The Cube at Dell Technologies World 2022 | Dell Technologies World 2022
thecube presents dell technologies world brought to you by dell welcome back to thecube's coverage day one dell technologies world live from las vegas at the venetian lisa martin here with dave vellante and john furrier guys let's talk first of all first time back in person since dell tech world 2019 lots going on lots of news today i'm going to start with you dave since you're closest to me what are some of the things that have impressed you at this first in-person event in three years well the first thing i want to say is so john and i we started the cube in 2010 john right in boston emc world now of course dale owns emc so wow it's good to be back here dale built this beautiful set i i said the number one thing that surprised me was how many people were here airport was packed cab lines the line at the palazzo the hotel to get in was you know probably an hour long and there's i thought there'd be maybe 5 000 people here i would say it's closer to eight so the the hall was packed today and everybody was pumped michael dell was so happy to be up on stage he talked i don't know if you guys saw his keynote i mean he he basically talked obviously how great it is to be back but he he talked about their mission-building technologies that enable the better human condition it was big you know chewy words right and then they got into you know all those all the cool stuff they're doing so we can get into it uh but they had cvs up on stage they had usaa on stage a big theme was trust which of course if you're dell um you know you want people to trust you i guess the other thing is this is the first live event that they've had since the vmware spin right so in 2019 they owned vmware yeah vmware is no longer part of the income statement dell had a ton of debt back then now dell's balance sheet looks actually better than vmware's because they restructured everything and so it's a world without vmware where now with vmware the gross margins were in the 30 plus percent range now they're down to 20 so we're now asking what's next for dell and they stood up on stage we can talk about it some more but a lot of multi-cloud a lot of cyber resilience obviously big themes around apex you know hybrid work john so let's get into that what are some of the key things that you heard today well first of all the customers on stage are always great dell's technology's 10 years for the cube and their history i saw something back here 25 years with celebrating precision the history of michael dell's journey and the current dell technologies with emc folded in and a little bit of vmware dna still in there even though they're separated out just has a loyal set of customers and you ruined the hallways here you see a lot of people know dale love dell michael dale himself was proud to talk before the event about his number one dave and pc market share that's been his goal to beat hp for years and so he's got that done but they're transforming their business because they have to the data center is now cloud cloud is now the distributed computing dell has all the piece parts dave we've covered this three years ago now it's turned into multi-cloud which is multi-vendor as a service is how the consumers consume innovate with data that's kind of the raw material future of work and obviously the partners that they have so i think dell is going to continue to maintain the news of being the great in the front lines as a data center slash enterprise now cloud edge player so you know i'm impressed with their constant reinvention of the company and the news hits all the cards snowflake partnership cutting edge company in the cloud partnership snowflake apex their product that's innovating at the edge this new kind of product that's going to bring it together unifying all those themes dave we're all hitting the marks chuck whitten up on stage obviously was the he was the multi-cloud you know conversation and i i think the vision that they they're laying out and jeff clark talked about it as well is a a term that john and i coined we can't remember who coined it john or me super cloud and they're talking about building an abstraction layer building on top of the clouds connecting on-prem to the clouds across clouds out to the edge hiding the underlying complexity dell managing all that that's their vision it's aspirational today but that really is super cloud and it's more than multi-cloud we you coined the term super cloud we riffed together i called it sub cloud that's right sub cloud and i said no it's going to float over super superman flies right that's right sub cloud not really a good name my kid gave it to me john actually i told him we do know that michael dell watches the cube he's been on thecube many times he watches the cube clearly he's paying attention yeah well i hope so i mean we write a lot about this and we talk to a lot of customers and talk to a lot of people but let's talk about the announcements if we can so the apex cyber recovery service you know ransomware recovery they're now also running that on aws and azure so that's big we heard presidio they were super thrilled about that so there i think i'd say about that is you know dell used to be really defensive about cloud now that i think they're leaning in they're saying hey we're not going to spend you know charles fitzgerald the snarky guy does some good work on capex i mean you look at how much the cloud guys are spending on capex you're 30 40 billion they can't compete on cloud capex doesn't want to compete can't compete build on top of that so that's a gift so that's cool um for you mentioned the snowflake announcement i thought that was big what that is it's very interesting so frank slootman has always said we're not doing a halfway house we're in the cloud okay so square that circle for me now snowflake's coming on-prem well yeah what they're doing is allowing customers to keep data in a dell object store ecs or other object stores and but use snowflake so non-native snowflake data on-prem so that expands snowflake cloud what it also does is give dell a little sizzle a little better partner and there's a path to cloud migration if that's where the customers want to go i mean i would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before vmware and aws yeah but we've talked about this don't you think that was the right move for vmware at the time but if you don't nurture the relationship aws will take all those customers ultimately from vmware but that product's still doing very well we'll see with netapp is another one netapp on aws i forget what they call it but yeah file anywhere so that was go ahead as i said what do you think what's the impact to snowflake why do you think snowflake chose dell because dell's the 101 billion dollar company and they have a huge distribution channel and a lot of common customers they own storage on the premise yep and so snowflakes looking for you know storage options on which they can you know bring data into their cloud i mean snowflake wants the data to go from on pla into the cloud there's no question i would add another thing is that snowflake can't do what dell technologies does on premises with storage and dell can't do what snowflake's doing so i think it's a mutual short-term and medium-term benefit to say hey you want to run a snowflake and use some services there great but come back and use dell so that to me i think is a win-win for snowflake just the dangerous game is whoever can develop the higher level services in the cloud will ultimately be the winner but i think the thing i would say there is as i said snowflake would love for the the migration to occur but they realize it's not always going to happen and so why not partner with a company like dell you know start that pipeline and fidel hey you know why fight fashion as jeremy burton would say the other thing was project alpine which is file block and object across cloud that's again setting up this super cloud and then apex i mean apex is the discussion we had a one-on-one session a bunch of analysts with uh jeff budreau runs isg we were supposed to be talking about isg all we talked about is apex then we had another session with apex and all we talked about of course is apex so they're still figuring that out i would say at this point they don't quite have product market fit and i think they'd mention they'd admit that but they're working hard on scaling engineering trying to figure out the channel model the compensation and you know taking their time but moving fast if you know what i mean i mean dave i think the big trend that's jumping out of me here is that something that we've been covering the headless cloud meaning if you can do as a service which is one of dell's major points today that to me everyone is a pass layer i think everyone that's building digital transformation apps has to be their own sas so they either do that with somebody a managed service which fits beautifully into that trend or do it own now e-commerce has this nailed down shopify or build your own on top of the cloud so headless retail is a hot trend you're gonna start to see that come into the enterprise where the enterprise can have their cake and eat it too and take advantage of managed services where they don't have expertise so those two things right there i think is going to drive a lot of growth for dell so essentially lisa what what dell is doing to say okay we're gonna the timing's good with the vmware spin they say now we're gonna build our own cloud as a service apex and they're starting with infrastructure as a service you know storage as a service obviously cyber recovery as a service so you're going to get compute and storage and data protection eventually they'll move into other areas and it's really important for them to do that to have their own cloud but they've got to build up the ecosystem snowflake is a small example my view they need hundreds and hundreds of snowflakes to fill the gaps you know move up the stack in middleware and database and devops i mean they should be partnering with hashicorp they should be partnering with all these companies that do devops stuff they should be i'd like to see them frankly partner with competitors to their data protection group well you know sounds crazy but if you're going to build a cloud look at aws so they partner with everybody right and so that's what a true cloud experience looks like you got this huge menu and so i think dell's trying going to have to try to differentiate from hp hpe was first right and they're all in dell's saying we're going to let the customers tell us where to go uh and so they i think one differentiation is their ecosystem their ability to build that ecosystem yeah but hp's got a good distribution channel too not just not as bad they all got the assets but they're transforming so i think at the end of the day as dell and even hpe transforms they got to solve the customer problems and reduce the complexity so again the managed services piece with apex is huge i think having the building blocks for multi-hybrid cloud at the edge just you can't go wrong with that if the customers can deploy it and consume it what were some of the messages that you heard from you mentioned cvs on stage usa on stage dell's always been very very customer focused they've got some great brands what did you hear from that customer's voice that shows you they're going in the right direction well first of all customers are long-standing customers of dell technology so that's one recognition of the ongoing partnerships but they're also messaged up with dell's messaging right the telling the dell story and what i heard from the dale's story was moving fast and reducing complexity is their number one goal they see the cloud option has to be there cloud native edge came up a little bit and the role of data so i think all the new application development today that's that's relevant has a data as code kind of concept data engineering is the hottest skill set on the planet right now and data engineering is not data science so you start to see top level csos and cios saying the new modern applications have to have data embedded in it's just too hard it's too hard to find an engineering team so i heard the customers saying we love the direction we love the managed services and by the way we want to have that supply chain and cyber risk reduced so yeah big big endorsement for dell you know the biggest transformation in dell two biggest transformations one was the financials you know the income statement is totally the 101 billion dollar company growing at 17 a year that's actually quite remarkable um but the the flip side of that the other big transformation was the customer and but with the acquisition of emc but specifically vmware it changed the whole conversation for dell with customers i think pre-2015 you wouldn't have had that type of narrative up on stage with customers because it was you know compellent and it was equal logic and it was small businesses now you're talking about really deep strategic relationships that were enabled by that transformation so my point is to answer your question it's going to be really interesting to see what happens post vmware because when vmware came together with dell the industry didn't like it the eco vmware ecosystem was like freaking dell okay but customers loved it right and that's one of the things i heard on stage today they didn't say oh well we love the vmware but he mentioned vmware the the cto from usaa so dell configured this commercial agreement with vmware michael dell's the chairman of both companies so that was part of the incentive the other incentive was tell us the number one distribution channel for vmware so i think they now have that muscle memory in place where they've earned that trust and i think that will continue on past the spin it was actually quite brilliant the way they've orchestrated that yeah lisa one more thing i want to add to that is that what i heard also was you had the classic here's how you be a leader in the modern era it's a big leadership message but then when you heard some of the notes software defined multi-cloud with an emphasis on operations dave so okay if you're a good leader stay with dell in operation so you see strategy and operations kind of coming together around cloud but big software-defined multi-cloud data operational story and i think those customers kind of are kind of on that yeah you got to maintain your operations devops is operations devsecops is operations so big like don't get too greedy on the modern shiny new toy you know uh in in the cloud yeah it's a safe bet right for for infrastructure i mean hpe is a good bet too but i mean dell's got a way broader portfolio bigger supply chain it's got the end to end with the the desktop laptop you know the client-side business you know a bigger services organization and now the big challenge in my mind for for dell is okay what's next and i think they got to get into data management obviously build up as a service build up their cloud they need software in their portfolio i mean you know 20 gross margin company it's just wall street's not as interested you know if they want to build more value which they do they've got to get more into software and i think you're going to see that they're going to think you're going to see more m a i'd love to see more organic r d instead of stock buybacks but i get why they have to do that well one of the things i'm looking at dave in terms of what i think the future impact is going to be is the generational shift with the gen z and millennials running it in the modern era not your old school rack and stack data center mentality and then ultimately the scoreboard will determine in my mind the winner in their race is what where are the workloads running right the workloads and then also what's the application development scene look like what do the apps look like what are they building on what's scaling them what's running them and the edge is going to be a big part of that so to me operations edge workloads and development and then the workforce shift and i do think edge i'm glad you brought up edge edge is you know so fragmented but i think there's going to be a massive opportunity in edge there's going to be so much compute at the edge dell talked about so much data it's unclear to me right now how they go after that other than in pockets like we heard from gil i believe they're going to do really well in retail no question there but there's so much other industrial iot so the telco space of the towers edge and in dell's you know dell server business yeah okay it's at intel and amd inside okay great their high margins come from storage not from compute not the case with aws aws had 35 operating margins last quarter oracle and microsoft that's that's that's the level that they're at and i'd love to see dell figure out a way to get paid more for their compute expertise and that's going to take some r d yeah last question guys as we wrap up our wrap of day one given everything that we've all been through the last couple of years what is your overall summary of what dell announced today the vibe of the show how well have they fared the last two years well i mean they've had a remarkable last two years in a large part thanks to the the client business uh i think today you're seeing you know them lift the the veil on on what's next and i think their story is coherent um there's again some financially they're much a much more sound company much better balance sheet uh not the most attractive income statement from a from a margin standpoint and they got work to do there but wow as far as driving revenue they know how to sell yeah i mean to me i think looking back before the pandemic when we were here on stage last we were talking end to end dell leadership and i say the biggest thing is devil's catching up fast faster than i thought and i think they got a they're skating through where the puck is going dave and i'll tell you why the end to end i thought wouldn't be a total flyer if the edge got too dynamic but the fact that the edge is growing so fast it's more complex that's actually given down more time so to me what i see happening is dell having that extra time to nail the edge piece because once they if they get there if they get there then they'll have their core competency and why do i say that because hardware is back server god boxes are going to be back you're going to see servers at the edge and look at the failure of amazon's outpost okay amazon's outpost was essentially hardware that's dell's business you talk about like compute as as a cloud but they really didn't do well with deploying compute like dell does with servers eks is kicking ass at the edge so serverless with hardware i think is going to be the killer solution at the edge a combination of cloud and edge hardware and the edge looks more like a data center than the cloud looks like the data center so you're saying hardware matters hardware matters hardwarematters.com check out that site coming soon i think it matters more than ever you know silicon advances i think the reason the hardware matters is because it's it's it's barbelling it's going from the box to the silicon and it's going you know upstream into software defined horizontally scalability means good silicon at the edge under the cover scaling all the stuff and then machine learning and ai and the applications so we've said this on the cube now what five years now guys we get an action pack tonight tonight two days tomorrow and wednesday michael dell is on tomorrow chuck whitten is on jeff clark et cetera et cetera caitlyn gordon is on wednesday all the heavy hitters are coming on they're coming on they're going to be allison dews coming on we're going to talk about the matthew mcconaughey uh interview which was i thought fantastic uh uh jj davis is coming on uh so we're gonna have a a great channel discussion as well uh with cheryl cook that's right a lot of the product people are coming on we're going to be talking apex it's going to be good with cyber recovery that's the storage alchemist is coming on john i can't wait to see that one stick around guys for our coverage all day tomorrow tuesday and wednesday lisa martin with dave vellante and john furrier coming to you live from the venetian in las vegas this is dell technologies world 2022 we look forward to seeing you tomorrow and the next day
2022-05-05 21:05
