody said,
"Oh, companies like yours,
data center operations are toast."
And the exact opposite happened.
It was like this rising tide lifted all boats,
the business is booming.
It's actually quite remarkable, isn't it?
>> Yeah, actually it's a good point.
We actually lean into cloud consumption.
I think if you remember, the cloud operates in four walls.
And so when a company actually starts to deploy
and leverage more cloud, they need a place to land
their digital infrastructure hub where they can make
connections to all the different cloud solutions
they're going to consume, and they're using their own internal
resources at the same time.
And so the more that we adopt cloud and lean into cloud
the more likely our customer is going to choose us.
And back to your opening comment about
the quote from the Oracle executive, in my career
I've been in the data center business for a long time,
and it's definitely a generational thing.
We have newer generation of IT leaders, when they think
about their internal data center,
their actual internal data center is ours.
They're not thinking about their own four walls
sitting on their own property like they did historically.
And so they view internal data centers as the contracts
they have with Cyxtera companies like Cyxtera.
>> Excellent.
All right, Holland, let's bring you into the conversation.
What are you seeing with hybrid cloud strategies?
Why are companies choosing hybrid? Give us some color there.
>> Yeah, I think, we as a company sit in an interesting
confluence of some workload movements, if you will.
So I think there's been, in some cases
an overcorrection in the public cloud,
people thought that a cloud-first strategy meant
that you have to throw everything up in a public cloud,
especially over the last couple years when we had
the surprise of a large remote workforce.
And as you mentioned at the top of the call, Dave,
we also have folks with the shrinking appetite
to own and operate their data centers, right?
So the hybrid approach is a selective methodology
to really look at the applications, look at the strengths
of each one of those venues where you can run
your applications and workloads and really choosing
the one that uses the strengths.
And there's several of drivers behind that.
Some of them are cost.
Some of them are performance.
Some of them might have to do a security
or data sovereignty.
So you can really match those requirements
and those business outcomes that you're looking to achieve
and align them with that platform
that's best suited to serve it.
>> So you mentioned a few of them,
but I want to sort of stay on that for a minute.
Is it egress cost?
Everybody talks about that, latency, proximity to the cloud.
I mean, I think there's a lot of times, I think the ideal
situation is you put your high performance,
transaction, low latency stuff, in one of your data centers
and, a lot of the data is in the cloud that you might need
access to, but is there other innovation?
Talk a little bit more about the drivers
that you're seeing with customers.
>> Absolutely.
I think as it relates to data gravity,
and the potential relation to egress charges
that is a huge consideration 'cause there's a cost
and a performance component to that.
If you decide you want to take that data,
and move somewhere else, if it's in the public cloud,
you're going to pay some pretty large egress fees,
but there's certainly other drivers,
performance being another big one.
If I've got a data lake or our big data analytics platform
or maybe an AI platform that needs to live close
to the data, and especially if those workloads
that are associated with crunching the data
are kind of high steady-state, maybe even mission-critical
workloads that is certainly a workload profile
that's better suited to run within our four walls.
You can have those CPU or GPU compute nodes
sitting right next to those large data sets,
operating with each other at land speed.
So in terms of the drivers behind making a venue change,
if you will, I think cost is one of the biggest ones
that we see, and maybe performance and security
following close after.
>> So, how are customers approaching hybrid?
Can you paint a picture of kind of what
that connection looks like and how they land
on their strategies?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So they're doing what I like to call
a workload appropriateness exercise.
And as they think about recalibrating where those workloads
live, exactly what I said before, they're looking
at the strengths of the platform, and lining up
those application profiles to live in the appropriate place.
We have a unique advantage because of our interconnection
profile, and our adjacency to public cloud platforms,
where if people want to have application tiers that maybe
some on both sides of the fence, if you will,
we have super, super low latency connections.
You can connect, layer two, maybe out to AWS,
and have your VPC on one side, have dedicated single-tenant
environments on our side, and have those applications
interact with each other in a super low latency fashion.
>> Hey, let me just ask a follow-up question on that
because I remember the Y2K days,
there was a lot of activity, a lot of spending,
and then CIOs wanted to look at their portfolio
and rationalize that portfolio.
When you talk about workload appropriateness,
are you seeing a similar application rationalization
exercise going on or is it just a, hey keep spending?
>> Absolutely, we're seeing rationalization.
And I think what's happening is folks are getting
a little more savvy about forecasting the growth
of their application, the growth of the data
associated with it, what the cost may be associated
with needing to move them around to different venues.
And so we're definitely seeing people look
at those numbers and make decisions
about workload placement based on that analytics,
and kind of knowledge of what it means down the road,
and also where the data might need to live locally too.
We're seeing people being a little more cognizant
geographically around data where it lives
and how that relates to where the computer
associated with that data is.
>> Yeah, it makes sense.
Hey Randy, can you tell us a little bit more
from a business perspective about the Dell partnership?
How did that come about? Who does what?
What are the swim lanes, overlaps?
Maybe you can help us understand that.
>> Yeah, so we're very excited about our Dell partnership.
As you can imagine, with as many customers,
and many data centers, as we've got deployed,
we have Dell located in a large percentage
of our customer environments.
And so it's just natural that we work together to figure
out how we can continue to meet our customer's needs.
And so the core idea that I'm excited about around Dell
is that Dell has an excellent technology platform
on all fronts.
They've got great compute and storage
and all types of software solutions.
And what we want to do is help them make
their platform more on-demand.
And so what do I mean by that?
If you think about the historical time
it takes to deploy a traditional colo environment,
from the time you spec the cage till you ship the equipment,
you install the network, you rack and stack the equipment,
unload the cloud stack.
It takes weeks to months to deploy.
And so what we're doing is working very closely
with Dell to look at our existing customers
and new prospects that are interested
in their platform and how can we pre-provision that capacity
in the data center, make it so it's already plugged
into the data center, already is powered up.
It's connected to the network and a customer
can purchase it on demand.
And so the idea behind this is how can we
give our customers all the benefits of colo
which is what Holland was talking about a minute ago,
but deliver that platform at the speed of cloud.
And that's really the essence
of the partnership we have with Dell.
We think it could be explosive.
We think there's a lot of opportunity, not only for us
but also for Dell as they continue to retain
their customers, and their customers
go through tech refresh cycles.
If they can have on-demand technology that they're already
familiar with, they can get the benefits that you get
from colocation at the speed of cloud.
And that's what our, the basis of our relationship.
>> Yeah. Thank you.
So Holland, I mean, Randy was saying, one of the pillars
of Dell Tech World this year
is the whole as a service thrust.
And essentially what it is, my viewpoint
is Dell's building out its own cloud.
It's aspiration, I think, is to connect on-prem to,
through hybrid, to public clouds, across clouds
out to the edge, you extract that, all that complexity
and you guys would be a key part of that.
From a CTO's perspective, that's a different mindset.
I mean, it changes the way we manage, think about, procure,
spend, and maybe that even the technical configurations
of how we deliver and consume IT.
Can you give us some thoughts on that?
>> Absolutely.
Look, I think what we're doing is we're laying
the foundation for a truly hybrid experience.
Randy mentioned us going through great lengths
with our technology partners like Dell
to make the data center consumable in an automated fashion.
And so as we increasingly move into technologies
like containers and using coordinators,
managers like Kubernetes, we really now have the ability
to make a true hybrid experience.
And if you think about the experience of deploying
in the data center, whether it's your own
or a co like ours, that was a 60 to 90-day conversation
to get that infrastructure spun up.
And so now if you can consume public cloud resources,
just like we're really used to doing,
where you can swipe a card and get access to infrastructure
in a matter of minutes or hours,
have the same experience with us,
we've kind of closed that last mile
of infrastructure delivery.
And the other neat thing about this is if you have a cloud
first mandate, if some of those workloads are running
into Cyxtera data center,
we check all those same boxes, right?
We have infrastructure that sits OpEx.
We have a global platform.
We have highly automated environment.
So you can really now start attracting yourself
a little bit from the infrastructure,
and start focusing on the important stuff
which the applications that sit on top.
>> So from a security standpoint, do you have a similar,
the cloud guys talk about the shared responsibility model,
is that a similar model that you guys have?
Can you describe that?
>> Yeah, it's very analogous to the shared responsibility
model in public cloud.
We give a little bit more control to our customers,
like things like we don't dictate maintenance windows,
we give a little bit more control
in terms of access to the infrastructure.
It's one of the reasons that organizations
like running infrastructure with us is because we can hand
off control to these certain things that the lower levels
of the infrastructure stack versus that higher level
of abstraction that happens with public cloud.
>> And what kind of skills are you after these days?
Is it people that can squeeze more power
and more efficient cooling?
Is it infrastructure management?
You mentioned Kubernetes before.
What matters to a company like yours
from a skill standpoint?
>> Yeah, in terms of our staff, it is at the lower levels
of the stack, if you will.
So maybe going up to layer two or three
if we think about the OSI model.
So certainly power engineering, cooling engineering,
the stuff that physically runs our data center,
that's our meat and potatoes, that's what's important to us.
But as you consider our digital platform
certainly, a networking know how knowledge of the entire
stack, knowing how things are architected,
understanding how cloud works,
understanding how cloud connectivity works.
These are all super, super important skillsets.
So we span the spectrum a bit, but it's less on the upper
ends of it, kind of going up to layer seven
>> Although I'd imagine that data center automation
is obviously a big part of your IP, right?
Is that something that you could guys
bring to the table, yes?
>> Yeah, it's actually one of our key innovations
is around how we've architected our software platform,
how we do our automation, how we run our network.
We've built a super, super innovative SDN fabric
that powers all of our metro regions that enables
the delivery of the infrastructure that hangs off of it.
So yeah, a huge percentage of our IP is around that software
innovation and that networking automation.
>> Great.
Randy, I wonder if you could close it out for us.
I'd love your thoughts on where you'd like to see
the Dell partnership go and any other information
you'd like to leave the audience with.
>> Yeah, I think you've asked a couple questions
about the perspective from a CTO, and the way that we want
to build our solutions is if you are a CTO
or if you're a cloud architect, what we are trying to build
is a set of LEGOs to allow you to assemble
your ultimate hybrid IT solution, to use a combination
of traditional colocation where you have equipment
that you own, that you manage, on-demand, bare metal
from great partnerships, like where we have with Dell
that can augment what you have in colo, have access
to a rich ecosystem of technology providers that sit
in the same data center markets so that you can start
to actually augment your IT architecture
with a lot of our solution providers that sit
within our markets, access to cloud OnRamp,
so you get low latency access to public cloud
and start to leverage some of the technologies they have,
and also have the ability to switch, right?
If you start with one cloud provider,
and at some point, you find something more cost-efficient
or a little bit more architecturally built
that we can facilitate that switch.
And then also to have connectivity
to all the different network carriers that we have.
And so, and also to do it globally, right?
And so our mission is to give the CTO
and the cloud architect, the ultimate set of LEGOs
to build their custom solution that highly cost-effective,
and meets all the technology requirements.
>> Yeah, hedging that risk and having exit strategies
I think is huge, every customer needs to think about that
before they (laughs) dive into the cloud.
Okay, guys, we got to leave it there.
Thanks so much for coming in, "theCUBE."
Great discussion.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you.
Thanks driving us.
>> And thank you for watching our ongoing coverage
of Dell Technologies World 2022.
The in-person live version where we insert great deep-dive
interviews like this one that focus on key customer topics.
Keep it right there, you're watching, "theCUBE."
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