Dell Tech World Day 1 Keynote: Inspiring New Ideas, featuring Michael Dell and Chuck Whitten
There's never been a better time for ideas than right now, because at this moment we have the technology to bring groundbreaking ideas to life, technology that drives human progress and allows you to reimagine and reinvent the world. Right now, we're turning waste into innovation. Right now we're protecting reefs with real time data. Right now we're plotting our return to the moon.
Our optimism is relentless, and our trailblazing spirit is propelling humanity forward, the only direction we know how to go. Our technology loves ideas and we're ready to help you bring them to life right now. Welcome to now welcome to Dell Technologies World. Please welcome Michael Dell. Welcome everyone. Welcome to Dell Technologies World where ideas become innovation and where innovation changes the world. You know,
someone somewhere has a big idea that is so powerful that it spawns an ecosystem of innovation. And in the process, new industries and new endeavors are created, new opportunities are unleashed. Right now, we have more power than ever before to turn ideas into innovations that fundamentally improve our businesses, life, and the entire world. And here at Dell Technologies World, we're gonna talk about how that power is growing and how it's continuing to accelerate.
And we'll be telling your stories about how together we are putting these powerful forces to work. So whether your big idea is curing cancer or frictionless commerce, or sustainable supply chain, from small businesses to governments and universities, to 98% of the Fortune 500 to all the innovative businesses out there in between with a dream and a big idea. Look, you're in great company. You are our customers, our partners, and our friends, and we exist to bring your ideas to light.
Last year Dell generated $102 billion, all in service of creating value for you. $102 billion in revenue. Thank you for joining us on this journey. We are also putting our enormous supply chain to work for you.
We ship two units per second, 179,000 orders per day. And our customers have told us that ensuring ongoing availability of our technologies is incredibly important given the world we live in today. And we have built one of the most resilient supply chains in the world with the strength and scale to be the partner you trust to deliver on your biggest opportunities. Because increasingly, technology is at the center of all of the significant opportunities in every domain. Now, one of our customers, Hyundai, is the world's third-largest automaker. And they have this big idea to reinvent manufacturing, and the future of connected clean transportation.
Hyundai Motor Group's future lies in expanding human reach to bring about the next wave of change. Our collaborations with Dell Technologies is central to our ability to innovate it's end, end-to-end solutions and flexible IT helps us build the digital trend of our manufacturing processes so our engineers can imagine the future much better. And Hyundai cars become more and more connected. They will offer much more than transportation. They will deliver truly personalized digital experiences automatically tuned to their driver's preferences. For this, highly scalable solutions, that Dell Technologies provides, are essential for us to process, fast amounts of data quickly with Dell Technologies as our global partner, we will expand human bridge and the moving experiences we deliver as a result will drive human progress.
You know, I, I love how well aligned we are to the goals and objectives of Hyundai and it represents really great work Dell Technologies at our best forging relationships, strong partnerships, and a deep understanding of customers. And I love to introduce our Senior Account Exec for Hyundai June Woo. Thank you. Hello, June, thank you so much for joining us here at Dell Technologies World. Thank you Michael.
I'm happy to be here with you and so many of our customers and partners. You know, June, for me, one of the things that is amazing about this story and so many of our customer stories is our ability to help customers with really a deep understanding of their needs. And I'd love for you to share a little bit about the working relationship that you've built with Hyundai Auto ever.
I think a lot of our success is because our partnership starts with strategic development. For example, last year we delivered the Next Wave of Change Leadership Forum where the CMO Mr. Suh, shared his vision to make, uh, his organization, Hyundai's most competent software and ICT company. Then last May, Mr. Suh joined us right here at the technologies world for executive briefings and also met with you Michael.
Yeah, I remember that well and that conversation was really a further leap forward in the relationship. Yes, that's right Michael. We discussed how to accelerate Hyundai's transformation and how we can elevate our partnership to deliver the full value of Dell's and to end, end-to-end capabilities. In manufacturing, covering the areas of Metaverse, Digital Twin and Edge, next-generation data center, data management, R&D cloud platform architecture, security, and most recently, manufacturing edge transformation. They've done a technical validation of Hyundai Auto Ever Edge software on Dell Edge gateways, and now they've joined the Dell Edge design program of Project Frontier, leveraging Hyundai Auto Ever's software capabilities and Dell Edge solution portfolio.
We can really think through how to provide the integrated solutions that go beyond meeting technical requirements to support Hyundai Auto Ever's overarching business objectives. That's fantastic. June, thank you for being a great advocate for Hyundai's success and thank you for joining us here today.
Thank you. You know, Hyundai, like all of you, is working to harness the enormous quantities of data at the edge that is being processed and protected and used right at the point of creation. And as we all know, the amount of data is exploding and its value is increasing, especially when we activate it with another really big idea like artificial intelligence. AI, just like the PC, the internet and the smartphone before it will transform industries and the way we live and work.
And if you're curious and you like to learn, look, there's never been a better time to be alive and never a better opportunity to make yourself and your organization smarter and more productive. Now you can quickly find the limitations of these models. And, of course, we have to ensure confidential and proprietary data is protected. And yes, there are dangers with these technologies that we have to manage thoughtfully and responsibly and make sure that these technologies reflect our human values.
But I'm more of an optimist and throughout human history we've successfully managed the risk of potentially existential technologies. And throughout human history, technology innovation has driven human progress. From health to education to sustainability, to prosperity, our measures of progress are bound to our innovations. And of course we're also finding that with these generative AI models, they get much better as you add more data and add more processing power.
IDC estimates that by 2025, 88% of the servers used for AI workloads deployed at the edge will be used for inferencing. And to support this, we're gonna need new architectures with orders of magnitude, higher speed and efficiency. And we are ready with rugged, compact and powerful servers designed for AI workloads for the edge and for telecom.
And for your clouds and data centers, we're first to market shipping in volume. Now with the PowerEdge XE9680. Stay tuned. You're gonna hear more about this later. It has eight NVIDIA Tensor Core H100 GPUs, currently the world's fastest available.
Now there will be a significant proliferation of open and closed source large language models for both specialized and general uses. And they will be distributed globally. Organizations will have many of their own private large language models to unleash the power of their secure data. Take a bank, for example, it wants to calculate credit risk, it wants to enhance customer service and improve fraud detection.
Those are relatively simpler problems to solve. Now, it doesn't really need its data to create beautiful artistic images or write poems or know all sorts of other random things that have nothing to do with the business of the bank. Enterprises are gonna be able to train far simpler AI models on specific confidential data, less expensively and securely driving breakthroughs in productivity and efficiency. And, while those breakthroughs are really important, the real opportunity is to reimagine your organization and what you can become, given the superpowers that AI is unleashing.
And if you're not already using AI across your organization and thinking deeply about reinvention, you're already behind. That's why AI workloads are the fastest-growing part of our cloud and infrastructure business. And tomorrow, right here on stage, you're gonna hear from Jeff Clarke and he's gonna be speaking with Jensen Huang from NVIDIA about all of this and much, much more. You will not wanna miss it. Look,
we hear you loud and clear when it comes to the importance of AI, just like we hear about your opportunities with the future of work, with edge, with multi-cloud, sustainability and security. We call it having big ears. Around the world, Dell Technologies has more than 65,000 dedicated account and service professionals listening to you every day.
And each week we have millions of customer interactions. Each one of those is a valuable data point that helps us understand our customers better so that we can focus our over 20,000 engineers on the technology innovations that matter to you most. And over the next few days, you're gonna be hearing a lot about how we're bringing our customer-inspired innovation together with our ecosystem of partners, so you can make smart choices from the edge to the cloud. Because there's no one answer for every workload, but there's a right answer to optimize every workload for performance and cost. Now imagine a future where all of the clouds and the edge come together and look like one system.
To make this happen will take an ecosystem, and our ecosystem keeps getting stronger and bigger and broader. PowerFlex is our developer-friendly, software-defined infrastructure built for multicloud and it provides unmatched performance and scalability. Enabling you to scale compute and storage independently or together with any hypervisor or container platform on premise and in the public clouds. And like PowerFlex, all of our storage, compute, edge, security, data protection and data management solutions are designed to connect with all of the elements of the multicloud system you depend on.
Multicloud by design isn't just a tagline, we're making it real. And here at Dell Technologies World over the next few days, we will release the largest expansion ever to our APEX offerings, bringing customers a modern cloud experience and consumption model built for multicloud. Now, partnerships have been at the heart of our philosophy and no partner has been on this journey longer with us than Microsoft. And today,
we have a couple of really exciting announcements to turn the big idea of multicloud into real innovations for you. I recently was able to sit down with Satya Nadella to talk about our joint cloud strategy as well as the future of work and generative AI. Satya, thank you so much for joining us today. You know, Microsoft has emerged as a major cloud player with your leadership and today we've got some really big cloud news to share. I'm super pleased to announce, first of all, that we're bringing our industry-leading storage software to Azure with the APEX Block Storage for Azure. We're running on-premise with a new service, our APEX Cloud Platform for Azure. And look,
these are great examples of how Dell and Microsoft were working together to give customers the freedom to choose when, where, and how they run their workloads - whether it be public cloud, on-prem, edge and beyond - driven solely by the needs of their business. And we're super excited for what this partnership means for our customers. This is something our customers have been asking for and we're grateful to be able to deliver it together. It's great to be at Dell Technologies World, with all of our mutual partners and customers. And, you know,
as you sort of rightfully captured it, right, we have been working on many parts of our, sort of, tech stack together - whether it's on Windows 11 and the PC innovation, or Microsoft 365, and of course, the cloud technologies. And today what we have done with, and what you have really helped bring to market with APEX Cloud Platform with Azure is just a breakthrough. I mean I think you just captured it very well when you said what customers really want is the seamlessness of the edge and the public cloud coming together. And this technology,
truly takes all of Dell's innovation and operational excellence and some of the technologies we have, packages it together so that all of the sensitive workloads in private and public sector can now have the options to deploy where they want with the same seamlessness of the control plane. So very, very excited to be partnered with you on bringing this new and technology to market. And Sanya, you mentioned Windows 11, obviously a core foundation of the Dell-Microsoft partnership for decades has been making customers more productive and certainly the pandemic accelerated the need for modern work capabilities. And, you know, together we're very focused on building the next generation of intelligence, secure PCs that deliver new collaboration experiences, new levels of performance, obviously in close partnership with Microsoft through Windows 11 and Microsoft 365. So, you know,
tell us a little bit about how you see the nature of modern work evolving, and especially how do you see AI and other emerging technologies fueling this? When will the next time information technology truly drive economic growth and productivity? And I feel this AI age, I think it's kind of more akin to when PCs first showed up, at work and changed the workflow, right? We all remember the days before word processing and spreadsheets and email and after. And so, I think this generation of AI will have a similar effect both at the individual productivity. Right? I mean this idea of having a co-pilot, whether you're writing code, or you're writing a document, or triaging email, or designing something, having a co-pilot help you remove the drudgery of the work and improve the flow and creativity at work I think is gonna be breakthrough at an organizational level. Right? If you think about salespeople, or marketing people, or finance people all being able to come together and really accelerate the work they do. Or even at the industry level, removing the doctor burden, when it comes to how they take care of their patients by having the co-pilot help them transcribe the medical record. All of these things I think are going
to have transformative effect. But the most interesting thing is the largest install base of devices that are capable of doing the most ambitious AI today, guess what, are the PCs. And so that's where I look at it and say going forward, we are designing everything at Microsoft - but across Microsoft 365 with this co-pilot design point where the user is at the center - we are going to accelerate everything on Windows. And so that's why the innovation that the two of us are working on, with Windows 11, Dell PCs and things like Microsoft 365 co-pilot or GitHub co-pilot are going to have a real transformative effect on economic productivity all over the world. Awesome. Thank you so much Satya.
We look forward to delivering all of that to our customers together. No, thank you so much Michael. Thank you for the partnership and thank you to all the folks, who are attending Dell Technologies World because to us, you know, being able to not just build technology but getting into your hands so that it can have the broadest impact, is what gives us sense of purpose and mission and so thank you so much for all of the opportunity. Thank you.
You know, Microsoft and Dell Technologies have a remarkable partnership, and over the next few days you're gonna hear from a constellation of leading partners who are working with us in an innovative way on another really big idea. And that is making your technology simpler to manage, own and operate. This way you could turn your ideas into innovations that will define your future, even when those ideas are way ahead of their time. Now let's travel to the world of Pandora, where innovation brought by James Cameron and John Landau's vision for Way of Water was brought to light after a 13-year journey.
I think the biggest, you know, practical shift in our production is we are a hundred percent digital. And the volume of data that we need on this film to make it a reality is tremendous. And without the technological resources that are available today, we could not have made the movie. Going into Avatar 2, we captured probably 10-15x more data than we did at Avatar 1.
We're capturing as much data about a character's performance or a scene as we can. We're capturing 26 reference cameras at a time. We're capturing stereo facial camera from every performer on set. We're capturing audio, we're capturing motion data, we're capturing the motion data of the camera that Jim's operating. We are working in two different continents. We're working in Los Angeles, we're working in New Zealand, and we need to be able to share everything that we hold digitally to make these movies. Knowing how much that we would rely on data,
we were looking for a gold-standard partner. And Dell turned out to be the perfect fit. We chose Dell Technologies because of the quality of the technology that they offer, but just as importantly, it was the people who understood our goals and objectives and wanted to work with us in a partnership to achieve them. As we move into each of the Avatar sequels, we're gonna it go to new biomes, we're gonna meet new clans, there's gonna be more data that needs to be stored, that needs to be preserved, that needs to be accessed for future generations. As we get more sophisticated, as new technology emerges our appetite for what impresses us grows. But that's why we rely on partners like Dell. Later today, Alison Dew will share the stage with James Cameron and you'll definitely want to check that out. Now,
I love the story because it highlights the true strengths of Dell Technologies as a partner and as an innovator. We solve some really big problems from excess scale storage to the processing power required for these incredibly advanced renderings to collaboration tools from a team working around the world and around the clock. Now think about Hyundai and Light Storm.
Their ideas and innovations are defining the future of manufacturing, advancing art and entertainment. Both our prime examples of advancing human progress enabled by technology. That is our purpose and it's our greatest privilege to be a part of such powerful stories. Your stories. It inspires us every day to keep at it, to keep realizing your greatest opportunities to create, innovate, and move forward. Once again, welcome to Dell Technologies World.
We are thrilled to have you with us. From the future of work, to AI, to edge, multicloud, security and sustainability. We have a perspective, we have a strategy, aligned innovation and an open ecosystem. And we're excited to share what this can all mean for your big idea. So let's get on with the show.
And I can't think of anyone better to share our technology, vision and innovation we'll all view than our co-COO, my friend and counselor and one of the keenest minds in the business, Chuck Whitten. All right Chuck, it's all yours and I'll be back out in just a few minutes. Take it away.
Well, thank you, Michael. Huh? And hello again. I stood on this stage for the very first time last year and it was an honor then and it's an honor now. Last year I talked about our purpose, to create the technologies that drive human progress. And I talked strategy - how through a series of different and contrarian bets, we've built a company that looks like no one else in technology, an end-to-end leader built for this moment in tech. And I talked about how when our purpose and our strategy come together, it demands that we tackle the unsolved problems of technology because when we do, it creates room for you to innovate and go change the world.
But that was last year. This year it's not just about vision and aspirations. I don't really need any fancy graphics or sound effects. Well, I mean maybe look, we're in Vegas after all right? But in all seriousness, today I want to talk about the tangible innovations we're delivering to solve your most pressing challenges, those unsolved problems.
And over the next couple of days, my partner, my mentor, and my friend Jeff Clarke and I will share what we've been working on, including some exciting news and demos that bring it all to life. But let's start with your unsolved problems because like everything else in technology, they continue to evolve. So over the last year I've spoken with hundreds of customers and partners around the world. It's one of the most inspiring parts of my job. And there are five challenges that I hear over and over. First, there's the future of work. At the start of the pandemic,
we quickly deployed disparate devices, applications, and collaboration tools as we all pivoted to working remote. And we all became part of the greatest re-imagination of work since World War II. Today, companies are having rich conversations about the future. Where does hybrid work go from here? And how can technology enable the next evolution, and the next and the next? Then there's multicloud. Last year we talked about delivering the innovations and ecosystem to change the game in multicloud. And since then you've affirmed and reaffirmed that we have the right strategy. You are deploying sophisticated hybrid and multicloud strategies.
You want the feature velocity and innovation of the public clouds, but you don't wanna be locked up in a single public cloud. So you're smartly putting the right workloads in the right places, which means you have clouds everywhere, on-premise, across multiple public clouds, at the edge, in co-location facilities. You're increasingly using FinOps to understand trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality in your cloud architecture and investment decisions. And as you optimize, you're going after the real prize - extracting value from the explosion of data sprawled across your multicloud estate.
What you need is somebody to make it all work better together, to make it multicloud by design, not by default. Michael talked about the power and promise of AI, so I'm not gonna spend a ton of time on it. What I know you're feeling is pressure. Pressure to move faster, to apply generative AI to your private data sets and to do it all smartly, securely and ethically. How about the edge, or as I like to call it, the real world? The perfect storm of data technology and competition is accelerating innovation at the edge. The problem?
The edge is everywhere and it's hard to operate edge infrastructure at scale. Existing models don't solve the challenges of running multiple critical and disparate OT workloads operating in remote and harsh environments, operating without skilled local IT, managing distributed infrastructure and applications and doing it all securely. And finally, their security. Distributed work, distributed data, multicloud, the edge, the attack surface has never been bigger and unfortunately the security industry has never been more fragmented or more broken. Now you've been clear. Don't give us more security products,
embed greater security and resiliency into Dell's core solutions. Basically don't get into the security industry, Dell, change the security of the technology industry. So, these are the five big challenges that we know you're grappling with, and consequently, where we've focused our innovation since we stood on this stage a year ago. And I should also mention that cutting through all of those challenges are a few timeless, high expectations that you've set for us.
You've asked us - and the world - to be more sustainable. This is no longer style points. Sustainability is at the top of your strategic agenda.
You want a modern cloud and modern consumption experience that's APEX. And we hear that you like it and you'd like to see it across our entire portfolio. And finally, you need help stretching your scarce IT investments in what is a challenging macroeconomic environment, and at a time when technology has never been more essential to your business. So, that's our agenda, because it's your agenda. So, today I'm gonna go deep on the future of work and multicloud- the core elements of our client and infrastructure strategies. And tomorrow, Jeff and friends will demo some of what we've talked about today and share what we've been up to in generative AI, the edge and in security.
Jeff's got an awesome keynote plan tomorrow. You're not gonna want to miss it. So let's turn to the future of work. Let me start by saying we're uniquely qualified to discuss this topic. We are the market leader in PCs and our business is overwhelmingly focused on the enterprise.
That means we wake up every day thinking about your people and the IT department that supports them. That's a deliberate decision, that's strategic focus. Now we all know the dynamics of work are forever changed. The remote and hybrid working patterns of the pandemic combined with years of technology innovation have fundamentally changed people's expectations of work. And companies are struggling with where it goes from here.
So let me give you the answer. The answer is there's not one answer, there is no one size fits all. Every company has to decide what works for their culture and in their competitive environment. But more importantly, there is no one size fits all for work inside a company. Within your organizations, there are different employee personas with very different needs. Putting ourselves in the shoes of today's new hybrid workforce, the dialogue needs to evolve and the tools have to evolve too.
So to that end, I want an invite to the stage our best subject matter expert, the man leading the technical charge in re-imagining work. Please welcome Ed Ward, president of our Client Product Group. Hey Ed. Thanks for joining us. Let's go look at let's look at some gear, how about it?
So, all right Ed, I just shared how we are unique in that we focus equally on the people and the IT departments that make up the modern enterprise. So, let's start with the people. We've given you a pretty clear mission, create the absolute best solutions in the industry for hybrid work.
Absolutely Chuck. You know, we have a long history of delighting our end users and we know that the bar only keeps rising in this hybrid world of hybrid work. So let's talk about this one. What's this one? Well that Chuck, that's our Latitude 7440.
It's the world's smallest and lightest 14-inch premium commercial laptop it is designed for on-the-go workers. Think of sales agents in the field. Chuck, the device is just so light. So light, weighs just a smidge over one kilogram or 2.3 pounds. Incredibly light while also passing military-grade specs for sturdiness and durability. Bottom line, it's light with no compromise.
And you know there's a keyboard on here, all laptops have keyboards, but this one might look like a typical one, but it's not because this keyboard, this device features the world's first keyboard using mini LED backlight technology. We use very small, very efficient mini LEDs about the size of a grain of sand and this technology is way more efficient. It uses up to 75% less power than standard backlight keyboards translates into almost three additional hours of battery life. We're so pleased with the performance and the mobility benefits that we've seen here. We're using this technology in most of our 7000 and 9000 series Latitude products. It's an amazing example of us addressing core customer needs through our technology innovation. In this case,
look a lighter laptop with longer battery life. Absolutely, that's right Chuck. And it's just one of the meaning examples of how we continue to innovate and push the boundaries for our customers. You know,
I think about what we have across the entire Latitude family, from the keyboards I just talked about to the first haptic collaboration touchpad that provides a more immersive work-from-everywhere experience to Dell Optimizer, an AI infused application that learns how you use your PC and automatically configures it for enhanced productivity. All of these innovations, they work together to give our end users the best devices for hybrid work. Now, add in a great modern OS like Windows 11. You saw our strong partnership with Microsoft earlier and the solution is unbeatable for our commercial customers.
That's what we wake up every day thinking about. Well, Ed, maybe let me pivot to another persona. So say I'm a high-ambition application developer looking to push the envelope on AI. What do we have for them? I'm glad you asked that Chuck. Like you mentioned earlier, AI is the hot topic of the day.
There's a common misconception out there that AI development only takes place in purpose-built data centers and this just isn't the case. So let's talk about that app developer. You know, they have to train models, they have to experiment with algorithm development. They have to do data cleaning and structuring, inference testing and more. The process is extremely iterative. It can take hundreds or even thousands of trial experiments to perfect our neural network algorithm.
This is where our powerful precision workstations come into play. We offer the most effective hardware and software solutions. We support GPU and multi-GPU acceleration, CPU, multi-threading and more. All this power helps developers to train large AI models with anywhere from 5 million to 500 million parameters all while running AI at the edge, and controlling the training data locally. Okay, well let's turn to the IT department. So, whenever I talk to customers, security is almost always the first topic that comes up in a world of distributed work.
Exactly Chuck. We have the most secure commercial PCs in the industry for a reason. Dell's safe BIOS technology has defenses built in at the BIOS and the hardware level.
Did you know we're the only OEM to provide off-host BIOS verification? I did know that. Okay. I thought you would - was a little test there. I thought you would. I thought you would. But but think of it like this.
The BIOS has a unique fingerprint and we have this fingerprint that we store securely off the device. IT can then verify the fingerprint they see matches the ones stored in that secure device. To confirm the PC BIOS has not been tampered with. This is really important because BIOS-level attacks really hard to detect, even harder to remediate. They can live on a machine even after it's wiped or re-imaged. And we're doing something really similar with our supply chain as well. Absolutely, Chuck.
We're leveraging this technology to use a similar approach to the digital fingerprint. Every component of the PC can be verified by IT. So you can be sure that the PC is delivered as it was built from the factory. No supply chain tampering, no surprises.
We're the only OEM with this level of supply chain assurance. But you know, IT departments aren't only asking us about security. Sustainability tops the list as well. And we're helping our customers choose a more sustainable future by choosing Dell. Last year alone, we used more than 55 million pounds of sustainable materials in our products. We offer recovery and recycling for services for business customers in 36 countries. And we've made incredible progress on our packaging goals.
Our Latitudes, for example, come in 100% recyclable packaging. Okay, Ed, one more thing before you go. Earlier I mentioned the pressure companies are feeling to make every IT dollar count. How can we help customers move the value line inside of IT from a PC perspective? Absolutely Chuck, we know the pressure. I know it well, looking at my budget. So every day our customers talk to us about the importance of PCs and timing their refresh cycles so that their employees have the best devices so they can be the most productive. But almost every one of these conversations is against the backdrop of the economic situation as well as tight IT budgets.
That leads me right into a new offering we're announcing today, our APEX PC-as-a-Service. This is really important because companies can continue to innovate and deploy the latest technology with predictable cost on more flexible terms. But we're not just talking about devices, peripherals, software services all personalized to your specific needs. And for those customers out there, especially small and medium businesses, who don't have dedicated IT resources, well, they can outsource the management of their devices to Dell with our APEX Managed Device Service.
It's all great stuff, Ed. Delight the end user, simplify IT, advance sustainability and never compromise. That's our strategy. Nicely done Ed, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me, Chuck. So let's turn to multicloud. True multicloud by design requires something easy to say and very hard to do - the freedom to seamlessly run workloads wherever your business needs dictate unconstrained by technology. Running the right workloads in the right environment, optimizing your public cloud spend, giving developers access to the innovation across the cloud ecosystem.
To enable that, you need three things. First, a set of ground-to-cloud capabilities. We originally called this Project Alpine, our solution for extending our advanced storage software capabilities out to public clouds. Second, you need cloud-to-ground capabilities to bring the cloud experience of all major cloud stacks down to on-premise IT.
And finally, you need air traffic control. You need consolidated deployment, monitoring and management across your estates and the ability to enable data mobility. Now Michael and Satya just announced huge innovations for Azure hybrid environments across both ground-to-cloud with APEX Block Storage for Azure and cloud-to-ground with Apex cloud platform for Azure.
Now these are the core building blocks for a multicloud by design strategy in Azure environments. How about we bring this to life through a real-world implementation? Please help me welcome Roshan Navagamuwa, CIO at CVS Health. Roshan. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it. So, look, at Dell, we talk about multicloud by design, not by default. And what you're doing at CVS Health is a fantastic example of that. But,
before we get into your vision and momentum in multicloud, can you remind us who CVS Health is? Absolutely. We are the leading health solutions company for consumers in the United States. We do that through our presence in the local community with over 9,000 retail locations across the country. We have a digital presence with over 47 million digital unique users and we have over a hundred million members in our Aetna Health Plan and our Caremark pharmacy benefits. So we hope we've got a few customers in the room today.
I think you have a lot of customers in the room. So let's talk multicloud. You're several phases into a really ambitious and forward-looking cloud strategy. Can you tell us how you're approaching cloud and why? Yeah, we started by working back from what mattered, our mission, which is to make healthcare more accessible, more affordable, and to improve outcomes. To do that we needed fluid technology to be digital-first and to be data-driven.
And to do all of that we had to take advantage of all the capabilities, the innovation that was available across clouds as well as tap into our internal systems. And we got started small, but soon we were powering our digital experiences, our data and analytics workloads in the cloud. And while the strategy was working, the problem was that it was unsustainable, it was unmanageable from an administrative perspective with fragmented environments, with, you know, the complexity becoming a little bit too much. We stepped back and we were more intentional about what I call phase two of our hybrid multicloud strategy with where we did a better job with enterprise architecture, did a better job with selecting common products and services across all the clouds across our data centers, like the data domain products for data protection. Once we did that, we were able to scale up and we were able to launch over 1200 of our applications into the cloud, thousands of developers, petabytes of storage, and we're able to do that very efficiently thanks to the partnership with Dell and frankly a number of the partners in the room today.
Well look, we're super proud to be your partner on that journey. You've been a really early adopter of many of our modern data center and multicloud solutions, including APEX Block Storage for Azure. The brand new solution Michael and Satya just announced, would love to hear about your experience with APEX Block Storage for Azure and more broadly how Dell solutions are enabling this multicloud.
I'll start with the second question first, Chuck. Broadly speaking, given the diversity of our businesses and the scale that we have, we need a spectrum of technologies to be able to solve for those things for the different parts of our business. So for example, we need edge solutions for our retail locations. We need hyperconverged solutions for the clinical workloads in our data centers and we need a dynamic Flex on Demand kind of capacity for all of our digital experiences and for our data workloads. And Dell has that spectrum of technology for us. But just as importantly, what we found was it's important to simplify and standardize all of it so it's manageable so that we actually can be agile and scale as efficiently as possible.
And that's what I really like about solutions like APEX Block Storage for Azure. Because I think not only do you simplify and standardize, what you've done though now is to go deeper into the technology stack. And I think that, you know, at least for us, we think we're gonna be able to reduce, significantly, the amount of shared storage we're gonna use in Azure, which all it does, it helps us use more of it more efficiently, more cost effectively. So we're really happy with that. And just stepping back, as a technology officer for a company, one of the things that I look for is - how do we solve business problems and create value by unlocking our DevOps teams to go faster, to be able to do more? And you know, working with Dell and, and the engineering partnership we have, the innovation with you and the ecosystem has been really powerful for us. So thank you.
Well it's so fantastic. We're so grateful to be your partner. Great to see the positive impact it's having on your business. Thanks again for being here today. Thank you Rash. Thanks for having me. Take care.
So, APEX Azure is the right answer for CVS Health and we're super excited to be working with them. But, putting you at the center of the multicloud world means working with all the major cloud providers. So, continuing ground-to-cloud innovations, we're equally excited today to announce APEX Block Storage for AWS and APEX File Storage for AWS.
This brings the software IP of our flagship file and block storage platforms to AWS. Now on the block side, this means linear scale-out performance, better resiliency and native mobility. And on the file side, it means enterprise-grade data protection, extreme scalability and native mobility. But wait,
there's more. Shifting to cloud-to-ground and our APEX cloud platforms, how we extend public cloud operating environments to on-premise IT. In addition to our Azure announcements, we're continuing our tight collaboration with VMware, with APEX Cloud Platform for VMware.
This is our purpose-built cloud platform for VMware virtualized environments using Dell's high-performance software, defined storage and automated lifecycle management. This is for customers looking to move and scale their workloads across their public cloud and on-premise environments and looking to streamline operations by tapping into existing VMware skill sets. So Azure check, AWS check VMware check. What about multicloud container orchestration? While I recently sat down with Matt Hicks, CEO of Red Hat to talk about that very thing. Take a listen. Well, Matt say hello to Dell Technologies World.
Hey, thanks for having me. Well, thanks for taking the time to have this conversation. Tell us in your own words, what is Red Hat at its core? What are you trying to achieve for your customers? At our core, we want to make customers successful with hybrid cloud and seeing customers be able to combine the best capabilities where they need them - whether that's in data centers, whether it's in public cloud, whether it pushes to the edge for them. That's our goal is to be able to combine these two worlds and make sure that customers can use them and drive innovation in their own spaces with it.
A fun fact for the Dell Technologies World audience, you were a founder of the Red Hat OpenShift team and have been at the forefront of cloud computing ever since. So, maybe we talk about the challenges. How do you see the challenges and opportunities of hybrid cloud and why are Dell and Red Hat natural partners? If I looked at the challenges of hybrid cloud, you have an incredible amount of capability, but you tend to need combine these. You need to be able to build with some standardization across them. You need to be able to run the infrastructure, whether it's in public cloud or on-premise efficiently.
And you have this new class of workloads, like AI type workloads, that are really pushing the envelope in terms of what you can do with it. Our goal with this is seeing these technology innovations like containers with Red Hat OpenShift. I was involved, by the way, in the early days with OpenShift. I don't think much of my code is left there. Seeing these, you know, technology innovations that come in that let customers utilize those options better. It really is a, it's a shift in how you build applications which, you can take advantage of. Matt, It's exactly how we think about innovation at Dell as well.
it's really customer-led. I think it was natural for us to ask ourselves, "Hey, how can Red Hat and Dell sort of lower this operational burden?" So to that end, we're making a big announcement today. APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. This is our new purpose-built, fully integrated platform for deploying OpenShift on-premises.
And it's a big deal. Matt, let's talk about the solution, how it can simplify and advance enterprise container orchestration in multicloud environments. Absolutely. I'm excited about this because when we look at something like OpenShift, we have to create this marriage between the application platform that OpenShift provides, built on Kubernetes, and extending it with the actual infrastructure. And I think that combination - with the APEX Cloud Platform and the deep integration with OpenShift consoles management - lets you use the skills that you have and offers more of that choice of being able to run that on-premise and the way that you want to with simplicity there. And that's where our partnership and the APEX Cloud Platform are gonna bring so much value.
Red Hat brings the open source container ecosystem and Dell brings the leading infrastructure and automation. I totally agree. It moves that requirement of customers to let them focus on their business and what they want to do in their business. And then being able to trust and rely on Red Hat's ability to build, maintain this platform and Dell's ability to build and maintain the infrastructure and having the confidence we're gonna work together and keep that stack running for mission-critical apps. I think it just adds one more component of choice of where customers can apply that innovation. So, we're excited to be doing this with y'all. Thanks for joining us at Dell Technologies World today.
Thanks Chuck. So, let's recap our APEX announcements thus far. From ground-to-cloud, we're delivering on last year's promise of Project Alpine with APEX Block Storage for AWS, APEX Block Storage for Azure and APEX File Storage for AWS. From cloud-to-ground, we're delivering a portfolio of integrated cloud platforms across hybrid cloud, virtualized, multicloud and container orchestration environments with our partners, Microsoft, VMware and Red Hat. So you can choose your preferred cloud service with the security, performance, efficiency and control of an on-premise solution.
And today we're also announcing APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage, and APEX Navigator for Kubernetes. This is to provide that air traffic control that I mentioned earlier, bringing consolidated deployment, monitoring and mobility for APEX block and file storage across multiple public clouds as well as Kubernetes storage management to the APEX Console. This is a game changer.
It provides observability across your cloud estates and helps you optimize them. First, by letting you activate mobility and over time by embedding intelligence into the software that will help you put the right workload in the right place to maximize performance and minimize cost. And finally, to deliver on the promise of APEX across the Dell portfolio, we're also bringing the simplified cloud experience of APEX to compute with APEX Compute. So,
now you can easily configure and deploy scalable and secure bare metal resources on-premise via the APEX Console. Customers can support virtualized or container-based environments by installing the hypervisor or OS of their choice. It's a subscription-based solution that allows you to pay only for what you use.
So look, we stood here last year and committed to taking on the problems of multicloud. I'm incredibly proud of our team and our rate of innovation. From storage, to data protection, to client, to compute, Dell APEX is now the world's most comprehensive as-a-service and multicloud portfolio.
So it provides simple and consistent experiences everywhere. How are we doing? How does that sound as an offer? Huh? So, I have one last announcement for you today. What I hope is coming through loud and clear is that we've built this company to be a natural partner in a complex technology ecosystem. Microsoft,
Red Hat, VMware, we know that solving the challenges of the data era requires us to build an ecosystem of partners. And we're doing that in the data analytics space as well. You told us you want to have the freedom to turn your data into insights wherever resides with your analytics platform of choice. And so to that end, I'm excited to announce a strategic partnership with Databricks. So this is a first-of-its-kind collaboration that allows customers to use Databricks software with Dell object storage to analyze data in place, store results and securely share it with third parties without moving data to the cloud. This extends our broad data analytics ecosystem, which includes recently announced partnerships with Snowflake, Starburst Data and Teradata. Again, it's all about giving you choice.
We're not here to dictate which cloud partners or analytics platform make the most sense for your business. Don't get me wrong, we're opinionated. We'll give you advice, but we're ultimately here to provide you options so you can innovate without any limitations. So, let's bring it home. We've talked today a lot about how we're solving the tough technical challenges because that's how we help you turn ideas into innovation, which brings me back to where I started, our purpose - driving human progress, applying technology to our most pressing challenges. Challenges like climate change and access to healthcare and education.
Over the last few years, the rate of technology innovation has accelerated, transforming the way we work and the way we live. But not everyone has benefited from the power of all that progress. Too often it's the people who need it most who are left behind.
That's why digital inclusion is one of our most pressing global challenges in need of collective action. It requires innovation, a sense of urgency and partnership. Partnership like ours with UNICEF. Today, half of the world's schools, which is about 5 million schools, aren't connected to the internet. That limits the opportunities of all of these children across the globe. In order to shine a light on the challenges of digital inclusion, you need both technology and strong partnerships.
That is why we have partnered with UNICEF on the Giga project. Their mission is to connect every school across the globe with the internet. And for us at Dell, this helps us achieve our mission of improving 1 billion lives by 2030 through digital inclusion. GIGA's goal is to connect every school to the internet by 2030. Oftentimes when you start working with a country or government, either they don't know where their schools are, other times some locations are incorrect.
The first thing that we do is to map a schools standard connectivity status. That's where we are applying AI techniques to process higher solution imagery at scale and automatically map schools. Thanks to Dell's high-performance competing systems, we were able to process all these images nine times faster than without this type of technologies. And this saved weeks and weeks of working time. Since 2019, GIGA has mapped an incredible 2.2 million schools across 138 countries and connected more than 2 million students in 20 countries.
The impact we have fits great because by connecting schools, we also connect communities around the school to the internet. The impact goes beyond just having access to connectivity, but it has impact the entire way these communities live and access information. We recognize this is an ambitious mission, but we also see that this is possible. It's achievable through the power of technology, partnership and innovation.
A child youth education can shape the life they want and change the world. Pretty powerful stuff. What do you think, Michael? Well look, I mean this is really the promise of technology - to solve the unsolved problems, to drive innovation and ultimately to make a positive and, you know, constructive change in the world with big ideas that can make a big difference. That's right. Ideas like those at Hyundai, Lightstorm, CVS and UNICEF. And the ideas that are still waiting in the minds of the children that are experiencing technology and connectivity for the first time, millions and millions of them around the world.
So we're so proud to be part of their stories and part of all your stories. Please enjoy Dell Technologies World. We look forward to being with you over the next several days. Thank you.
2023-05-24 21:51
