>> theCube presents Dell Technologies World
brought to you by Dell.
>> Welcome back to Las Vegas.
We're here in the Venetian Convention Center.
My name is Dave Vellante.
I'm here with my co-host John Furrier.
You're watching theCube's live coverage
of Dell Tech World 2022.
Great crowd I would say 7,000, maybe even 8,000 people,
when you add in all the peripheral attendees.
Jeff Clarke is here.
He's the vice chairman and co-chief operating officer
of Dell Technologies.
Great to see you face to face man.
>> Hey guys. Good to see you again.
>> Awesome.
>> So really enjoyed your keynote this morning.
>> Thank you.
>> You were pumped up.
I thought the presentations and the demos were crisp,
so congratulations.
>> Thank you.
>> How are you feeling?
>> Doing a great job?
How am I feeling?
Well one relieved, if you know me well enough,
I'm an engineer by heart.
So trade the anxiety to do that is,
and build up is quite draining, but having it done
I feel pretty good now.
But I feel good about what we discussed.
It was a fun day to be able to talk to real customers
and partners face to face like we're doing here,
and showcasing what we've been doing.
I must admit that was a little bit of fun.
>> Yeah well, we're chilling on theCube,
we're laid back as you know,
what was your favorite moment?
'Cause you got a lot of highlights.
The snowflake deal we love,
been talking about it all show.
The IP of Dell with Software-Defined was pretty cool.
Lots of great stuff.
What's, what.
>> Some cool laptop stuff too.
That was interesting.
You know, I have to, where's the share button?
>> By the we have a Discord server now
and all 18,000 people want to know.
>> You're asking me to pick amongst my children
which I like the most.
>> How big is your monitor on your desk?
>> I have a 49 on one side
and a 42 on the other side.
That's what both you guys need.
>> Productivity (indistinct) need some.
>> Well in the world of Zoom, it was incredibly productive
to have that surface area in front of you.
So which of my announcements was my favorite.
I think from a raw technology point of view,
showcasing Dell innovation,
thinking about what we've done in a very differentiated way.
It's hard not to say the Power Flex investment.
>> Look at that.
Look at I wrote just wrote down Power Flex.
>> Yep.
>> Right? Think about it.
Software-Defined, we are the leader in Software-Defined.
infrastructure that can be, think of it as independently
independent ability to scale compute from storage.
So we can linear scale knows no bounds,
unlimited I/O performance.
The ability to put file block, support hypervisors
and bare metal, all on a single platform.
And then we made a bunch of other improvements around it.
It's truly an area where we're a leader.
We're differentiated in our core IP matters.
>> And that's Dell IP, Dell technologies.
>> Top to bottom.
>> Okay, cool.
>> So, from a pure technical point of view
is probably my favorite.
What's not liked about PowerMax,
the most mission critical,
the most secure high end storage system in the world.
And we made it better,
we made it more secure.
We put an isolated vault in it.
We added some multifactor authentication.
We improved the architecture for twice the performance,
50% better response time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Its pretty cool.
And then you got to put a notebook in front of everybody,
where you think about in this modern workplace,
and what we've learned as hybrid users.
What software that we've embedded into that Latitude 9330
was pretty interesting I thought.
And then if I pull day one into the conversation,
sort of the direction of where we're going of Multi-cloud.
The role of Multi-cloud and our ability to be sort
at the center of our customers multi-cloud world.
I loved how Chuck described
moving from multi-cloud by default to multi cloud by design
and then the subsequent architecture that we put behind it.
And then probably cherry on the old cake
was the snowflake announcement
that got a lot of people excited
about bringing a really differentiated
view of cloud based analytics down on our object storage.
I know that was more than one, but I can't help myself.
>> I like the cherry on top of it.
>> You've said a number of times.
I think the number is 85% of your engineers
are software engineers.
You talked about, is that the right number, roughly?
>> Yes Sir.
>> And so, you talked also about 500 new features today
and every time you're talking about those features,
I inferred anyway, it was part of the OS.
A lot of it anyway.
A lot of software, does hardware still matter?
And if so, why?
>> Of course hardware still matters.
>> Explain why.
>> Well, last time I checked,
doesn't the software stuff work on the hardware.
>> Exactly.
>> Doesn't the software things make hardware calls
to exploit the capability we built into the software?
Of course it does.
It says it absolutely does matter.
But I think what we're trying to describe
or to get across today, is we're moving up the stack.
we're adding more value.
Basically our customers are dragging us
into a broader set of problems,
and software is increasingly the answer to that.
Running on the best hardware, the best infrastructure.
Being able to build the right software abstraction
to hook into either data frameworks like a snowflake.
Being able to present our storage assets of software
in the public cloud, ultimately the ability to pull them
and think of it as a pool of storage for developers
to make developers lives easier.
Yeah that's where we're going.
>> And is it accurate in your view.
You're going up the stack, more software content
and there's value that's also flowing into Silicon,
whether it's accelerators or NICs and things like that.
Is that a right way to think about
what's happening in hardware and software?
>> You and I have had a number of conversations Dave
of the evolution of the architecture,
where we're going from a general purpose CPU based thing
to now specialty processors whether that be a smartNIC,
purpose built accelerators.
If we leaped all the way out to quantum,
really purpose built accelerators for a specific algorithm,
there's certainly specialization going on.
And as that happens, more software and software define
is necessary to knit it together.
And we have to be the person that does that.
>> Talk about how the software defined piece
makes the innovation happen on the hardware.
Is it the relationship that it's decoupled
or you guys are just building design Silicon
to make the software better?
'Cause that interplay is a design, is designed in, right?
>> I think it's a little bit of both .
Clearly being able to exploit the underlying
hardware features and capabilities in your software
in a differentiated way is important.
Something we've excelled at for many years.
But then the ability to abstract,
if you think about some of the things that we talk about
as a data fabric or a data plane
and a data plane working across different architectures,
that's an abstracted piece of software that ultimately leads
to a very different solution
and that's where we're driving towards.
>> What's different now,
and what's similar now from the past?
I was just on a panel, talking about space,
Cal Poly in California space symposium
and this hardware and space,
and it's software's driving everything,
you can't do break fix and space.
>> Lets talk about the edge.
>> You can't talk about,
you can't do break hard to do break fix in space.
So you got to rely on software in the supply chain.
Big part of the design.
As software becomes more prevalent
with open source and et cetera,
that innovation equation is designed in.
What's your thoughts on that?
>> Help me understand John, more of this specific
of what you're looking for, where do you want to dive into?
>> As Silicon becomes more efficient,
what does that do for the software
in things like edge for instance,
as the boxes move out and the devices move to the home
they got to be faster, more intelligent, more secure.
Michael says it's a compute tower now, 5G for instance.
>> Yeah maybe another way to look at it.
We've been in the industry a little while.
For the longest time hardware capabilities
were always ahead of software.
We built great hardware, we let software catch up.
What's changed certainly in this time,
and as we look going forward,
is the software capabilities are now ahead
of those very hardware capabilities in bringing it.
And to me that's a very fundamental change
certainly in my 35 years of doing this
that's very different.
And if you believe that continues,
which I do particularly as we face increasingly
more difficult challenges to continue with Moore's law.
How do we continue to build out the transistor density
we've all benefited from for four, five decades now.
Software innovation is going to lead,
which is what we tried to hint at today.
And I think that's the future.
That's where you're going to see us continue to drive.
And think about how we talk about technology today.
I know Dave and I had this conversation not too long ago,
whether it's infrastructure as code.
Who would've thought of that idea a decade ago.
If we think about data as code,
we were talking about before we got on air,
what data on code,
data's little bits one's in zero stored in Silicon
>> You store it, you move it around now.
>> So it opens a door or the door to,
I think innovation done differently.
And perhaps even done at more scale,
as if we abstract it correctly.
>> Yeah and Mike had a good point on it
when he was on about all the good benefits
that come from that and the customer and in society.
And I guess the next question with the customer side
if they take your, if the flip,
if the script is flipping which I believe that it is,
I agree with you.
How does the customers deal with the innovation strategy?
Because now they want to take advantage of the new innovation,
but what problems and opportunities are they facing
that's different now than say a decade ago?
If you're in IT or you're trying to create a greatest group
within your CISO organization,
I'm mean there are problems now that we didn't see before.
What do you, how do you see that?
>> Well I think the biggest change would be again,
if you look and reflect on our careers,
IT was sort of in the business, it played a role.
It was often put off to the corner,
just make the place sort of work.
And today, and I think the pandemic
and global health crisis accelerated this.
Technology is now part of people's business
and you can't compete without technology.
And in fact, we saw it during the early days
of the pandemic, those customer that were further along
on their digital transformation
generally weathered the storm in their sector,
better than those who were behind.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> What does that tell us?
Technology was an enabler.
Technology helped them weather the storm, prepared them,
made them more competitive.
So now I think, I don't meet many CIO and CEOs
who don't have the conversation about their business model
and technology being symbiotic
That they're integrated.
That they can't do one without the other.
That's a very different mindset
than when we grew up in this industry where this stuff was.
So now you take that as a basis.
We got data everywhere.
Most of the data's going to come out of the data,
not in the data center's,
its going to be created outside of the data center.
The attack surface has grown disproportionately.
>> People sharing data too, their data with other data.
>> Very much so.
>> Generating data.
>> In places sometimes they don't know where it is
and hope to get it back.
So the role to be able to protect that estate if you will,
to be able to protect the information
which increasingly data is companies fuel,
what makes them go, how do you protect it?
How do you ultimately analyze it?
How do you provide them the insights
to ultimately run and drive their business?
That's the opportunity.
>> So we were in the same wavelength with Power Flex
and I'm a little concerned about confirmation bias,
but I want to say this,
I really like the way your Dell's language
and your specifically has evolved.
You talk about abstraction layers,
hiding that underlying complexity .
Building value on top of the hyperscalars,
OnPrem connecting.
So we call it super cloud, you guys call it multi-cloud.
We saw two examples of that today,
Project Alpine and the Snowflake.
As early examples, I'm trying to gauge how real this is.
We think it's real.
We talked to customers who clearly say
this is what they want.
I wonder if you could, add a little detail to that,
some color on your thoughts, on how real this is,
how it will evolve over time.
>> Well from our seat in the way that I see it,
in driving our underlying product development roadmaps.
People want to drag into conversation about public and private
and this, and what have you.
And that's not how customers work today.
Customer really have got to this point
where they want to use the best capabilities regardless
of where they lie.
And if that's keeping mission critical data on premise,
taking advantage of analytic tools in the cloud,
doing some test dev in the public cloud,
moving out to the edge,
they want to be able to do that, reasonably quickly and not,
we were talking about this before we got on the air
in an easy fashion, it can't be complex.
So how do you actually knit this together,
in a way that is not complex and enables customers?
That's what I think customers want.
So you think about our multi-cloud vision.
It's about building an ecosystem
across all of the public clouds.
Which we've made announcement and announcement to do that.
>> Well you said earlier, default versus by design
which referencing to the multi-cloud.
But I think the design is the key word here.
The design is a system architecture,
you're talking about,
you said also technology and business models
are tied together and enabler.
>> That's right.
>> If you believe that, then you have to believe that
it's a business operating system that they want.
They want to leverage whatever they can.
And at the end of the day
they have to differentiate what they do.
>> Well that that's exactly right.
If I take that and what Dave was saying
and I summarize it the following way.
If we can take these cloud assets and capabilities,
combine them in an orchestrated way
to deliver a distributed platform, game over.
>> They telling us we got to wrap.
>> Love that.
>> Which is bumming me out because I,
we had so much, we haven't covered,
we haven't talked about 5G.
We really haven't hit on APEX.
What else is exciting you?
Something, you know, let's in the last minute or so,
let's do a rapid fire.
>> We just got started.
>> I know we just got started.
>> We have a schedule.
>> Aren't you guys the boss?
>> He just came over which is great.
We want to go the next.
>> Not when it comes to the schedule, we're not.
>> You just laid out the checkmate move right there.
>> Look what I get excited about.
Edge to me is a domain that we're going to see
in this part of our careers.
Have the same level of innovation in discovery
that we just saw in the early part of our careers
and probably times 1O or times 100.
And I think about the world we live in
and matching up what's happening in this digitization
of our world and everything having a sensor in it,
and collecting data everywhere on everything.
And then being able to synthesize it
in a way that we can derive reasonable insight from,
to be able to make real time decisions from.
Whether that be in healthcare, a smart city, a factory,
the transportation area,
our own website of how the traffic comes in
and how we present our offers more effectively
to what you want,
which are then different than what Dave wants.
The possibilities are unlimited
and more on the top half of the first ending,
if you like baseball analogies
and a long way to go.
And a tremendous amount of innovation that'll happen here.
I get excited about that place.
Now it's not going to happen overnight .
Everyone what's about the edge, wasn't that IoT.
Stop putting a timeframe on it.
>> Yeah I know.
>> The foundation is built to be able to develop and evolve
and innovate from here like I've never seen.
>> And the playbook to get back to your game over comment
is whoever can simplify and reduce the complexity
and make things simpler and easier.
That's I mean, that's kind of the formula
for success basically.
I mean, it sounds kind of easy, right? Like.
>> Spot on.
>> Just do it. Like what, but that's hard.
>> Remember.
>> It's hard.
>> And being able to build data centers
in millions of places.
So for example what we'll (mumbles) in a little 5G,
you think about all of the public cloud data centers today.
I think there's roughly 600 locations.
You've got 7 million cell towers.
>> Yeah.
>> 7 million cell towers.
>> (indistinct) right there.
>> Data center at the edge of the network.
>> Yeah.
>> As we disaggregate the telecom infrastructure
from a monolithic big black box,
into a disaggregated standards based architecture
with virtualization and containerization in it.
>> I mean.
>> How to compute.
>> I love the whole Metro operating model there,
like having that data center at that edge
all that wire wireless coming in.
>> I agree.
>> Pretty impressive.
Powering all the Teslas and all the cars out there,
sending telematics to people's phones and.
>> Let's wait till next time.
>> Wearables.
>> I was going to say next Dell Technology World
choose to have some fun.
>> Jeff Clarke, thanks so much for coming to theCube.
You're awesome guest and congratulations on all the success
and really appreciate your time.
>> Yeah.
>> Thanks for having me.
Thanks for the kind words.
>> All right thank you for watching
this is Dave Vellante, for John Furrier.
Dell Tech World 2022 live, we'll be right back.
You're watching theCube.
>> That was great, man.
You great riff.
(gentle music)