Dell Technologies Power of Three Discussion | Supercloud 5

welcome everyone to the cubes continuing coverage of supercloud 5 the battle for AI Supremacy I'm your analyst and host Rob stretche today I'm joined by Todd Lee vice president Cloud par Partnerships with Dell Allison Johnson who's the senior manager worldwide channels for AWS Marketplace and Raphael merwitz who's the vice president of Technology Solutions and strategic Partnerships for Presidio a partner of both AWS and Dell welcome thanks for having usk you thanks for having me thank you for having us yeah I mean I know Raphael you've been on before and Todd and you know Alison are joining us for the first time so this is great that we're going to get to jump in and really talk about one of my favorite subjects which is really cloud marketplaces where you kind of look at it and say okay this is such a simplistic way to go and get up and running so quickly with the technology but it's always that case of okay now what I've bought it now how do I you know institutionalize it how do I make it part of the corporate standard how do I start to have it as a piece going forward and what are the ways to use that um and you know to that extent let's kind of jump into the AWS Marketplace the relationship that you all have together and let's start with Raphael because I I think kind of the glue between a lot of the isvs and the different solutions providers and you have that relationship with Dell and AWS have been longstanding yeah it's been a fantastic uh Journey with AWS and Dell a d partnership is over 20 years old ad us partnership uh is heing on seven years now and what started out on the AWS side is mostly an engineering partnership has become a very very strategic partnership ship for Presidio we now have over 500 AWS customers that we are providing services for every day to and we have over 3,000 D customers through our history that we provide services to so we like to say as you said we like to say we the glue that basically stitches it together not just from a procurement standpoint of the marketplace but also the engineering that we can provide whether it's on premises or public cloud and we can bring those together yeah I I think that me uh you know again having been on the it side a long time ago in the early 2000s and I always leaned on my service providers to help me understand and because was I was never a you know heter I was always a heterogeneous shop I always had different Technologies in there and I think with Cloud that definitely is true now more more so than ever where you have stuff on Prem you have stuff in the cloud you want to stitch it all together Todd kind of let's break down what the significance of having providers like prido that are partnering with you on your journey as you guys put a lot of stuff into the marketplace yeah so be happy to the first thing though is I like to ask you a question like what do you think of the cloud jacket I I love the cloud okay I think it's fantastic I'm kind of jealous to I had to do something I mean this is his second time on the cube you know I had to show up and at least do something as a rookie so you're rocking it I had to ask it Alison I had to ask it but um you know to your question I think that today more than ever the conversation with customers is about the ecosystem of partners that they use so whether used to be in the data center that ecosystem was like different vendors or whatever on the data center floor it is dramatically broader than that now and so from a Dell perspective to partner with AWS to partner with precidio to bring all of that capability to a customer in conjunction with what Dell already does that's a game Cher right and that is what customers need it's not like what they're looking for it's like what they need to actually be successful so that's how we think about it yeah no I I think when you start to look broader at this and I I think this is where it's key I mean again you can go and get so many different Technologies out of the marketplace uh you know back to you Raphael with with how do you look at it and help your customers who are joint customers of AWS and Dell how do you help them figure this all out and bring it all together yeah so um we have many many customers that procure today through the marketplace uh through pridal technology is very very important but actually if you go back to there's a comment that Allison made earlier during the prep when you look at customers today they actually know what they want to buy because they're researching that over 60% of customers know what they want to buy before they actually um talk to you so the marketplace has become a much easier mechanism to to procure the infrastructure that customers do need and one of the things that customers still want to try to understand is well I have on premises backup or storage or infrastructure that I need to figure out how to bring to the cloud or leverage the cloud four maybe it's Disaster Recovery maybe it's AI maybe it's production workloads that's really where pidio can come in provide engineering expertise around that and we provide our customers with pre-sales expertise post sales expertise and manage services uh expertise around all of that today yeah CU it's I mean again a lot of your customers they're not having massive AWS divisions that are going out and doing all that cloud procurement and things like that I mean you I mean you do have some large customers but I at the same time it's you have different personas who had to be brought along in this process yeah we have to we have to uh talk to different uh parts of the customer sometimes it's uh maybe marketing that looking to do certain things and maybe specifically it that may be involved and as you said sometimes in the bigger customers they do have a split methodology for on premises and public cloud and we really that bridge that can bring all of that together yeah that totally makes sense and I I think Allison let's bring you in here a little bit on this and I think it would seem that having partners like precidio can really just glue things together and I know both you and Dell have been leing it hard to Partners over the last couple years and in particular uh you know around these Cloud offerings because I think there's you know people don't just have Cloud they don't just have on-prem it's definitely in the research that we've done it it's really settled in at like a 5050 split at this point how how does really Marketplace help through people like precidio help those organizations get a start yeah I mean Marketplace you know started 11 years ago and as we evolved from a full-price kind of self-service uh mechanism to more of a platform where customers could buy discounted software um almost immediately our customers um were requesting you know this is a great platform but if I can't buy through trusted advisers like Presidio I'm not going to be able to use it and so back in 2018 we rolled out our Channel partner private offer program which enabled Partners like precidio to be able to work with their customers and procure software much as they do outside of marketplace and then in 2020 when we added Professional Services to the catalog that's when Partners began to really harness the power of marketplace so they could have listings in there that customers could find and buy and so I think you know we have you know for the last five years we have been building a strong Channel offering for partners like Presidio and what's really unique is Presidio was one of the first partners that we ever worked with right so Rafael was talking about how long their relationship has been with AWS and I was their first channel account manager um in my first job at AWS and so I have a long-standing relationship with them and they really helped us co-develop what is now available to thousands of Partners and Raphael how's that R been I mean again being one of the first and again having uh you know full disclosure I worked for that friction free it's seamless always seamless it's always seamless so I mean again you've you've grown in in this relationship with both I mean you had a long-standing dell and even prior to that EMC relationship how how has this grown up for you well it's been fantastic I think we one of the largest uh cppo Partners today worldwide don't know if Allison has any comments on that but certainly speak about that but not just having Allison on our team to begin with but also Allison now is at the Forefront of developing these private offers and the first private offer that we actually did with a customer over 5 years ago was actually urement that came to us that said we want to purchase the software from you but we want to leverage our EDP that we have with AWS and that's very important because customers do have existing contractual obligations with AWS so this is the way that they can draw down on those Contra contractual obligations and um the ease of use back then even with 5 years ago it was very very easy uh for this customer to actually uh purchase or $5 million worth of software at their time W Addison any coms on I mean if you think about it just to add on you know if it takes a couple minutes to spin up a few instances of ac2 but then you have to go through a six-month procurement cycle for the software that goes along with that purchase it's not really helpful right and so to be able to buy in the way that we've created you know where our customers can spin up spin down um software just in time with their migration I mean that's been I think you know what they have told us is that that's been really helpful for them as they're migrant to the cloud so yeah no that that makes sense and I I think again this is where Dell has been leaning in and I I think it doesn't it it's pretty tough I am having done it myself at different startups and to get into the marketplace and make it look seamless to your point Allison I mean I think you know if it doesn't spin up quickly if it doesn't you know it's not effective and you got to wait and go through procurement process you know Todd Dell's been doing a lot in this area and what are kind of you know your views on what you have in Market place and how it really helps organizations yeah I mean if I go back a little bit if you think about um Dell in a market share model if you look at the market share in the data center we're we're market leader in all kinds of different categories right servers and primary storage and backup Etc so we're simply thinking about all right let's just take that IP that software IP and let's drop it into AWS and allow our customers take what they're already using and apply it into the marketplace of AWS so now as Allison said you get the benefit of taking that budget wherever that budget exists and bringing that into their Cloud business so that they now have a true multicloud story that actually expands from whatever they're using today into those new deployments in the cloud and then you take a precidio and you weave that together so we have capabilities like I'll give you a customer example okay so we have a large uh Global customer that was running um Native storage on our stuff in their Data Center and inside the Market or sorry inside AWS we get engaged we bring kind of Enterprise class services for Block storage in this case to that uh environment we now bring Enterprise class replication business resiliency operational resiliency we did a cost efficiency play where we were able to run at a higher performance and take out cost so you think about all of the models we use in the data center we're bringing that same model into the market or into AWS and then with Allison's team and Allison Marketplace environment we're able to procure it in a way that matches what the customer's needs are because depending on the the time of year they might say I just want to use my software agreement and bring it in or I have budget I have EDP that I want to use I'll use that in the marketplace and then with precidio we can get it deployed we can run it we can combine to create that ecosystem that it creates that benefit so that's what's playing out with customers all over the world yeah you got get a little excited about I think that's the great the great thing is really it's about what is the use case and what are the customer success criteria that they're going to actually see benefit Roi TCO out of that because I think uh knowing the engineering team on the Apex side for instance I know the cloud platform for you know cloud storage and things of that nature and what they're doing there they're doing some really Innovative things that they're cross actually cross engineering with AWS and I think you know to that there's still people who were using you know Dell product on premise and they want to have that same experience and that consistency with their Cloud experience and I think Raphael you were kind of mentioning there was you know a median Entertainment customer that really kind of you know captures that a little bit from your perspective yeah I mean uh Todd also is wearing a wonderful jacket every every Apex customer should get one of those jackets there you that's a whole another marketing SP on the well I'm sure the marketing people will see this video and we can we can try to see if we can make that happen that's it but back to this media back to this media and entertainment customer this customer what you find a lot of times when customers leverage AWS sometimes they don't think about backing up the infrastructure in the public cloud and apex apex one of the uh products within Apex is uh data protection within the cloud and this customer leverages Apex data protection to back up their AWS infrastructure today which is really really important um it makes it a lot easier for the customer to use and also it's it's a SAS based offer and it's pretty much point and click and very very uh simple for customers to leverage so whether they backing up the on premises application or public Cloud it's very straightforward to uh use these tools today yeah and I I think that is probably one of the the keys to the market place is the fact that it's got to be simple it's got to be easy to use it has to be pointand click to get up and running and I I think again Dell's done a really good job with that and growing into that over the years uh I guess you know from all of this you know to all of you you know kind of open up you know what your organizations think about when they're approaching M you know Marketplace and they're looking for a solution CU like you said 60% already know what they want before they get to you get the Presidio they know what they want to procure or they think they know what they want to procure what are the things that they should think about I think the first thing is uh specifically for customers is think about how you actually going to deploy and use that infrastructure whether it's software Hardware infrastructure cloud-based infrastructure that's very important and how are you going to operationalize it uh one of the key aspects and Todd mentioned this is performance is important but also making sure that your if you have a storage team that your storage team understands what is actually available in the cloud so they can actually leverage the same apis leverage the same consistent uh deployment model and also a management model as well that's very very important so we talk to customers a lot about that because customers don't want to incur costs to actually bring on new resources to do that hey Allison from your side of things yeah I was gonna throw it to you you know I think you know Market place is really viewed as a uh modern modern procurement platform right and so as you know different business units are looking at products on Marketplace wanting to procure them you know years ago maybe procurement wasn't as important to involve in the um in the equation but today since procurement does own that spend commitment with AWS I think it's critical that these business units that are looking to buy on Marketplace to tap into that spend it's it's critical to involve procurement and and show them you know how Marketplace works if they don't know typically you know if they're a more of a modern procurement team they're they're familiar with it um but I think it's critical to involve procurement early on in the process and Todd I'll give you the last last say this and real what what do you see when organizations are engaging with Dell and how they can leverage Marketplace in Presidio to really accomplish those use cases yeah I mean I think one of the things that I think is critical is that customers still need to go through a technical and operational and a finan fincial evaluation this is not Nirvana right if I think about I maybe one of the reasons I wear Cloud jackets is because I get crazy because I have four kids and they open up their phones and they just click and they buy stuff and it shows up on their phones and I get the bill and then they don't use it three months later right we want to avoid those scenarios inside the cloud because it's the marketplace makes that procurement Alyson so efficient and easy that we still to your point you need to do your technical architecture does it fit into your technical strategy Northstar how are you going to operate it do you have precidio providing manage services do you have a deployment capability how does it fit into the infrastructure and applications you already own and then what is your current Financial scenario do you have Capital dollars do you have operating dollars is it a Marketplace transaction that snaps right into your EDP and so just don't lose track or sight of what you're really trying to accomplish technically operationally and financially and when you do that then the marketplace is that speed right it becomes the Speed and Agility that allows you then go execute what your plan is yeah no I I think that's one of the keys and I think bringing it all together and having a strong partner like a precidio to help bring them stitch together I I think you know again being that this is the week of Reinventing all things Cloud have been going on and we'd be remiss if we didn't say the word AI once more uh you know I think people need to have a strategy going forward around their data how to protect it how to move it how to get the performance out of it and I think you know again that seems to be where this partnership really has strengths and legs Rob this is stuff is not easy right when I go talk with customers they used to have these buildings that had all their stuff in it and they could walk in it and touch it and feel it and work on it that is those rules have changed they have SAS providers they have AWS and prido and partners AWS prido delic we got to work together to help customers navigate this like this isn't this isn't an option anymore this is critical right and so I get a little excited right but our average Enterprise customer is managing like 600 vendors a year right so I mean there's a lot there's a lot that goes into it and and I mean what's interesting you know working with prido as long as I have the very first meeting I had with them we talked with them about how much what percentage of your business is Professional Services it was very small at the time and you know now I know it has really shifted um in into a different direction because our customers not only need the software but they really you know the services that Partners like Presidio provide to help them on this journey are really critical to their success and so yeah it's just been fascinating to see the evolution of of of how our customers are using the marketplace and partners I I I think that's a great place to leave it I I think that you know again when we start to look at this this really is one of those places where people could get out in front of their skis and buy stuff without having an of how to use it and bring it in and I think this kind of partnership and getting this out there that this is going on uh is is huge because I think this is really key to those organizations so you know Allison you know Todd Raphael thank you for joining us thank you thanks having me well yeah and welcome to the party so uh stay tuned for more coverage of supercloud 5 the battle for AI Supremacy I'm your host and analyst Rob stretche you're watching the cube your leader in Enterprise technology news and Analysis stay tuned for [Music] more

2023-12-07 05:38

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