>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World
brought to you by Dell.
>> Good morning.
Welcome to day two of theCube at Dell Technologies World
live from the Venetian in Las Vegas.
Lisa Martin, with John Farrier and Dave Nicholson.
Guys lot of momentum yesterday, the vibe was amazing.
We think there's about 8,000 people here,
announcements yesterday, a lot going on with multi cloud,
with partners, with customers.
John, we got Michael Dell coming on in just about
15-20 minutes.
>> Yep. The keynotes getting out
people are starting to come in.
You can see them flowing through the hallway.
Michael Dell will be on about 15 minutes
and we're going to ask him every year
when they have theCube here,
we're going to have room with questions around
digital transformation,
security is the hot thing obviously here,
data and what's up with Dell?
So we'll see what he's going to say?
>> We had some really good interviews yesterday.
We had customers on, we had partners
and the overall sentiment was people are very excited about,
the momentum that Dell is coming off from FY '22
of first time hitting north of a hundred billion,
first time in the company's history.
The partner ecosystem expanding,
what their acknowledgement multi cloud is here...
>> The vibe was good.
The partners are excited.
Lot of opportunity.
>> Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing story here
this year is that,
VMware's not part of Dell Technologies World,
although there is some stuff kind of connecting them
together in terms of ownership,
but it's still now on its own.
So that's a key development that's happened,
since we were last here in person.
But the digital transformation train
continues to go down the tracks
and it's getting better and better and better.
And for, in terms of what is happening,
but there's still more complexity at the edge.
That's something that's important,
and security more than ever is important on a global stage.
But also the cyber attacks are going up.
Ransomware has essentially become so standard
everyone needs a solution.
So everyone's pivoting to endpoint protection,
zero trust, and ransomware has been...
You see the storage vendors go that way.
So its a big trend.
A lot of people go in there and they need it too,
'cause ransomware is very dangerous.
So, and then obviously cyber all over the world is huge.
So, you know, Dell plays a role in that.
They'll have a lot of gear
and I think the edge story is developing nicely.
>> Yeah, you talked about ransomware.
I was reading some stats recently
that there's one attack every 11 seconds.
That organizations now
it's not a matter of are we going to get hit?
It's when?
>> Yeah.
>> And I think I read a stat the other day
that said 75% of organizations will be hit
by at least one cyber attack by 2025,
which is around the corner.
So security is that board level
front and center conversation,
and we saw a lot of that
with what they were announcing just yesterday alone.
>> Yeah, and to me the cybersecurity issue
is just also a political one.
The adversaries can play with open source
and the threats are real.
The threat factors are increasing
and there's no perimeter as everyone knows that in security,
and you start to see data being protected.
So now you've got data protection is changing,
that's big for Dell.
You know, they have a huge footprint of disaster recovery
and data protection.
And so, that becomes a really key point for
protecting the data in flight,
data engineering is a hot trend.
So data as code has become huge.
You're seeing that in all the digital applications,
the role of data is becoming more and more.
>> Absolutely. We talked a lot Dave about edge yesterday
and especially, particularly in retail,
and a lot of the massive transformation and the pressure
that retail is under, you know,
as consumers, we bring this,
we want the online experience in the connected store.
And so they talked a lot about what they're doing
with respect to edge at the retail yesterday
and in financial services.
Really interesting.
What are some of your thoughts
on the direction that Dell's going?
>> So I've been taking a little bit of a different angle
on this since I've been here,
prowling around looking under the covers
to get an understanding of the advances in hardware
that are driving the top line value proposition.
So here, it's appropriate to talk about things like
retail at the edge and the experience that
that delivers to an end user customer,
Dell is still doing, however,
the really hard work of optimizing systems on the back end,
the stuff that a lot of people would say
they don't care about.
The idea is Dell makes sure that this development happens,
so people at the edge don't have to care about it.
So, that's the thing that I find fascinating,
being a kind of an old school hardware guy myself,
is that all these really cool things
aren't getting talked about
because we don't need to talk about them
because Dell has it handled.
So whether it's retail, whether it's advances in security,
they're all driven by highly optimized and tuned hardware.
You mentioned partners,
partnerships that Dell has behind the scenes
are critical to all of that.
>> I mean, I think the big thing about Dell too
is they have a co-chairman,
they have Chuck Whitten, a co-chief operating officer,
Jeff Clark, Chuck Whitten's new (indistinct),
and you got two to co-COO's.
>> Right?
>> Right. So you got a fledging company, Dell's growing.
And the big question is M and A.
Dave and I were talking about that last night
with a bunch of folks in the hallway
about who does Dell buy?
Do they need to buy anyone?
And again, hardware is back.
I mean, you look at what we talked about yesterday
in our wrap up, day one was essentially,
hardware's becoming more important.
And even at Amazon ReInvent when we recovering that show
role of silicon plays a huge role.
Now, they run hardware in the cloud.
So we all know hardware,
is just servers somewhere in the cloud there.
So I think hardware is going to be huge David,
because, you know, edge needs more smaller, faster, cheaper,
boxes to sit and co-load, Equinox was on yesterday.
You're seeing like 5G edges deploying.
So I think hardware is going to matter.
I think you'll see the home become much more device centric,
smarter devices.
So smart city, smart homes, hardware matters more than ever.
>> Yeah, yeah.
Well, and from an acquisition perspective,
who knows maybe Dell would acquire VMware.
Crazier things have happened.
>> Or VMware could acquire Dell.
>> Oh yeah, crazier things have happened.
(all laugh)
>> Dave would argue that one.
>> So, the hardware's back again.
It makes me think of that Eminem song "Slim shady".
Think we need to do some sort of parody on that together,
but what does that mean for the partner community?
There are over 200,000 partners.
We could talk about, (indistinct), GSI's, data centers,
the hyperscalers, that partnering system.
>> I mean the partner story is I think
more important than ever.
You're seeing more ecosystems develop around companies
that you wouldn't think have ecosystems.
That's because with cloud and now the cloud operating model,
which is on-premise and edge,
you can do piece parts of solutions and the glue layers,
the abstraction layers in software at scale,
are now available.
So it's easier for customers to buy point solutions
or platforms and put them together.
Be it more than ever,
seeing the headless retail, as an example
a trend that's happening.
You're seeing look at in the consumer market,
ghost kitchens, ghost retail.
So you're starting to see delivery,
and so at the consumerization of IT is happening.
You're going to see more and more custom applications
that are taking advantage of stacks that are configured
either on the fly or, you know, multiple partners.
So I think you're going to see, the big players like AWS,
Microsoft, Dell have real big ecosystem players
and that's going to be a huge trend continuing.
>> So today Michael Dell is coming on in just minutes.
Chuck Whitten is also on, Jeff Clark.
What are some of the things that you really want to dig into
with these guys John?
>> Well the big thing I want to ask him is how their strategy
and operations fit into how their customers are consuming.
Dell's got a huge customer base.
I want to find out how their solutions are being
operationalized by the customers.
And that's going to be coming, poking at the cloud a little bit
and see how real that's going.
Apex has been very popular.
The security story.
I also want to ask about the changing workforce,
because the IT departments of the old,
those folks are aging out.
So a new generation of IT is coming together,
and I think those folks want things easy, push button,
easy button, dashboards.
They've never, maybe not even racked a server before,
so completely different new generation.
And I see how that impacts the, how they make products.
>> Good point.
We saw some of that in the keynote this morning
they were showing some of the gaming opportunities.
Dave and I were in there this morning
and what they're doing for that,
and the gamers are all very excited about that.
But the connected home was something
that they were talking about.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
Who knew you could make a track pad on a laptop,
more exciting.
It's I mean, it's brilliant.
They, you know, controls for, you know
for a home video conferencing built in it.
It just shows that, again, kind of at that hardware level
where people think, ah, doesn't matter.
No, there's a lot of room for innovation there.
And back to the discussion of around partners,
much like the big cloud players depend upon
systems integrators out in the marketplace
in order to deliver these solutions to end user customers,
the channel's going to be incredibly important.
And I know that Dell is putting a lot of effort
behind that right now.
That's pretty clear.
>> Yep.
>> Yeah.
>> We've seen a lot of that.
So exciting stuff today..
I mentioned the three guys,
three only of the many folks
that are coming on the show today.
We've got Allison Dew tomorrow,
some other happy hitters.
Guys, looking forward to great day two full coverage.
Stay with us.
We've got a lot of content coming at you from theCube
live from the show floor of Dell technologies World 2022,
from the Venetian in Las Vegas, stick around.
Michael Dell will be up next with John and Dave.
(gentle music)