Douglas Phillips, Microsoft & Travis Vigil, Dell Technologies | Dell Technologies World 2023

welcome back everyone it's thecube live at Mandalay Bay Dell Technologies World 2023 our second day of coverage Lisa Martin here with Dave vellante we've had some great conversations as I always stated because we do we've been talking a lot a lot of news a lot of deep Partnerships that Dell has going deeper we're going to be chatting about that next with Microsoft and Dell I always like to see products or projects turn into products we've seen a lot of that Partnerships ecosystem is growing it is growing hybrid Cloud it's all happening we're going to be unpacking all that one of our alumni is back with us Travis B Hill is here SVP of product management cross-platform software and solutions at Dell great to have you back Douglas Phillips joins us corporate vice president Azure Edge and platform at Microsoft welcome great to have you guys too it's awesome to be here so Travis let's go ahead before we talk about the new platform you had a Blog recently want you to kind of unpack that with the shared Dells and Microsoft's shared vision for hybrid Cloud can you for our audience kind of summarize what you talked about on that blog yeah I think the the blog really did a good job of detailing that Microsoft and Della have had a long and very successful technology collaborate collaboration relationship I mean we've been partnering together for 30 plus years and uh if you look at even today in Market Microsoft and Dell have a great partnership with Azure stack HCI Dell is one of Microsoft's largest Partners or isn't Microsoft's largest partner for Azure stack HDI today and we're really excited about the ability to take that partnership to the next level and so if you looked at kind of the uh the pillars that we built the relationship on it was how do we make hybrid Cloud easier for customers to consume how do we make it so that the services that they know and love in azure can be extended to on-premises or the edge in the case that you know customers have a latency or a data gravity or data sovereignty or a cost issue that they might want to address and how do we make it so that they can manage it all from one place securely so those are really the pillars that we've built you know our historical relationship on but also this going forward collaboration around azure Douglas expand from your perspective Travis mentioned Michael mentioned yesterday when he was when he did the the pre-record with Satya 30 plus years talk about it from Microsoft's perspective obviously a long history partnership a lot of evolution and maturation yeah it's um I mean it is a critical partnership for us and I think um you know always but even more so right now as we're seeing a real pivot and you know with the incredibly broad adoption we see from our customers of cloud and cloud computing more and more of our customers want to take the power of the cloud I think as Travis stated and expand that out into the world where they live work and make decisions and that's the way we refer to the edge right it's everywhere outside of our brick and mortar data centers and our ability to partner together and deliver a seamless experience for our customers is just absolutely critical um and and right now I'd say you know when we look at the number of customers coming in looking at as we call it digital transformation or modernization of their applications and workloads statistically an incredibly large number of those can system an edge component I mean inevitably regardless of if we're talking about industrial manufacturing Automotive retail our customers are coming to us and saying we want the power of Microsoft's Cloud we want the power of azure and we wanted to to extend out into the world where we're operating whether we have factories or retail locations or restaurants we want that power and in order for us to do that this partnership is just an absolute key part of that and you know I'm very very excited about the announcements yesterday as we've had so many customers asking us what's next in our big Edge strategy and this is it this is the start of it so I'm incredibly excited and I know a lot of the other folks back in Redmond are very excited about this announcement and how we move forward on this partnership well you've got two companies that obviously there was nowhere to go except on-prem back in the day so you both started there you both have long long histories in the industry Azure has been amazing I've written about it a lot at just this this unbelievable momentum that Microsoft has created uh it's actually quite remarkable and then I like the way you described it Douglas is sort of extending so the cloud of writing about this for years the cloud is extending you know back to on-prem out to the edge and the challenge has always been that singular experience so maybe you could talk about what you've announced and we could dig into that a little bit from a customer perspective yeah yeah and and to answer that question Dave I'd like to build a little bit on what Douglas was saying that there is something new that is happening that we're seeing in the market the uh we did a survey recently almost 50 percent of our customers are hybrid today and over the next 12 to 24 months an incremental 25 say that they're going to go hybrid we're talking about 75 of all customers being in a hybrid uh workflow and what we hear them ask us is you know I I went to the cloud because I it was easy I went to the cloud because of elasticity and Dell if you can work with Microsoft so that when I'm deploying the infrastructure you know in my data center or you know in the edge if you make it easy to scale you make it easy to upgrade it you make it easy to make sure that everything's working properly you tie into the native Azure Services that's what I need to effectively scale that environment back on premises so that's what we've worked on and that's what we've announced see in terms of that's interesting my data shows about only 14 percent of customers are all in on the public Cloud so the world is hybrid and that's the world is hybrid if you ask them you say what's that going to look like in three years and they stay pretty much flat what about workloads um you know there's this narrative out there that says that ninety percent of the workloads are still on-prem again my data doesn't suggest that notwithstanding Telco if we take Telco out of it what do you what do you see in you in your worlds is it it feels to me like it's a lot more like 45 to 50 percent is in the cloud and the stuff that's on Prem is sticky is not a business case to move necessarily or it's hard to move or it's risky to move so why not just keep it there and give it the cloud operating model what do you guys see yeah I would I would classify it slightly differently um and statistically I don't know but what I would say is you know building again back on what what Travis was saying what we see very clearly is our customers want the power of that centralization the global businesses or local businesses that have presence which is most businesses in multiple different locations want the ability to have oversight of those businesses from a centralized location and even more so in a post-pandemic world where companies regardless of Industry are working in more hybrid fashion some of their workers are required to be in factories other workers are required to be in a headquarters location some are working remotely and working from home and they want to be able to have a centralized place where they can go and look at data data about how their factories are running how their stores are performing and have a common developer experience of how they deploy those applications and workloads in that centralized location you know we would call the Microsoft cloud or Azure or out to the edge in the locations they live and I think to your point I see that being durable I see it being a durable state right we're not looking at this is transient where how are we going to migrate this workload to the the cloud but the point I would make is it's also different from the way we've historically talked about hybrid or private Cloud which is give me my own Azure I want an Azure in my factory I want an Azure in my own data center versus we want to extend the Azure Fabric and what it gives us a common developer experience common security compliance user experience whether you're talking about an I.T person or an operator or a developer and help me project that and just enough of that out to the edge so that I can have the workloads I need at the edge for real-time decision making or powering the robots in my factory or whatever it might be that's interesting um when you listen to your speak uh Douglas I was thinking about single point of control and that's always been really important in technology I.T generally and largely because of recovery right recovery is hard but tick that box not that it's an easy thing to do it's not trivial but you mentioned a single version of the truth essentially with analytics security governance those are relatively new higher priority items and that's where you extend the fabric and that seems to be sort of different than like you said just give me a stack on Prem it's a it's a new model and and so like my question is what impacts will that have on the operating model because the cloud operating model obviously had an impact does this take that further go ahead I I would say this is a big part of our partnership um and it's hard right and I think this is this is the exciting challenge that Travis the rest of the Dell team and I have had the ability to work on together which is you know when we control the brick and Martyr the HVAC the network the nodes that are going into our data centers it's arguably easier when you start throwing in customer networks their own power somebody cutting fiber in the street outside of it and they have a dependency that they can't sell someone you know a hot dog or a car if that system isn't working that interoperability and what is running at the edge and what is running in the cloud you have to have a very clear and intentional decision making and how you do that and a huge part of that is the interrupt between the hardware infrastructure uh the software the operating systems and the cloud and that is what we're working together on and you know I think this is just the beginning we've got a lot of exciting work ahead of us in expanding that uh you know that relationship and that fabric for our customers not homogeneity speaking speak of customers can you share their involvement in the in the productization of what was announced yesterday I imagine that there's a customer flywheel yes that really generates and Powers this can you share and maybe a favor to customer story that that really demonstrates the value of what this is delivering yeah you know I I think if you look at the business that we have today with Microsoft uh with Azure stack HCI as I mentioned we're the the number one provider the number one partner for Microsoft with that so we have hundreds if not thousands of customers already running a version or a predecessor to what we're delivering and what they were clearly telling us is this is great but can you work together so that is a seamless support experience it is a validated appliance that when I do a firmware update that we that I know that everything works uh can I can can I I work with Udell so that I can start to incorporate some of maybe the storage services that you provide as an adjunct to the Appliance model uh so that it fits into my broader on-premises ecosystem those were the things that customers told us and if you looked at what we prioritize that's exactly what we're doing so talk more about the announcements um give us some specifics right we've been sort of dancing around it give us the hard news we are announcing Apex Cloud platform for Azure which is all what we've been talking about it's the collaboration between Dell and Microsoft to provide a platform which Azure Services can run on premises or at the customer in the customers data center at the edge in a co-engineered appliance that Microsoft and Dell have jointly brought to Market okay so I bring that to wherever I want it Edge everything's Edge I guess and now for Douglas everything's Edge yeah I call it the data center yeah his data center is different though what did yeah Jensen call it today the AI Factory yeah in fact you go there you go rename things okay but that's stretching Azure that Azure you can call the fabric I don't want to confuse it with some other product but conceptually stretching that experience to wherever Edge data center AI Factory correct precisely and then what does that actually mean for a customer so what services can they tap um with that stretch um so this will be a growing list um so and this is this is a huge part of our strategy with Microsoft Arc um so we have several Services um that are Arc enabled today we allow our customers to go to their Azure portal and as they're managing their Cloud infrastructure in Azure um they can use ARC to project a set of those Services out to their Edge Appliance and we will be working to expand that very very quickly right now I'd say two of the most popular Services we see are our database services and security security is one of the first so people are looking for you know the security they see which is top of mind for everyone right now I think in every industry in the cloud and how can they project that through leveraging Microsoft security tooling from Azure out to the edge and then monitor that in a centralized way so those are two of the workloads which is being used SQL Server precisely yeah okay that's the starting point precisely goes from there at the cosmos DB and other stuff will secure SQL Server secure SQL and also Fender and other Security Services that Microsoft enables in our cloud and we're allowing our customers to now project and manage from the cloud to their Edge endpoints what's the go to market approach like you talked about the joint collaboration where can customers go I imagine to both you mentioned the co-engineering but talk a little bit about the GTM strategy yes it will be available uh definitely as a Dell branded Appliance and we're working with Microsoft on how in the right for the right instances it can also be made available via Microsoft but there will be joint uh incentives for both of the sales teams to go and pursue business together on it and while we're still working on that I'd say the end goal we have at the end of the day is for our customers are joint customers and our Microsoft customers to be able to go very simply request through their Azure portal to expand that into their brick and mortar locations out in the world so we're going to be working in Earnest to make that a reality Travis what's Dell bring to the table um that some of the competitors you would say can't do as well I mean we have a history of working with ecosystem providers and making it easy there are several examples in recent history where we've shown that if we can partner together with what we would call an operating environment provider uh where we do the integration we do the testing we do the simplification we do the orchestration of the upgrades we do those very basic but powerful things that customers uh struggle with that were successful so we have a a history of doing that and then the other thing that that I wanted to comment on when Douglas was talking about it what you know I think about you you know Douglas's uh Azure experience where it's you know tens or hundreds of data centers we have customers in thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of locations we have stock I mean things like stalking services at scale that just make it such that we can we have a reach and an at scale capability for both support and sales that really complement you know the overall relationship ecosystem overlap and try to project okay things that customers can take advantage of we talked about some of Microsoft services but there is some ecosystem overlap between what Dell has and what Microsoft has the guys have been around for a long time so what can we expect going forward in terms of other types of not necessarily Dell services or Microsoft services that may become available can I tap into my ecosystem I guess is my question other security players or areas with Microsoft you know might not have uh products or products that I want to utilize on this solution yeah look the one that we're we're collaborating on real time and very closely is the ability to use Dell software-defined storage within um within the um Apex Cloud platform for for Azure we have a lot of customers that on-premises have utilized Dell software blocks software-defined storage as sort of a a substrate for many different environments and they want to use that as a as a part of ACP for Azure as well so that's the first step could that tie in to um whatever project Alpine has become um is that sort of part of that you're going to stretch the Alpine fabric I'm sorry what's the product name power it's powerflex yeah yeah yeah yeah it is it is absolutely powerful So within within ACP we will be utilizing power Flex um we also announced that we're going to be running powerflex in uh in Azure uh and so what if you have powerflex running in Azure if you have power Flex as part of ACP for Azure on-premises you can start to do cool things from a you know a data Mobility perspective I could bring that storage maturity that storage stack maturity into Azure now yeah yeah we announced it here yeah yeah yeah yeah okay uh and and that's available today uh yes sir it is awesome yeah now how about how about pricing how do you price this stuff in that sort of hybrid environment is it is it Cloud pricing is it is it on demand is it how does that all work have you figured that out yet or I'd say we're still working on that what do you what do you say that's a very fair statement but it's available today if I said if I get my checkbook out I said all right this is here yeah I said so uh Azure stack for uh HCI is available today uh powerflex and Azure is available today uh ACP for Azure is coming soon yeah cool last question guys in our last 30 seconds here feedback from the folks on the show floor here I'm sure at dinners and meetings that you've had based on the announcement what what are some of the things that you've heard that excite you about the momentum that the partnership has currently so first uh sure I'd say you know at the end of the day the um the huge value that we see in this partnership is for our customers so I I think you know the customer seeing Microsoft and Dell truly partnering and collaborating at a technology level you know you've asked a lot of questions about pricing go to market how do we sell it at the end of the day two technology companies and this is something I'm really proud of two technology companies working together as one company from a product perspective removing not just our org charts but Our Brands and getting them out of the way so that we can deliver a seamless experience for how our customers are consuming transformational technology that's allowing them to operate their businesses in more secure effective distributed ways that is a superpower and you know I think we've seen certainly in the the period of this partnership we've been working on I'll speak for myself here our companies come together at an engineering level and jointly develop a product where you know we have people co-located on one continent together working on some of this we have your hardware and our in our labs and our development environment you've got our software in your labs and your development environment we're running daily weekly scrums bi-weekly leadership sinks where Travis sudir and myself and others are coming together and reviewing progress as if we were one company I'd say I'm hearing some of that excitement from our customers and it and it's visible which is you know we have a huge demand from our customers today to simplify this how can we get you know Microsoft and Dell's technology delivered in a seamless way as possible where it just works and there's a lot of excitement it's not trivial to get engineering teams together I mean you're just in one company significant expansion of the partnership and just to add just a little bit to what Douglas said because he said it so well uh the customers that I've talked to basically said Thank you right thank you for making it easy yes I I you know you know stop stop talking to me about your widget start talking to me about my operating environment and how you bring it all together awesome guys thank you so much we are out of time but we appreciate you guys sharing and really unpacking the announcement the value in it for customers what it means for the partnership so next year you've got to come back bring some customers and really show us correct correct the little open how it's working we appreciate your insights thank you we'll be back so much for our guests and for Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin up next couple of alumni join us Rob emsley is back David Noy as well going to be talking about data protection how Dallas helping customers achieve that elusive cyber resiliency which is incredibly important these days stay tuned they'll be right here foreign

2023-05-30 09:48

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