Pierluca Chiodelli, Dell Technologies & Dan Cummins, Dell Technologies | MWC Barcelona 2023
the Cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress we're not going to hi everybody welcome back to the theater in Barcelona my name is Dave vellante I'm here with Dave Nicholson day four of mwc 23. I mean it's Dave it's it's still really busy are you walking the floors you got to stop people are cheering they must be winding down giving out the awards really excited here look at ciardelli is here he's vice president of engineering technology for Edge Computing offers strategy and execution at Dell Technologies and he's joined by Dan Cummins who's a fellow and vice president of the in the edge business unit at Dell Technologies guys welcome thank you I love when I see the term fellow you know you know they don't just give those away what do you got to do to be a fellow well um you know fellows are senior technical leaders within Dell and they're usually tasked to help Dell solve you know a very large business challenge right to get to a fellow uh there's only I think 17 of them inside of Dell so it is a small crowd you know previously uh really what got me to fellow is my continued uh contribution to transform Dell's mid-range business you know vnx2 and then unity and then power store you know uh and then before then after that you know they asked me to come and help you know Drive the technology vision for how Dell wins at the edge nice congratulations now here Luca I'm looking at this kind of cool chart here which is Edge platform by Dell Technologies kind of this Cube like cubes of course you know yeah so so tell us about the edge platform what what's your point of view on all that Adele yeah absolutely so um basically in when weekly The Edge and before even then was bring it on board to create this vision of the platform and now building the platform when we announce project Frontier was uh to create solution for the edge right Dell has been at the edge for 30 years we've sold a lot of compute but the reality was people want outcome and so in the edge is a new market very exciting but very silent and so people at the edge have different personas to quickly realized that we need to bring Intel people with expertise quickly realize as well that doing only solution was not enough there was a lot of problem to solve because the edges outside of the data center so you are outside of the wall of the data center and what is going to happen is obviously you are in the land of no one and so you have millions of device thousands of millions of device all of us at home we have all connected things and so we understand that the the capability of Dell was to bring in technology to secure manage deploy with zero touch zero trust the edge and all the edge that we're speaking about right now we are focused on everything that is outside of a normal data center so how we married the computer that we have for many years the new gateways that we create so having the best portfolio number one having the best solution but now transforming the the way that people deploy The Edge and secure the edge to through a software platform that we create you mentioned project Frontier I like that Dell started to do these sort of project uh project Alpine or sort of the multi-cloud storage I call it the super cloud uh the project Frontier it's almost like you develop it's like Mission based okay that's our North Star people here project Frontier they know you know internally what you're talking about you may maybe use it for external Communications too but what have you learned since launching project Frontier what's different about the edge I mean you're talking about harsh environment minutes you're talking about you know new models of connectivity so what have you learned from Project Frontier what I'd love to hear the fellow perspective as well and what you guys are learning so far yeah I mean start and then I led to them but we learn a lot the first thing we learned that we are on the right path so that's good because every conversation we have there is nobody said to us you know you are crazy this is not needed any conversation we have this week start with the Telco thing but after five minutes it goes to okay how I can solve the edge how I can bring the compute near where the data are created and how I can do that secure at scale and with the right price and then can speak about how we're doing that yeah yeah but before that we have to really back up and understand what Dell is doing project Frontier which is an edge operations platform to simplify your Edge use cases Pier look and his team have a number of verticalized applications right you want to be able to securely deploy those you know at the edge but you need a software platform that's going to simplify both the life cycle management and the security at the edge with the ability to be able to construct and deploy distributed applications customers are looking to derive value near the point of generation of data we see a massive explosion of data but in particular what's different about the edge is the different Computing locations and the constraints that are on those locations you know for example you know uh in a far Edge environment um the people that service that equipment are not training in the I.T or trained in I.T and they're also trained
in the Safety and Security Protocols of that environment so you necessarily can't apply the same I.T techniques when you're managing infrastructure and deploying applications or servicing in those locations so Frontier was designed to solve for those constraints you know often we see competitors that are doing similar things that are starting from an I.T mindset and trying to shift down to cover Edge use cases what we've done with Frontier is actually first understood the constraints that they have at the edge both the operational constraints and Technology constraints the service constraints and then uh came up with an architecture and Technology platform that allows them to start from the edge and and bleed into these so I'm laughing because you guys made the same mistake and you I think you learned from that mistake right you used to take x86 boxes and throw them over the fence Now You're Building purpose-built Systems right project Frontier I think is an example of the learnings you know you guys an I.T company right come on but you're learning fast and that's what I'm impressed about well Lynn of course we're here at mwc so it's all Telecom Telecom Telecom but really that's a subset of that yes fair to say can you give us an example of something that is that is uh orthogonal to uh to Telecom you know maybe off to the side that maybe overlaps a little bit but give us give us an example of edge that isn't specifically Telecom focused well you got the uh The Edge verticals uh and Pierre Lucas probably speak very well to this you know you got manufacturing you got retail you got Automotive you got oil and gas every single one of them are going to make uh different choices in the software that they're going to use the hyperscaler Investments that they're going to use right and then write some sort of automation uh you know to deploy that right and the edge is highly fragmented across all of these so we certainly could deploy a private Wireless 5G solution orchestrate that deployment through Frontier we can also orchestrate other use cases like connected worker or overall equipment Effectiveness in in manufacturing but peer Luca you have you have a number well but from York just to be clear from your perspective the whole idea of for example private 5G it's a feature yes that might be included it happened it's a network topology a network function that might be a feature of an edge environment but it's not the center of the distance it enables the outcome yeah okay so this this week is a clear example where we confirm and establish this the use case as I said right Dave you say correctly we learn very fast right we brought people in that they came from industry that was not I.T industry we brought people in with their fans and we we are Dells so we have the luxury to be able to interview hundreds of customers that just now they try to connect the OT with the I.T together and so what we
learn is really at the edge is different personas the person that decide what to do at the edge is not the normal I.T administrator is not the normal telephone who is it as an engineer is it it's for example the store manager yeah it's for example the um the person that is responsible for the manufacturing process those people are not technology people by any means but they have a business goal in mind their goal is I want to raise my productivity by 30 percent and I need to have a preventive maintenance solution how we prescribe this preventive medicine solution it doesn't prescribe the preventive solution it goes out he has to a consultant or himself to deploy that solution and you choose differently now the example that I was doing from the houses all of us we have connected device the fact that in my house I have a solar system that produce energy the only things I care that I can read how much energy I produce on my phone and how much energy I send to get paid back that's the only thing the fat that's inside there is a compute that is called Dell or other things it's not important to me same Persona now if I can solve the security challenge that the S.I or the user need to implement this technology because it goes everywhere and I can manage this and extensively and I can put the supply chain of Dell on top of that and I can go every part in the world no matter if I have in a Papua New Guinea or I have an oil rig in Texas that's the winning strategy that's why people they are very interesting to the including Telco the B2B business in Telco is looking very very hard to how they recoup the investment in 5G one of the way is to reach out with solution and if I can control and deploy things more than just sd-wan or other things or private Mobility that's the key so so you have so you said manufacturing retail automotive oil and gas you have solutions for each of those or you're building right now we have a solution for manufacturing with for example PTC that is the biggest company is actually based in Boston yeah there's a company that the Market's just coming yeah very interesting another solution with the litmus that is a startup that that also does manufacturing aggregation we have retail with deep North so we can do detecting in the store how many people they pass how many people they do and all of that and all these solutions that will be when we will have Frontier in the market will be also one Frontier we are also expanded to energy and we going vertical by vertical but what is the really learned right you said you know you are an I.T company What To Me the Edge is a pre-virtualization area it's like when we had uh you know I'm I've been in the company for 24 years coming from EMC the reality was before there was virtualization everybody was starting in Silo nobody thought about okay I can run this thing together with security and everything but I need to do it because otherwise in manufacturing or in a shop I can end up with thousands of devices just because someone tell to me I'm a I'm a store manager I don't know better I take this video surveillance application I take these things I take a you know smart building solution suddenly I have five six seven different infrastructure to run this thing because someone say so so we are here to democratize the edge to secure the edge and to expand that's the reason so but the frontier platform is a really the horizontal platform and you'll build specific solutions for verticals on top of that you'll Then I then the beauty is isvs come in yes because it's open and they're developers we have a cell certification program already for our solution uh as well for the current solution but also for Frontier what does that involve self-certification you go through you go through some it's basically a isv can come we have a access to a lab they can test the thing if they pass the fifth screen then they can become part of our ecosystem very easily so they don't need to spend days or months with us to try to architect the things so they get the imprema tour of being certified they get the Dell brand associated with it maybe there's some go to market benefits yes as well cool one thing I just want to stress you know when we say horizontal platform really The Edge is really a distributed Edge Computing problem right and you need to almost create a mesh of different Computing locations so for example even though Dell has Edge optimized infrastructure that we're going to deploy in life cycle manage customers may also have compute solution existing compute Solutions in their data center or at a co-location facility that are compute destinations project Frontier will connect to those private Cloud Stacks they'll also collect connect to multiple public Cloud stacks and then what they can do is the solutions that we talked about they construct that using an open based you know protocol template that describes that distributed application that produces that outcome and then through orchestration we can then orchestrate across all of these locations to produce that outcome that's what the platform so it's a compute mesh is what you just described it's a software orchestration mesh okay okay right and allows customers to take advantage of their existing Investments also allows them to to construct Solutions based on the isv of their choice we're offering Solutions like peer Luca had talked about you know in manufacturing with litmus and PTC but they could put another use cases together based on another isv is there a data mesh analog here the data mesh analog would run on top of that we don't offer that as part of Frontier today but we do have teams uh working inside of Dell that are working on this technology but again if there's other data mesh technology or packages that they want to deploy as a solution if you will on top of Frontier Frontiers extensible in that way the open nature of Frontiers it doesn't care it's just a node on the mesh yeah right now of course you'd rather you'd ideally want it to be Dell technology and you'll make the business cases they get additional benefits if it's Dell Pier Luca talked a lot about you know deploying infrastructure outside the walls of an I.T data center
you know this stuff can be tampered with somebody could move it to another room so they can open up in the supply chain with uh you know resellers that are adding additional people can open these devices up we're actually deploying using an edge technology called secure device onboarding right and it solves a number of things for us we as a manufacturer can initialize the roots of trust in the Dell Hardware such that we can validate you know tamper detection throughout the supply chain and securely transfer ownership and that's different that is not an I.T technique that's an edge technique that's just one example that's interesting I've talked to other people in I.T about how they're using that technique so it's trickling over to that side of the business I'm almost curious about the friction that you that you encounter because the you know you paint a picture of a of a of a Brave New World a brave new future ideally in a healthy organization they have there's a CTO or at least maybe a CIO with a CTO mindset they're seeking to leverage technology in service of whatever the mission of the organization is um but they've got responsibilities to keep the lights on as well as innovate in that mix what are you seeing as the Inhibitors what what's what's the pushback against the frontier that you're seeing in most cases is it what what is it inside of though no not I'm saying I'm saying with Market friction Market Market friction I think you know as I explained uh do yourself is one of the things that probably is the most inhibitor because some people they think that they are better already they invest a lot in this and they have the concept but those are again Silo Solutions so if you're going to um some of the huge things that they already established thousands of stores and stuff like that there is an opportunity there because also they want to have a refreshed cycle so when we speak about software software software when you are at the edge the software needs to run on something that is there so the combination that we offer about controlling the security of the hardware plus the operating system and provide an end-to-end platform allow them to solve a lot of problems that today they do it by themselves now I met a lot of customers some of them um one actually here in Spain I will not make the name but it's a large Automotive they have the same challenge they try to build but the problem is this is just for them and they want to use something that is a backup and provide with the Dell service Dell capability of supply chain in all the world and the diversity of the portfolio we have these guys right now they need to go out and find different types of compute or try to adjust things or they need to have 20 people there to just prepare the device we will take out all of this so I think the the majority of the pushback is about people that they already established infrastructure and they want to use that but really there is an opportunity here because the as I said the itot came together now is a reality three years ago when we had our initiative they've pointed out sarcastically we just trying to be honest I can't let you get away with that and we we failed because it was too early and we were too focused on on the fat to go going push ourselves to the boundary of the iot this platform is open you want to run Ajax you run Ajax you want openvino you want Microsoft iot you run Microsoft iot we not prescribe The Talk we are locking down the bottom what you described is the inertia of of sunk dollars or sunk euro into an infrastructure and now they're hanging on to that yeah but I mean you know I when we say horizontal we think scale we think low cost at volume that will that will win everything right there is a all the things and and the economics just overwhelm that siled solution inevitable you know if you want to apply security across the entire thing if you don't have a best practice and a click that you can do that or bring down an application that you need you need to touch each one of these silos so they don't know yet but we're gonna be there helping them so there is no pushback actually this particular example I did this guy said you know there are a lot of people that come here nobody really described the things we went through so we are on the right track guys great conversation we really appreciate you coming on thecube pleasure to have you both thank you all right and thank you for watching Dave vellante for Dave Nicholson we're live at the theater we're winding up day four keep it right there go to siliconangle.com John furrier's got all the news on thecube.net we'll be right
back right after this break the cube at mwc 23. [Music]
2023-03-08 12:45
