Dell Technologies World 2024 | Caitlin Gordon & Shannon Champion | Dell Technologies

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Caitlin Gordon

VP, Product Management

Dell Technologies

Shannon Champion

Vice President of Product Marketing

Dell Technologies

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World

Dell Technologies Inc. devoted much of its annual conference in Las Vegas this month to defining its artificial intelligence strategy. Through announcements and various executive presentations, the company highlighted a set of networking and infrastructure solutions designed to capitalize on the technology tsunami that has become AI.What that picture looks like now and how it could propel Dell forward was a central focus for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as Dell executives, partners and industry analysts offered their insights into how AI is shaping the enterprise computing future during Dell Technologies World 2024

Hybrid AI and multicloud: Dell Technologies’ vision for simplifying IT operations

As businesses seek more efficient ways to manage their IT infrastructure, hybrid AI and multicloud environments are becoming increasingly essential.These advancements are driven by the need to simplify operations and enhance scalability, allowing organizations to stay agile in a fast-paced digital world, according to Caitlin Gordon (pictured, right), vice president of product management at Dell Technologies Inc.Dell’s Shannon Champion and Caitlin Gordon talk with theCUBE about hybrid AI.“A lot of what we talked about today is, you bring AI to the data, and the data is in the data center,” she said. “One of the philosophies for the APEX Cloud platform is really to simplify operations

play_circle_outline Unlocking Efficiency: Streamlining APEX Cloud Consumption and APEX Multi-Cloud for Optimal IT Infrastructure Operations

play_circle_outline Announcements: APEX Navigator enhancements, APEX Navigator for Kubernetes

play_circle_outline Unlocking Potential: Enhancing On-Premises Infrastructure Modernization & Operational Efficiency with APEX Cloud and Hybrid AI

play_circle_outline Agility and accelerated innovation cycle with APEX subscription and APEX AIOps capability

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Caitlin Gordon & Shannon Champion | Dell Technologies

Caitlin Gordon

VP, Product Management Dell Technologies

Shannon Champion

Vice President of Product Marketing Dell Technologies

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>> Hello, everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE. We're live here at Dell Tech World. Come on inside theCUBE. I'm here with Bob Laliberte, my co-host. Really excited to have two CUBE alum, some of our favorite guests. Caitlin Gordon is the Vice President of Product Management, and Shannon Champion, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Ladies, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you.

Caitlin Gordon

>> It is great to be back.

>> We're talking APEX.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yes, we are.

>> Love APEX. We're talking about hybrid AI, hybrid cloud. APEX is essentially the cloud operating model brought to your customers. What's new in APEX? What's the momentum like? A lot of buzz.

Caitlin Gordon

>> There's a lot going on. Our APEX strategy has really always been about APEX Cloud consumption, which is APEX subscriptions, and then cloud experiences with our APEX Multi-Cloud. And a lot of that was all about, how do we simplify consumption and operations of IT infrastructure? And that's more important than ever for our customers, whether it's multi-cloud by design, or just simplifying and making an APEX model for the consumption of that infrastructure. We're having more and more conversations with a broad set of customers, because this need is just increasing every day.

>> You've been doing this now for a while, talking to customers, evolving the messaging, the marketing, the positioning, the competitive angles, the differentiation. You guys got some action going on at the show. You always carry news in your back pocket.

Shannon Champion

>> Yep, for sure.

>> Tell us about it.

Shannon Champion

>> Well, last year, it was the APEX Show and it set the stage for this last year of continuous innovation. I'll just say that. From a momentum perspective, with APEX, we are in every major cloud ecosystem. We introduced eight APEX offers over the last year and continuing to build upon them with over 500 software-based advancements across the portfolio in the last year. And we've expanded global reach and availability to 134 countries, so our customers can take advantage of that multi-cloud by design and more places around the world.

>> Awesome, that's great. Clearly, there's a lot of emphasis on multi-cloud environments these days and whatnot, and you've made a lot of advancements over the last year. I'm assuming there's also maybe a few that you've made this week as well. Perhaps, Caitlin, you want to go in and talk a little bit about some of the announcements that you're making this week?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We always have announcements. We are talking a lot about AI, but there's a lot of multi-cloud and APEX announcements, so we'll go through them. First is the APEX Navigator announcements. We have enhancements to our APEX Navigator for multi-cloud storage. We've had support in the past for Block and AWS. Now, we're expanding both the type of storage and the public cloud support by adding file support to APEX File in both AWS and Azure. So, really expanding that portfolio and the official introduction of APEX Navigator for Kubernetes. So, really bringing that same simplicity to Kubernetes storage management. It's really something that expands this whole APEX Navigator strategy and story that we started talking about last year and now is real.

>> Yeah, that's absolutely. And it's going to be imperative for all those organizations deploying modern application environments and architectures. Leveraging that Kubernetes space, being able to manage it under a single comprehensive platform.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah, it's simplifying it at scale. That's really the key.

>> Why is file so hard in the cloud? It's like the cloud file is just kind of crappy. You know what I mean? You guys have to come and bring the stack, but is there something unique about cloud that makes it difficult? Or does it matter-

Caitlin Gordon

>> I don't think it's unique about cloud. I think it's unique about file.

>> Yeah. Okay.

Caitlin Gordon

>> It seems simple on the face of it, but then when you have to have an enterprise-class scalable file system, it's actually a lot harder. And I think the public clouds have figured that out, too. And obviously, we've been in this space for a long time with OneFS and PowerScale. Bringing that to the public cloud is really just enabling not only a more compelling file storage in the public cloud, but also seamless operations with what also customers have on prem, which is yet another challenge for a cloud to be able to accomplish.

>> When you start with the mindset of get put right to do file, it's not so easy.

Caitlin Gordon

>> It turns out it's not so easy.

>> It always looks easy from the other side, isn't it?

Caitlin Gordon

>> Clearly, there's been a lot of organizations talking about that shift to the public cloud over the last several years in multi-cloud and so forth. But what struck me today was there were a lot of talk about on prem as well, and not so much from, "Hey, do you have to fully repatriate?" But certainly, for AI and things like that, organizations are going to want to have a lot of that infrastructure back on premises. Obviously, you've got the APEX Cloud platforms, so I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about what's going on there and what you're doing to help organizations to modernize their on-premises infrastructure as well.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. A lot of what we talked about today is, you bring AI to the data, and the data is in the data center. And one of the philosophies for the APEX Cloud platform is really to simplify operations. We've felt in the past six months to 12 months, there's almost a private and hybrid cloud resurgence in this conversation driven by AI and many other topics. So, what we've announced this week is really an additional support for our APEX Cloud platforms for Microsoft. First of all, supporting new AI solutions on that. And then, on our APEX Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift, we've really optimized that for AI. That includes new GPU support, support for object storage, and new solutions with Red Hat OpenShift.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Right. And that's really giving organizations the opportunity to drive a lot of operational efficiency, regardless of where they're hosting applications or their data. So, whether it's in the public cloud, whether it's on prem, you've got one consistent solution to enable you to operate more efficiently and ultimately, even deliver better experiences.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. In a lot of ways, it's we built this with VxRail for VMware, and we can take that same philosophy to Red Hat OpenShift, which is ideal for AI, as well as actually virtualization. So there's a lot of excitement around that, as well as our Microsoft partnership.

>> Are you hinting that there's maybe people looking at alternatives for their virtualization strategy?

Caitlin Gordon

>> They might be.

>> Okay. All right, just checking. I thought I've heard that once or twice.

>> Why? Why? Why would they be doing that?

Caitlin Gordon

>> There's nothing going on in that space.

>> I've been asleep for a year.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Welcome.

>> Yeah, thank you. But there's going to be some interesting news coming on that, so we won't go there. Red Hat, you guys announced you guys were at Red Hat Summit?

Shannon Champion

>> We were.

>> Yeah. I wasn't there, but I was watching from afar. Some interesting things going on there with RAG, you guys with Llama. What's the update there?

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah. We're really excited to partner with Red Hat on a lot of solutions. In the AI space in particular, there's an update to our digital assistance solution there that is based on RAG model and Llama LLM, to really help people get started with a digital assistant based on Red Hat OpenShift AI. We also are introducing another AI solution on Red Hat OpenShift AI with NVIDIA Riva for speech recognition. So, two new AI solutions, in addition to the new GPUs and object scale support in the Red Hat space. So, a lot of exciting things in the AI world happening in partnership with Red Hat.

>> When Llama 3 comes out, do you just unplug two and pop in three? How does that work? No, I wonder because it's like, these models are so advanced and there's this leapfrog effect going on.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Not quite plug-and-play yet.

>> It's like, I feel like in my new XPS, which I was so happy with, and then I see these AI PCs come out, I'm like, "I want one."

Caitlin Gordon

>> I want one, too. There's always a shiny new thing around the corner, but that's the philosophy of the Dell AI Factory. We have our own internal processes, but more importantly, how are we helping our customers accelerate that time to value and simplify the complexity that is AI for them today?

>> It's not exactly plug-and-play, but that is the experience that ultimately you're working toward your customers?

Caitlin Gordon

>> That's right. Yeah.

>> So, they don't have to think about it, because it's there?

Shannon Champion

>> That's the beauty of validated designs. Dell does that work of the validation of the full stacks, so our customers don't have to do that.

>> Yeah. We were talking earlier today about, Dave had done a little survey saying, "Where do you think people are going to... where AI is going to live?" I think a lot of it talked earlier about the predominant response was, we think it's going to be in the cloud. And I think a lot of that is just because organizations don't know how to get it on prem. It's not like they have a lot of experience, expertise. We know internally, Dell has got a major initiative to get AI implemented throughout, so a lot of great learning experiences that you're able to drive there. And then, obviously, be able to put, like you said, those validated designs, get that even into APEX to help accelerate the adoption of these AI factories. I think the other key thing for me this week has been, when I think about AI factories, I was thinking largely data center. But the term AI factories for you is more about, "Hey, how do we standardize the adoption of this and drive it across the entire enterprise?" So, whether that be the GPU-based servers, whether it be the workstations, all the way down to the AI PC, so that you can drive that inference closer to the edge. And you're helping them to drive that experience basically in a consumption-based model as well.

Caitlin Gordon

>> That's right. We want the easy-button experience, but with the flexibility that they need in the data center.

>> I think the reason why a lot of people selected that... We gave them three choices. How is hybrid AI going to evolve? Is it going to be like hybrid cloud, or is it going to be faster? Or is it cloud with the today? I think a lot of experimentation goes on in the cloud. And then, people want to bring it in production, they're like, "Well, wait a minute." But don't you think that over time, as they adopt APEX, they become more comfortable with it, it'll be a lot easier for them to do experimentation in APEX as you build out the services? What'd you say? 500 new software-based innovations?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We've been busy.

>> Right. Yeah. As you build those out, and as you do so in the AI era, experimenting with APEX, shops are going to say, "Hey, we have an experimental platform." I think that people just don't see it yet, so they say, what do you think about that?

Shannon Champion

>> One thing we didn't touch on yet is this concept of APEX universal storage layer. The beauty of that is software-defined, enterprise-class storage capabilities on prem and in the public cloud, which then unlocks the ability for data mobility. So, you can optimize that workload placement. You can test it in the cloud, bring it on prem and optimize it that way.

>> My supercloud antagonist, Charles Fitzgerald, when I did this poll, he chimed in and said, "What? Did you give up on supercloud?" No, it's there. It's actually happened, just like we said it would, Charles.

Caitlin Gordon

>> You couldn't resist.

>> No, I couldn't resist. No, but that was always the concept. Hide all the complexity underneath, you guys take care of that and create... It's really identical experience irrespective of the physical location. That's what you've done. That didn't just happen. You had to do engineering. You had to understand each of the cloud environments, all their primitives. You had to worry about the security. It's not trivial to do that.

Caitlin Gordon

>> I think the other great part about what you're doing is that it's not strictly relegated to Dell solutions only. You've got an ecosystem. I recently wrote a blog on it, It Takes an Ecosystem. IT Takes an Ecosystem. And the reality is, it's difficult for any one company to do everything, as we evidenced by the partners on stage today showing ServiceNow and NVIDIA, et cetera, Samsung. You have Microsoft, you've got Red Hat and many others that you're working with. It's great that you're able to not only build that ecosystem of validated solutions, but you're then able to bundle all that together and deliver that as a single solution.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. And do that with the agility required. The moving of the speed of AI is different than the world we had been living in. That's some of the new challenges, and we're lucky to have such great partners to be able to work through that with.

>> You guys still on the multi-cloud by design? Is that still the solution?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We are, absolutely.

>> So, what does that-

Caitlin Gordon

>> I live and breathe it.

>> What does that entail? If you're a cloud architect, system architect, application head, what does it mean to be multi-cloud by design? Where do I start? What's that journey look like?

Caitlin Gordon

>> It comes back to simplicity, simplifying operations. Ultimately, AI has just added fuel to what was already happening. Traditional sysadmin, IT admins' roles are increasingly becoming both operational and development roles, increasingly needing to have AI skills, which means less time to spend on managing the infrastructure. And to feel on top of that, the ecosystem is more complex. Multi-cloud by design, which as we've talked about in the past, really is more multi-vendor, is actually even more important because it's more multi-vendor. And the requirements for that simplicity, that operational simplicity, are louder than ever before. It's really doubling down when you look at what's going on in the data center, when we talk about cloud-to-ground, but also in the ground-to-cloud side of things. As Shannon mentioned, with the universal storage layer, you want to be able to burst to the cloud, leverage the cloud services to get up and running fast. But ultimately, you probably want to keep your data, your precious data, on prem when you're going to be deploying in production. That side of it is just as important.

>> Caitlin, what are the key product challenges there? Is it integration? Is it injecting IT ops? Is that through ecosystem partnerships? Can you paint a picture there?

Caitlin Gordon

>> I think one of the key challenge, we work as a product team, is we know that the value that we can bring, for example, with this HCI and the ACP portfolio, is the assurance of that full stack. That assurance is validation, as well as development work for us on the automation orchestration. The challenge for us is, we know we need to do that for an ecosystem, so there's a horizontalness to it, but you also have to bring the depth that's going to bring that value. And it's that balance of how far do you go and how deep can you go? And how can you provide that flexibility for customers? That's a lot of the challenge we think about, especially when you look at the private hybrid cloud innovation. That's the balance that we struggle with quite live right now.

>> Day to day. Very good.

>> Anything else that we didn't hit on? Did we hit all the key messaging and-

Caitlin Gordon

>> I guess, one of the things-...

>> all the points?

>> One of the things I'll throw out there is, you had mentioned that how all the innovation is accelerating. So, maybe, how is AI in that innovation cycle with GPUs impacting? If I'm signing up for a subscription, I might be a little bit concerned that, hey, there's another new GPU coming around the corner in another three to six months. I know even talking from your team, new products are coming out every maybe as early as nine months to develop it from scratch. How is APEX going to adapt to this accelerating innovation cycle?

Caitlin Gordon

>> You want to start?

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah, so I would say two things. One is that you can subscribe to any part of the Dell AI Factory. APEX subscription is available across the entire Dell infrastructure, APEX Multi-Cloud and AI Factory set of solutions and products. And that makes it simple for customers to consume on a monthly basis and all of that. The second way is, one thing we didn't touch on yet is the APEX AIOps capability, which is intelligence within our products. We have always had infrastructure observability. I say always, for at least a decade, we've been delivering that functionality and capability. And now, we're adding to that. So, we don't get only infrastructure observability, but you add on application performance observability and monitoring. So, really expanding the capability of AI-driven intelligence within our offers.

>> That's fundamental in any cloud, whether it's your cloud or the public cloud. And that's IP that you guys developed?

Shannon Champion

>> Yes, we brought together the IP of CloudIQ, in partnership with Moogsoft and the acquisition that we did earlier, and took our IP from the infrastructure observability, together with IBM Instana, to deliver the applications .

>> How nice. Connecting the dots here.

>> Ah. Oh, there you go.

>> Beautiful.

Shannon Champion

>> Three integrated offerings all coming together as APEX AIOps.

Caitlin Gordon

>> The APEX AIOps assistant is actually one of the first customer available gen AI innovations we've put into our own products. We actually have AI built into this new AIOps infrastructure observability, and that's a pretty straightforward RAG framework with our knowledge base articles. So, a customer can just, natural language, ask a question. Instead of having to dig through the knowledge base articles or call support, they can just ask the questions, get the answer back. Really simple user interface, and that's all built internally using industry standard frameworks.

>> That just makes the knowledge base a lot more accessible. Do you foresee a day when, I'm sure you do, but I wonder if you could just comment, where the system acts as a system of agency? We're not there yet, I presume?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We're not there yet.

>> I wasn't that asleep. But I think that's where we're headed, right?

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. We talk a lot about that is how do we, yes, use it for internal development, but also help our customers interact with the product more in that way? So that we have a lot of ideas even where we can start there, but it's exciting to think about where it can go because of the speed of innovation here. And it's just incredible. It can be overwhelming.

>> That's good, though. 500 software-based enhancements? I love it.

Caitlin Gordon

>> See where we are next year, right?

>> Big APEX offers.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Well, you guys, you're a dynamic duo. You're constantly raising the bar, amping it up, whatever you want to say.

>> Absolutely.

>> Guys, thanks so much. It's great to see you. Congratulations on all the hard work. You look great even though you haven't slept in a year.

Shannon Champion

>> Thanks. We'll see you next year.

>> Love having you guys on. Thank you.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Thanks for having us.

>> Again, appreciate all the support. All right. For Bob Laliberte and Savannah Peterson, my name is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Tech World 2024. We'll be right back.

Caitlin Gordon & Shannon Champion | Dell Technologies

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>> Hello, everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE. We're live here at Dell Tech World. Come on inside theCUBE. I'm here with Bob Laliberte, my co-host. Really excited to have two CUBE alum, some of our favorite guests. Caitlin Gordon is the Vice President of Product Management, and Shannon Champion, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Ladies, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you.

Caitlin Gordon

>> It is great to be back.

>> We're talking APEX.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yes, we are.

>> Love APEX. We're talking about hybrid AI, hybrid cloud. APEX is essentially the cloud operating model brought to your customers. What's new in APEX? What's the momentum like? A lot of buzz.

Caitlin Gordon

>> There's a lot going on. Our APEX strategy has really always been about APEX Cloud consumption, which is APEX subscriptions, and then cloud experiences with our APEX Multi-Cloud. And a lot of that was all about, how do we simplify consumption and operations of IT infrastructure? And that's more important than ever for our customers, whether it's multi-cloud by design, or just simplifying and making an APEX model for the consumption of that infrastructure. We're having more and more conversations with a broad set of customers, because this need is just increasing every day.

>> You've been doing this now for a while, talking to customers, evolving the messaging, the marketing, the positioning, the competitive angles, the differentiation. You guys got some action going on at the show. You always carry news in your back pocket.

Shannon Champion

>> Yep, for sure.

>> Tell us about it.

Shannon Champion

>> Well, last year, it was the APEX Show and it set the stage for this last year of continuous innovation. I'll just say that. From a momentum perspective, with APEX, we are in every major cloud ecosystem. We introduced eight APEX offers over the last year and continuing to build upon them with over 500 software-based advancements across the portfolio in the last year. And we've expanded global reach and availability to 134 countries, so our customers can take advantage of that multi-cloud by design and more places around the world.

>> Awesome, that's great. Clearly, there's a lot of emphasis on multi-cloud environments these days and whatnot, and you've made a lot of advancements over the last year. I'm assuming there's also maybe a few that you've made this week as well. Perhaps, Caitlin, you want to go in and talk a little bit about some of the announcements that you're making this week?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We always have announcements. We are talking a lot about AI, but there's a lot of multi-cloud and APEX announcements, so we'll go through them. First is the APEX Navigator announcements. We have enhancements to our APEX Navigator for multi-cloud storage. We've had support in the past for Block and AWS. Now, we're expanding both the type of storage and the public cloud support by adding file support to APEX File in both AWS and Azure. So, really expanding that portfolio and the official introduction of APEX Navigator for Kubernetes. So, really bringing that same simplicity to Kubernetes storage management. It's really something that expands this whole APEX Navigator strategy and story that we started talking about last year and now is real.

>> Yeah, that's absolutely. And it's going to be imperative for all those organizations deploying modern application environments and architectures. Leveraging that Kubernetes space, being able to manage it under a single comprehensive platform.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah, it's simplifying it at scale. That's really the key.

>> Why is file so hard in the cloud? It's like the cloud file is just kind of crappy. You know what I mean? You guys have to come and bring the stack, but is there something unique about cloud that makes it difficult? Or does it matter-

Caitlin Gordon

>> I don't think it's unique about cloud. I think it's unique about file.

>> Yeah. Okay.

Caitlin Gordon

>> It seems simple on the face of it, but then when you have to have an enterprise-class scalable file system, it's actually a lot harder. And I think the public clouds have figured that out, too. And obviously, we've been in this space for a long time with OneFS and PowerScale. Bringing that to the public cloud is really just enabling not only a more compelling file storage in the public cloud, but also seamless operations with what also customers have on prem, which is yet another challenge for a cloud to be able to accomplish.

>> When you start with the mindset of get put right to do file, it's not so easy.

Caitlin Gordon

>> It turns out it's not so easy.

>> It always looks easy from the other side, isn't it?

Caitlin Gordon

>> Clearly, there's been a lot of organizations talking about that shift to the public cloud over the last several years in multi-cloud and so forth. But what struck me today was there were a lot of talk about on prem as well, and not so much from, "Hey, do you have to fully repatriate?" But certainly, for AI and things like that, organizations are going to want to have a lot of that infrastructure back on premises. Obviously, you've got the APEX Cloud platforms, so I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about what's going on there and what you're doing to help organizations to modernize their on-premises infrastructure as well.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. A lot of what we talked about today is, you bring AI to the data, and the data is in the data center. And one of the philosophies for the APEX Cloud platform is really to simplify operations. We've felt in the past six months to 12 months, there's almost a private and hybrid cloud resurgence in this conversation driven by AI and many other topics. So, what we've announced this week is really an additional support for our APEX Cloud platforms for Microsoft. First of all, supporting new AI solutions on that. And then, on our APEX Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift, we've really optimized that for AI. That includes new GPU support, support for object storage, and new solutions with Red Hat OpenShift.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Right. And that's really giving organizations the opportunity to drive a lot of operational efficiency, regardless of where they're hosting applications or their data. So, whether it's in the public cloud, whether it's on prem, you've got one consistent solution to enable you to operate more efficiently and ultimately, even deliver better experiences.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. In a lot of ways, it's we built this with VxRail for VMware, and we can take that same philosophy to Red Hat OpenShift, which is ideal for AI, as well as actually virtualization. So there's a lot of excitement around that, as well as our Microsoft partnership.

>> Are you hinting that there's maybe people looking at alternatives for their virtualization strategy?

Caitlin Gordon

>> They might be.

>> Okay. All right, just checking. I thought I've heard that once or twice.

>> Why? Why? Why would they be doing that?

Caitlin Gordon

>> There's nothing going on in that space.

>> I've been asleep for a year.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Welcome.

>> Yeah, thank you. But there's going to be some interesting news coming on that, so we won't go there. Red Hat, you guys announced you guys were at Red Hat Summit?

Shannon Champion

>> We were.

>> Yeah. I wasn't there, but I was watching from afar. Some interesting things going on there with RAG, you guys with Llama. What's the update there?

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah. We're really excited to partner with Red Hat on a lot of solutions. In the AI space in particular, there's an update to our digital assistance solution there that is based on RAG model and Llama LLM, to really help people get started with a digital assistant based on Red Hat OpenShift AI. We also are introducing another AI solution on Red Hat OpenShift AI with NVIDIA Riva for speech recognition. So, two new AI solutions, in addition to the new GPUs and object scale support in the Red Hat space. So, a lot of exciting things in the AI world happening in partnership with Red Hat.

>> When Llama 3 comes out, do you just unplug two and pop in three? How does that work? No, I wonder because it's like, these models are so advanced and there's this leapfrog effect going on.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Not quite plug-and-play yet.

>> It's like, I feel like in my new XPS, which I was so happy with, and then I see these AI PCs come out, I'm like, "I want one."

Caitlin Gordon

>> I want one, too. There's always a shiny new thing around the corner, but that's the philosophy of the Dell AI Factory. We have our own internal processes, but more importantly, how are we helping our customers accelerate that time to value and simplify the complexity that is AI for them today?

>> It's not exactly plug-and-play, but that is the experience that ultimately you're working toward your customers?

Caitlin Gordon

>> That's right. Yeah.

>> So, they don't have to think about it, because it's there?

Shannon Champion

>> That's the beauty of validated designs. Dell does that work of the validation of the full stacks, so our customers don't have to do that.

>> Yeah. We were talking earlier today about, Dave had done a little survey saying, "Where do you think people are going to... where AI is going to live?" I think a lot of it talked earlier about the predominant response was, we think it's going to be in the cloud. And I think a lot of that is just because organizations don't know how to get it on prem. It's not like they have a lot of experience, expertise. We know internally, Dell has got a major initiative to get AI implemented throughout, so a lot of great learning experiences that you're able to drive there. And then, obviously, be able to put, like you said, those validated designs, get that even into APEX to help accelerate the adoption of these AI factories. I think the other key thing for me this week has been, when I think about AI factories, I was thinking largely data center. But the term AI factories for you is more about, "Hey, how do we standardize the adoption of this and drive it across the entire enterprise?" So, whether that be the GPU-based servers, whether it be the workstations, all the way down to the AI PC, so that you can drive that inference closer to the edge. And you're helping them to drive that experience basically in a consumption-based model as well.

Caitlin Gordon

>> That's right. We want the easy-button experience, but with the flexibility that they need in the data center.

>> I think the reason why a lot of people selected that... We gave them three choices. How is hybrid AI going to evolve? Is it going to be like hybrid cloud, or is it going to be faster? Or is it cloud with the today? I think a lot of experimentation goes on in the cloud. And then, people want to bring it in production, they're like, "Well, wait a minute." But don't you think that over time, as they adopt APEX, they become more comfortable with it, it'll be a lot easier for them to do experimentation in APEX as you build out the services? What'd you say? 500 new software-based innovations?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We've been busy.

>> Right. Yeah. As you build those out, and as you do so in the AI era, experimenting with APEX, shops are going to say, "Hey, we have an experimental platform." I think that people just don't see it yet, so they say, what do you think about that?

Shannon Champion

>> One thing we didn't touch on yet is this concept of APEX universal storage layer. The beauty of that is software-defined, enterprise-class storage capabilities on prem and in the public cloud, which then unlocks the ability for data mobility. So, you can optimize that workload placement. You can test it in the cloud, bring it on prem and optimize it that way.

>> My supercloud antagonist, Charles Fitzgerald, when I did this poll, he chimed in and said, "What? Did you give up on supercloud?" No, it's there. It's actually happened, just like we said it would, Charles.

Caitlin Gordon

>> You couldn't resist.

>> No, I couldn't resist. No, but that was always the concept. Hide all the complexity underneath, you guys take care of that and create... It's really identical experience irrespective of the physical location. That's what you've done. That didn't just happen. You had to do engineering. You had to understand each of the cloud environments, all their primitives. You had to worry about the security. It's not trivial to do that.

Caitlin Gordon

>> I think the other great part about what you're doing is that it's not strictly relegated to Dell solutions only. You've got an ecosystem. I recently wrote a blog on it, It Takes an Ecosystem. IT Takes an Ecosystem. And the reality is, it's difficult for any one company to do everything, as we evidenced by the partners on stage today showing ServiceNow and NVIDIA, et cetera, Samsung. You have Microsoft, you've got Red Hat and many others that you're working with. It's great that you're able to not only build that ecosystem of validated solutions, but you're then able to bundle all that together and deliver that as a single solution.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. And do that with the agility required. The moving of the speed of AI is different than the world we had been living in. That's some of the new challenges, and we're lucky to have such great partners to be able to work through that with.

>> You guys still on the multi-cloud by design? Is that still the solution?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We are, absolutely.

>> So, what does that-

Caitlin Gordon

>> I live and breathe it.

>> What does that entail? If you're a cloud architect, system architect, application head, what does it mean to be multi-cloud by design? Where do I start? What's that journey look like?

Caitlin Gordon

>> It comes back to simplicity, simplifying operations. Ultimately, AI has just added fuel to what was already happening. Traditional sysadmin, IT admins' roles are increasingly becoming both operational and development roles, increasingly needing to have AI skills, which means less time to spend on managing the infrastructure. And to feel on top of that, the ecosystem is more complex. Multi-cloud by design, which as we've talked about in the past, really is more multi-vendor, is actually even more important because it's more multi-vendor. And the requirements for that simplicity, that operational simplicity, are louder than ever before. It's really doubling down when you look at what's going on in the data center, when we talk about cloud-to-ground, but also in the ground-to-cloud side of things. As Shannon mentioned, with the universal storage layer, you want to be able to burst to the cloud, leverage the cloud services to get up and running fast. But ultimately, you probably want to keep your data, your precious data, on prem when you're going to be deploying in production. That side of it is just as important.

>> Caitlin, what are the key product challenges there? Is it integration? Is it injecting IT ops? Is that through ecosystem partnerships? Can you paint a picture there?

Caitlin Gordon

>> I think one of the key challenge, we work as a product team, is we know that the value that we can bring, for example, with this HCI and the ACP portfolio, is the assurance of that full stack. That assurance is validation, as well as development work for us on the automation orchestration. The challenge for us is, we know we need to do that for an ecosystem, so there's a horizontalness to it, but you also have to bring the depth that's going to bring that value. And it's that balance of how far do you go and how deep can you go? And how can you provide that flexibility for customers? That's a lot of the challenge we think about, especially when you look at the private hybrid cloud innovation. That's the balance that we struggle with quite live right now.

>> Day to day. Very good.

>> Anything else that we didn't hit on? Did we hit all the key messaging and-

Caitlin Gordon

>> I guess, one of the things-...

>> all the points?

>> One of the things I'll throw out there is, you had mentioned that how all the innovation is accelerating. So, maybe, how is AI in that innovation cycle with GPUs impacting? If I'm signing up for a subscription, I might be a little bit concerned that, hey, there's another new GPU coming around the corner in another three to six months. I know even talking from your team, new products are coming out every maybe as early as nine months to develop it from scratch. How is APEX going to adapt to this accelerating innovation cycle?

Caitlin Gordon

>> You want to start?

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah, so I would say two things. One is that you can subscribe to any part of the Dell AI Factory. APEX subscription is available across the entire Dell infrastructure, APEX Multi-Cloud and AI Factory set of solutions and products. And that makes it simple for customers to consume on a monthly basis and all of that. The second way is, one thing we didn't touch on yet is the APEX AIOps capability, which is intelligence within our products. We have always had infrastructure observability. I say always, for at least a decade, we've been delivering that functionality and capability. And now, we're adding to that. So, we don't get only infrastructure observability, but you add on application performance observability and monitoring. So, really expanding the capability of AI-driven intelligence within our offers.

>> That's fundamental in any cloud, whether it's your cloud or the public cloud. And that's IP that you guys developed?

Shannon Champion

>> Yes, we brought together the IP of CloudIQ, in partnership with Moogsoft and the acquisition that we did earlier, and took our IP from the infrastructure observability, together with IBM Instana, to deliver the applications .

>> How nice. Connecting the dots here.

>> Ah. Oh, there you go.

>> Beautiful.

Shannon Champion

>> Three integrated offerings all coming together as APEX AIOps.

Caitlin Gordon

>> The APEX AIOps assistant is actually one of the first customer available gen AI innovations we've put into our own products. We actually have AI built into this new AIOps infrastructure observability, and that's a pretty straightforward RAG framework with our knowledge base articles. So, a customer can just, natural language, ask a question. Instead of having to dig through the knowledge base articles or call support, they can just ask the questions, get the answer back. Really simple user interface, and that's all built internally using industry standard frameworks.

>> That just makes the knowledge base a lot more accessible. Do you foresee a day when, I'm sure you do, but I wonder if you could just comment, where the system acts as a system of agency? We're not there yet, I presume?

Caitlin Gordon

>> We're not there yet.

>> I wasn't that asleep. But I think that's where we're headed, right?

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. We talk a lot about that is how do we, yes, use it for internal development, but also help our customers interact with the product more in that way? So that we have a lot of ideas even where we can start there, but it's exciting to think about where it can go because of the speed of innovation here. And it's just incredible. It can be overwhelming.

>> That's good, though. 500 software-based enhancements? I love it.

Caitlin Gordon

>> See where we are next year, right?

>> Big APEX offers.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Well, you guys, you're a dynamic duo. You're constantly raising the bar, amping it up, whatever you want to say.

>> Absolutely.

>> Guys, thanks so much. It's great to see you. Congratulations on all the hard work. You look great even though you haven't slept in a year.

Shannon Champion

>> Thanks. We'll see you next year.

>> Love having you guys on. Thank you.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Thanks for having us.

>> Again, appreciate all the support. All right. For Bob Laliberte and Savannah Peterson, my name is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Tech World 2024. We'll be right back.