Steve McDowell  0:03  
Hey, Matt, it's time for another DataCentric podcast. 

Matt Kimball  0:06  
Right on Steve, how you doing? What are we gonna.. What are we going to talk about this week?

Steve McDowell  0:10  
It's all about servers.

Matt Kimball  0:11  
We have a special guest was trying to been trying to book this guy for about a year. His agent always tells us he's he's busy. He's traveling the world. Building villages digging wells. This is one of the big celebrities out of out of Round Rock, right? It is. Yeah, his name is Jonathan Sackler. He's a Director of Product Marketing at at Dell I don't know if it's Dell Technologies Dell EMC. I don't know like what they like to go by but he is the dude when it curves the power all Dell

Jonathan Seckler  0:44  
doesn't say we're all Dell Technologies now. So yeah, thanks.

Matt Kimball  0:47  
There we go.

Jonathan Seckler  0:48  
What are you doing? Well, it's you know, it's a it's a late summer here in Texas and it's nice and warm out. So there's there's there's lots to do. It's really What's

going on? Yeah,

Matt Kimball  1:02  
yeah, it's a Steve, you don't know this. And rod, you definitely don't know this because you're in Massachusetts, but it's, it's, it's about 100 and 405. It's going to continue to be this way for the next few days. So, welcome to Texas summers. That's warm. Yeah. Yeah. So listen, we brought Jonathan on to talk about kind of what's going on at, at Dell Technologies, some of the cool stuff that's going on in server world. And some of the observations he has not necessarily belt specific, but observations he has around the it consumer market and kind of what he sees in some of the shifting demographics and stuff. You and I have talked about seeing the younger crowd coming in and unseating us old guys, and kind of how they're consuming and in buying technology nowadays. No, that's a great topic. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. So, Jonathan, let's just jump in if that's okay. All right. So you're I do want Kind of give us the two minute intro of who you are, you know what you do outside of you know, when you're not busy saving the world?

Jonathan Seckler  2:08  
Yeah, no thanks. Um, so my name is Jonathan Sackler. I've been with Dell, almost 10 years, as I'm fond of saying it's the longest relationship I've had outside of my family. And I have the privilege of leading the server marketing team here and working on the power edge and open manage brands. And as you pointed out, I think is one of the big areas of focus are very areas of interest that I see in the market today is, is we seem to be in this generational shift in it, where the the typical it buyer is starting to, you know, I'm gonna use this phrase, I know I'm gonna offend everyone. They're gonna they're aging out and younger. buyers are coming in. And it's an interesting time. That reminds me a lot of how there was a transition, you know, 20 years ago, when people shifted from buying desktop PCs as a form factor to preferring laptops. And you're seeing a, it's almost a similar shift. Partially, I think, coming from that same generational shift.

Steve McDowell  3:27  
So I look at these young guys, I look at these young guys, and do they care about servers? It seems. So before I did what I'm doing now, I managed a bunch of engineers. And all I wanted to do was go on to Amazon and use their expense account and spin up a VM. They didn't care, right? That's exactly that's not always the responsible way to do it.

Jonathan Seckler  3:48  
No, that's and that's exactly the challenge we have at Dell Technologies is, you know, it is a lot easier to whip out a credit card and buy an instance on Amazon, no doubt how However, I think, you know, the the the opportunity is that as buyers then build their businesses, that that is not always sustainable. I mean, you there's there's there's a inherent I think infrastructure challenges that you get when you have that, you know, when you do that because you just can't predict the scale of what you need to do. And so costs can can run out of control. I think there's always, I think, a back of mind security concern that you have to keep in mind there's, you know, seems like once a quarter, if not more often, there's always some kind of either a big outage or a big exposure of something, because someone misconfigured a file or someone, you know, did the permissions wrong, or just something bad happened, those kind of things happen. And so that's certainly a concern. And, you know, I think also there's just there is an agility factor that can go both ways. I think, you know, a lot of guys it's like I said, it's easy To start up an instance at a at a cloud provider, but once you get into some of these, some of the things that people want to do these days, especially around areas like, you know, in emerging technologies or artificial intelligence, etc, you can do something small. But we are, we're starting to see a real barrier between a between pilot projects that are done on the cloud and production level implementations that that businesses just can't afford to solely leverage the cloud there. There has to be, you know, a, an infrastructure component. Right, right. scaling is always going to be a challenge. And there's any hidden cost and complexity in the cloud.

Matt Kimball  5:41  
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny, Robbie, and Steve, you you bring up a good point about the net. Notice this with a lot of the younger generation, it's a it's a software first world, right? It's solid software defined, or the cloud near the clarification of the data center. But ironically and Rob, you hit on this, it's Jonathan, you've hit on this, it seems to me that the, you know, in this era of software defined and cloudification infrastructure has arguably never been more important because of the potential for exploits. And you think about hedge you think about the movement of data from, you know, unsecured points, or across unsecured lines from point A to point B. And the the ability to secure that data, manage that data, lock that data down, it seems like that's the problem, potentially never been more important than, than today. Oh,

Jonathan Seckler  6:32  
yeah. I mean, and, and I think the geopolitical, you know, issues are becoming more important as part of that and exactly it so, you know, the, the data, you know, the, the statistic everyone likes to quote is that, you know, over half your data is being created somewhere else, you know, outside of your normal data center, and getting access to that data. You Using it doing something with it and you know, actually gaining something out of it. And then and then acting on it is, is not always a straightforward of a problem or, or a process that you would think it is because another statistics like we'd like to throw out at Dell is that the cost to move data from the from an edge type location, you know, outside of your data center into the, into the data center is all one of those metrics we saw is it's almost equivalent to about 30% of the cost of actually do something with it. So you're adding but you know, you're adding a third of your of your cost. It's just in the transportation of all that information. And

Steve McDowell  7:40  
it's not just the edge to right, it's you have the same sort of economic constraints, moving it in and out of the cloud, right? Yeah. Yeah. recipes on Amazon are a huge source of revenue. And, and I didn't realize that the term data gravity came from an engineer at Dell. I was listening to Matt Baker's podcast last week. Because Baker's Yeah. And he talked about the origin of that turn, but the idea that, you know, processing follows data. And wherever data is most economical to store that's where you want to put your servers. And more and more, it seems to me as I look at this, that's on prem somehow, right, whether that's in a cell phone rack, or we're starting to see in a very interesting Adele's perspective on this, we're starting to see more, you know, on prim consumption base capacity on demand models, right, like your private cloud stuff. Yeah.

Jonathan Seckler  8:33  
Yeah, no, I think that's a great point, I think because to your point, it is a data gravities that are definitely an issue and egress fees, like you said, are a big, big thing. The other part of it too, is that the types of applications and the types of things that we actually want to do with information these days, has really exploded. You know, we introduced a brand new line of servers back in February to the world At the poweredge Xc series, and XC at the time it stood for emerging extreme emerging form factors. And it is it's actually meant to be a portfolio of servers that are built to unique environmental constraints. And the first one we introduced was an edge server. It was a, at a short DEP. It had a very dense form factor. It had extended temperature range capabilities, all that fun stuff. But one of the interesting things that we had to build into the server was the need to include alternative acceleration technology from you know, partners like Nvidia and Intel, we had to build in massive, you know, massive for the space storage capacity into it, because the type of things that people are doing are no longer it's no longer monitoring something out the edge or or serving a serving up a file or or some kind of experience. There's There's actually intelligence, there's actually things that are going on. And so the requirements are just, they just start to stack up on each other.

Matt Kimball  10:07  
So Rob with Jonathan keep saying, Rob, I'm looking at Jonathan With that said, can't take my eyes off of you, Rob. With that said, Jonathan, is there? Do you find this, you know, this, this need to kind of as all of these emerging use cases, start to come in and deployment models start to come in? Do you find the need? You know, xe is it's almost I won't, I don't wanna say specialized, but do you find the need to kind of start tailoring the infrastructure to this brave new world, if you will? of it? Yeah. That would drive.

Jonathan Seckler  10:46  
No, that's exactly yeah, I think that's exactly it, you know, within the data center. The world has standardized quite a bit and, and, and a lot of, you know, our competition. We'll talk about coming monetization, but from a form factor and a power requirement and a, you know, environmental standpoint, yeah, you've got to standardize in order to maximize the utilization of the space and the capacity. But then when you leave the data center, then, you know, obviously, you have to adjust for new requirements, new environments, new new capabilities, and we're seeing that kind of bifurcation of the model, you know, servers are coming, you know, they come in a standard size, so many rack units, you know, the depth and width can only go so far, you know, based on based on rocks and technology, but, but for certain use cases, there is benefit to to evolving in a form factor or innovating capability inside or outside of those constraints. And we're seeing that becoming almost, you know, I don't want to say they're becoming more commonplace, but becoming more common enough that we want to be ahead of this, you know, the potential rise of new standards or new form factors, right? Yeah. So so there's that little bit of that, too.

Matt Kimball  12:11  
What's your what's your challenge as a product marketing guy, right, you're out there kind of positioning telling the story, all the I mean, it's a lot more difficult than, you know, some people may realize, what are your biggest challenges and kind of, you know, all of these. And it's not just that it's AMD and Intel based platforms, right. I mean, versity suppliers and how do you how do you navigate that and telling that story to these young kids that are

Jonathan Seckler  12:40  
that are coming out? One of the Yeah, one of the there's, there's a there's there's a lot of different ways to think about that, because I think you're, you're hitting on about three different, you know, vectors that are that are happening in the world. I think, on the one hand, while technology is standardized, and I think you know, going back to what is Even said earlier, you know, most modern engineers today just just, they just they don't want to deal with the hardware, they want to deal with the outcome, the solution, the the application that they're working on, and just, they just want to work. And so technology becomes less of a compelling factor from a value proposition standpoint. However, the opposite is also true. We are seeing some amazing innovation in technology out there. I mean, not just you know, and I'm not talking just about Dell, but as you pointed out, you know, Intel introduced storage class memory with octane, persistent memory as a as a new factor last year, AMD epic, you know, it's gone through its second generation of technology already, and is just just taking over at the high end and a lot of HPC and an AI type environments. So technology matters what we're sending video graphics and accelerator type technology, FPGAs, etc. Really the attach rate of those devices into standard servers is growing at almost the same pace. So you're seeing a lot of, on the one hand, you have the the users probably don't care about the technology, but they're the demands, they're putting on the platforms, the technology itself is driving a lot of innovation. And, and the third part of it, you know, the third vector that you're saying what, from a marketers big challenges is that the things that people say that they really value? performance, the reliability and quality of a system, and things like that are what you know, certainly true. We're not you know, there, those are certainly factors out there. The new buyer, really, I think, achieves that goal of performance through scale. they achieve that reliability, almost through the agility that they have in the in the market. texture of the applications they're building. And it really becomes a

challenge to provide that.

You know, peace of mind or that that stability story to that, you know, that underpins so much of what we build, but, but but appeal to and and address the needs of newer buyers who are looking for, you know, you know, they're they're looking for a solution. And the underlying technology is a it's a factor they do. It's I don't want to say it's not important, but it is definitely not their reason for bonding. Right? They,

Matt Kimball  15:41  
yeah, well, it used to be in the days and Steve and I, and I mean we knew in previous days as well right? It used to be eating feeds and speeds and feeds and speeds and feeds and that's no longer what excites Dan stupid on the credit card scam right? It never it no longer excites people. It's about time to value it's about it is about performance. But performance is measured differently than clock speed.

Jonathan Seckler  16:07  
Yeah, that's, you know, that's and that's a good way to think of it. It's performance is measured differently. You know, it's why we see it's such a great success with VX rail at Dell, you know, this, it's, it's not just hyper converged infrastructure, right. VX rail actually adds a lot of service level capability and a lot of technology, a lot of automation on top of it, so that people actually get that outcome faster. And I never I my introduction to all this was to VX rail was about three years ago. Madison energy I think, in Wisconsin or Wisconsin and I forget the name of the company, but the their head of it came on stage and talked about how he was shifting his infrastructure to VX rail. And you know, he was doing it because he didn't, you know, he he needed the he needed to achieve a goal and he didn't want to He's time getting there. He wanted, you know, one of the easy button, and that's what he got. So you really have to lean into that idea that you're selling that you're selling the whole not the drill, you know, these days, even more than, right?

Matt Kimball  17:14  
Yeah, that's a good one selling the hole, not the drill. I gotta use that one with my kid tonight. I don't know how I'm gonna use it some. Hey, one of the things. Steve, did you want to add on to that? I didn't mean to.

Steve McDowell  17:28  
No, no. Go ahead, Matt.

Matt Kimball  17:30  
One of the things that wanted to hit on and before we get there, let me ask you this looking back over the span of 2020s. Ben, this is a weird year right. And it's it's weird in so many different ways. But you know COVID in particular and the impact of of it consumers and kind of deployments in the such, you know, have you found that given given the the kind of All of the craziness that's gone over the last few months said certain types of deployments, you've seen more interest in versus others or, you know, have you seen a, you know, kind of a shift within, you know, the the adult customers or, you know,

Jonathan Seckler  18:16  
they've definitely been renewed and, and focus on building for, you know, from an infrastructure standpoint, building for disaster recovery. There was there was a lot of that enabling the remote workforce, certainly a big factor and and, and deli you know, and I will say Dell as a company has really responded to that both for both for our customers but for ourselves as well. You know, I've been working from my home now since the end of February because of Coronavirus. And I our own it has, you know, the ability, their ability to respond quickly to this change, and ensure uninterrupted service for the hundreds, you know, over 100,000 employees that are working remotely now is, you know, is pretty impressive. I, you know, we all in every company love to make fun of it and, you know, our own IT shops, but I'll never say that about it again, they really stepped up to the to the challenge. And I think that that's and we've been able to leverage that and help other customers do the same thing. And we're seeing that, you know, seeing that happen, as well. So, so yeah, there's definitely a renewed focus on how do I enable my workforce to do their jobs wherever they are, and raise that productivity level.

Matt Kimball  19:45  
And one of the reasons why I asked that is it ties into something you mentioned at the outset of that you oversee and that's open manage, and this ability for IT shops to remotely deploy remotely monitor remotely manage and keep that environment up and running without having to be, you know, walking up and down the aisles of a data center. You and I have talked about this previously To me it's the most underrated and, and, and best kept secret of Dell Technologies. But there's a lot going on there. Right. I keep it.

Jonathan Seckler  20:25  
Yeah, I mean, it's I like to refer it I, I've heard it referred to as it's like the most important feature that no one will buy. Right? Because it's, it's there. It's critical. You it's never Top of Mind and an RFP necessarily, you know, but but it but if you don't have it, you really do suffer and open manage, has been or is a is a great asset to our customers. You know, our open manage portfolio spans the the capability of a server infrastructure management from a, from the most basic, hey, I need to know if the server is on or not to, you know, how do I integrate my alerts that I get in a software console with ServiceNow. So that so that my IT team can, you know, can respond to outages proactively. And. And yeah, and so we're seeing a real interest in that. And I think we're getting a lot of benefit from it. And as we've tightened up our integrations with Microsoft and with VMware, so that, that that experience becomes seamless to the administrator, regardless of whether they're a hardware administrator, you know, hardware hardware admin sysadmin, or someone who's working in the software. And we think that that gives us a little bit of an advantage of our competition, but I think it's also good for the user as well. They don't have to change screens just to, to see what's going on or to make a change.

Matt Kimball  22:04  
And that's thousands and thousands of servers supported simultaneously, patch.

Jonathan Seckler  22:11  
patch management updates, proactive service alerting, graceful firmware patch management in a cluster, like, you know, and like you said in a, like a Microsoft environment or a VMware environment where you don't have to interrupt service to the user, you can migrate the VMs gracefully as you update the server you know, the infrastructure underlying underlying it move you know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

Matt Kimball  22:37  
Yeah, it's a it's it's funny because it's being an ex IT person and spending time in the management space server management space. It's something that's always in my it's always near and dear to my heart when I talk to folks that are still in the IT world. And by the way, we are worthy of ridicule and making fun of that's okay, you can

Jonathan Seckler  22:59  
win Yeah, not anymore. It's kind of like yeah, you once you once you step up like you're like they have you can't make fun of anymore.

Matt Kimball  23:07  
Yeah. Then we're like the nurses of the data center.

Jonathan Seckler  23:10  
That's right. Yeah, that's a good one. I'll start using that. Don't use that. Just

Matt Kimball  23:17  
but I mean, I'd say this is this is one of those topics management, server management, environmental management, data center management is a topic that is always top of mind. It's been top of mind. You know, since I've been in the industry, it's constantly evolving. And but I think a lot of folks that kind of get caught up in the server world or they hear about a person from from Dell coming on and they immediately think like poweredge or maybe even poweredge Xc but they forget about all of this kind of glamorous glue that really makes it really is the separator or separates Dell from a lot of other companies.

Jonathan Seckler  23:55  
In you know, going back to the challenges of marketing, you know, Earlier, and we talked about the standardization of infrastructure. in an environment where everything is standardized, how do you innovate? Right? And the and I believe that the only way you can innovate is through the user experience somehow. And yes, open management open manage that software is Dells innovation in a lot of ways, right. It's our ability to actually impact the user, you know, in a standardized environment.

Steve McDowell  24:28  
Yeah. Hey, kick topics a little bit, Matt. And then maybe, yeah. You talk about standardized environments, standardized server, we're starting to see or hear a lot of noise, right from the hyper scalars and the public cloud guys about arm based servers. How do you how do you look at that whole space? And are your customers asking for something different from x86?

Jonathan Seckler  24:54  
So that's a great question and and historically, is, you know we've we've all I think dipped our toe in the arm server world in some way. I mean, Dell had arm based servers in 2012. I think 20 2013 or so. I know that our competition has tried to do something similar around that same time frame. And it had it didn't work then. And but what's happening now, talking about arm is I would kind of flip that to say there is a space where our customers are looking at what what ours, one of our senior fellows calls the domain specific architectures. Yes. Right. And you are then he may be quoting someone else but this idea that certain know you're going to we're going to see more and more of that accelerator, attach that FPGA attach alternative CPUs. I think you're going to see a much more nuanced Balance of say Intel versus AMD and the data center where the data center are going to pick the right architecture for the right application, or the right certification level to do what they want to do. And yeah, I haven't, you know, arm is something that's always, you know, always we do, we do hear that everyone asks, well, what do you think about arm? And you know, the answer is usually like we were always investigating. We just don't have any plans right now. Right.

Steve McDowell  26:29  
Well, and also there's not a compelling server part that's not owned by Amazon today. Right? Any system starting to build and ask the question, because, you know, I don't know if this is a, you know, price performance play for the cloud, guys. Were there certain workloads like serverless that we could just throw out there. This is, you know, we should look at this as a broader trend. And it sounds like maybe what you're saying it's a little early to know yet.

Jonathan Seckler  26:54  
From a from a Yeah, certainly from a purely, you know, an arm based server perspective. Could there be an arm excellent. in a in a standard server, you know, that's that's highly likely, but I don't know.

Matt Kimball  27:06  
Yeah. But it depends. Yeah. This, this goes to what you were were talking about earlier though in tailoring infrastructure for the workload, right. And tailoring doesn't just mean a different form factor. The domain specific silicon is interesting, because I mean, it was a huge investor in graph core, which is making AI chips, right? That's right. There is so many different technologies. And while going back to while I as a, as a application developer, as an engineer, don't care about what infrastructure is there in front of infrastructure is damn important to lighting up that specific workload. in that in that goes specifically to the this workload will have this kind of perhaps this kind of silicon workload be will have an entirely different type of silicon and that's x86 and others not even just x86 versus arm because Yeah, different architectures out there.

Jonathan Seckler  28:02  
Yeah, no, absolutely. Because you're seeing you're seeing the the the GPU based servers arm x86 Yeah, all of that.

Matt Kimball  28:11  
Yeah, that's gonna be fun. It's It's fun to watch companies like Dell kind of play in this space and kind of evolve the portfolio. And really, and one of the things that Steve and I have talked about with y'all in previous podcasts is how, how pragmatic and practical you appear to be in approaching the market and coming in at the right time with the right portfolio and not just a here's another server. But, you know, here is an all up solution for analytics for big data for AI. That makes it a lot easier for it to consume, to deploy, consume and manage over the lifespan of that of that solution.

Jonathan Seckler  28:53  
It pragmatic is a good word. And I think that what you're seeing is that this is, I think, Ultimately, our desire and our strategy to ensure that this offer and the solution that we propose and that we build is something that a customer can rely on. Not just from a reliability standpoint, but from a, just from a, you know, a practicality or just kind of statement. I think that one of the things you're seeing at Dell that it's we don't talk about a lot online, and we don't it's not a part of our product portfolio is the increased attention that we pay to the standards bodies, because at you know, fundamentally, I, you know, and I, I've never seen it articulated in a really clean way for a public consumption. But Dell, Dell doesn't go down the proprietary path. Right. And I think fundamentally, we do we don't do that because we don't want to put our customers in a situation where their their investment is no longer meaningful. No So, you know, if there is a proprietary or an alternative thing that's going on, Dell will lean into the standards body to make that standard real, you know, real, so that everyone can, you know, benefit and that that way that the solution we bring the market will, you know, has, you know, will you No, it will never, it will never get, you know, won't dead end or at least in a way that that would, you know, lock a customer into, into something that they can't use anymore.

Matt Kimball  30:26  
And it's smart to because it's a, you know, if you allow for, you know, the standards bodies in the market to kind of to find what their needs are, you know, you don't fall into the trap of building really cool technology that doesn't necessarily have a place in this world, right or doesn't fit the specific needs of the customers or the market.

Jonathan Seckler  30:50  
That's right. That's right. And because, yeah, yeah, that's a good that's a good way of putting

Matt Kimball  30:56  
Steve did I did you have another question in there that you want to ask? I didn't mean to I did not keep going. Oh, wow. Okay, Steve, a little bit.

Jonathan Seckler  31:05  
So, the question is, can I ask you guys a question? Oh, wow. So,

yeah, we'll turn the tables a little bit. So, you you guys have been following the environment over the past, you know, past year. And, you know, one of the things that that you know, that we've been talking about is how is the market reacted to a lot of the things that we're doing how is Dell customer base reacted? What are you guys seeing at the macro level? That you know, we need to like that Dell or anyone needs to like focus on to be successful or to help people be successful?

Like, what are we missing? What am I missing here?

Matt Kimball  31:45  
We can we can, we can engage with you on a day of discovery.

Unknown Speaker  31:52  
Sure.

Matt Kimball  31:55  
Just good. Steve, did you want to go first you want Yeah.

Steve McDowell  31:57  
So I think one of the kind of the veterans that we've seen, right is, we've talked a lot about this, or I've talked a lot about this with people is, is, you know, sometime in March or April, suddenly every data center became a lights out data center, A and B. Everyone's IT shops suddenly had to rapidly reconfigure from supporting cheap desktops on the cubicles to let's work from home and whether that meant rolling out laptops, or in a lot of cases, you know, spinning up a lot of remote desktop. So what I'm what I'm working away to say is that enterprises that have been invested in embraced Software Defined whether that's VX, VX, rail V, san, whatever, or, you know, Nutanix on the other side, those guys had a much easier time. So when you when you talked earlier about, you know, it's the power of VX rail plus the Dell servers plus all of the things that we put around that. That's really true, and it's more true today than it was right. I can't To go touch my servers and reconfigure them, and even you know, traditional virtualization is hard to manage remotely. So it's really that ability to rapidly reconfigure, and we don't know where we're going right over the next year. So that's going to continue to be the case. You know, so from a kind of high level meta trend, I think, the reconfigurability of the data center along with and, you know, Matt's talked a lot about remote diagnostics, remote management, and how we're really stressing the hell out of those solutions right now figuring out what works and what doesn't work. So even if you don't forget the kind of the Uber high level, software configured everything, just the very basic can I manage and reboot and flash my BIOS without ever touching a machine? You know, it's the tooling around the servers that's mattering more, I think, than the servers.

Matt Kimball  33:49  
Yeah. Yeah, we we Steve and I were talking about this a couple of months ago, and it's almost like from a remote manageability perspective, just to finish on that thought. It's almost like, you know, when COVID hit, it was like see trials for a brand new built ship, right? I mean, and a lot of these tools have been in place for so long. Oh, yeah. But organizations never really utilized them to their true capacity, or extent or to what they were designed to do. Right. And now it's like, while we really have to, you know, redeploy or reconfigure reprovision from from home, and not only it's not just a PowerPoint slide anymore, it's this is reality. And I think that's exposed some of the weaknesses, but I think that's actually showing some of the strengths around tooling like open manage. Yeah, no, because we haven't heard from customers about, you know, kind of not working as advertised. I do think at a meta and Steve, I think what Steve did a really good job of talking about is this march toward autonomy and it sounds stupid but you know, but it truly is, you know, IT shops and when I started Out nightie, we were the pocket protector guys. We did pull servers out of racks, put them back in, we use disks and floppies and disks to, to bring them up and get them running. And it's a we're past the point thanks to cloud thanks to virtualization, thanks to cloud native. And thanks to technologies like power one, you know, these composable infrastructure platforms that are going out there. It consumers are looking to, you know, for that easy button VX rail is a great example of that. But that march toward autonomy is really it's real. And time to value is so darn important to IT shops. That's what Steve was saying. That's why VX rail is, you know, tools like the x rail are so darn important because I can be up and running like that, you know, in minutes versus weeks. And that's a big deal. is so so and I think it is Steve, tell me You think differently, but I think you know, Dell is really, again, you know, you've you've approached the market really in a real smart way. You didn't rush to get out there first on everything, you rushed out there with a complete solution. In a time when when the market was ready to adopt the technologies, that's that's my feedback. And this is not a, you know, we're interviewing to get that P OE from you. But really, that's that really is kind of what we've heard and what we've we've, or what I've seen in the market, I should say, let's finish on that. And

Steve McDowell  36:33  
yeah, and I'll agree with Matt. I mean, we look at Dell, and you know, a lot of guys that have our job title, we beat up on you a little bit, right for not being out there first on everything. But when you guys show up, it's with a completely baked solution with service and support and reference architecture and this and that. You're not out there floating a lot of science experiments. And you may be doing that and we just don't see it. But you know, it seems like some of your competitors spend a lot of time doing very public science experiments or Really lead nowhere. So, you know, we look at Dell and not to make this a love fest, right. But one of the things I respect about what you do as an organization, not just your server team, is you really take a deliberate approach in terms of what's working for it, and how are we helping them solve real problems? You know, jumping wholescale into Kubernetes and helping people migrate. That's not helping a lot of people right now. Right? It's more fundamentals, especially right now in the time of COVID. So I'll shut up. Yeah.

Jonathan Seckler  37:27  
That's great. No, thanks for the kudos for on behalf of everyone Adele. But, but good points around the, you know, the, the march toward autonomy. I love that phrase. You should you should write a paper on that one. That's a good

Matt Kimball  37:44  
I'll send you an email after this podcast. But you know, it's funny that you say that though because not about the paper. But the this topic in with speaking with folks in the past, you know, there was this this rush toward the cloud. It was was almost irrational, right? It was like, throw everything we can at the cloud. And then, you know, over the last 18 months or so you've heard about the repatriation of and bringing data back in and I really don't think it's so much a repatriation, I think it's a rationalization, you know, kind of, we figured out what the benefits of cloud are, what the limits are and what their true costs are. And now we're kind of rationalizing, you know, where everything sets and the reality is, it's, it's a combination of on prem off Prem and the ability to, to move functions, move data, move applications, you know, from on prem to off Prem from on prem, ad on prem be in to be able to do that seamlessly is so important. And the reason why I say that is I think, you know, when I look at kind of how you're telling your story out there, Jonathan, you do a good job of kind of addressing it from that perspective. You don't, you know, kind of tied to the science experiment. You don't go and say everybody's clapping. Native, therefore right or you know, cloud native is the future therefore, right? You understand that, you know, real IT folks and real it practitioners. It's a comp, they're managing everything under the sun. And even the public cloud guys are seeing that, right? I mean, you look at what Amazon's doing without post. And Azure has similar things in Google Cloud, you know, a lot of data, whether it's because of latency or whatever, needs to be somewhere closer to home in the public cloud is going to give you so it's not just people repatriating from the cloud. It's, it's a whole scale migration of workloads from cloud to on prem and we're redefining what on prem means whether that's outpost whether that's as a service, whether that's my own my own server, so around the edge salary range,

Jonathan Seckler  39:43  
yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I those are that's a great pieces of feedback and great insights because it even the word repatriation, and we use it to refer to bringing applications back, but there is this mobility of and flexibility of where things can go. And, you know, kind of goes to the, you know, even inside the Dell technology cloud value proposition. It's not that it's a private cloud. It's that it's a platform with connections to the public cloud and so that you can do those things. You can move those applications back and forth. Yeah.

Matt Kimball  40:19  
Yeah. never asked an analyst their opinion. That's a gotcha.

Jonathan Seckler  40:28  
That's good. Well, you guys really spent 10 minutes with your opinion. I spent 40. So I think we're,

Matt Kimball  40:34  
we're not done yet. That was great. Well, thank you for the again for the time, Jonathan and, Steve, thanks for thanks for holding off on the afternoon drinking until after this podcast. I appreciate what's in the water.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai