Dell Technologies World 2024 | Todd Lieb | Dell Technologies & Deepak Setty | Microsoft

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Todd Lieb

Vice President, Cloud Partnerships

Dell

Deepak Setty

Sr. Director of Worldwide Partnership Sales

Microsoft

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

Collaboration between Dell Technologies and Microsoft extends synergy between APEX and Azure

Microsoft Corp. made several announcements this week around generative artificial intelligence tools, and the news overlapped with enhancements released by Dell Technologies Inc. on Monday.Microsoft added to Azure’s arsenal of generative AI development tools while collaborating with Dell to enhance how businesses harness AI at the edge. The news bult on Dell’s previously announced integration of APEX with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.Todd Lieb, Dell Technologies, and Deepak Setty, Microsoft, talk with theCUBE about the latest announcements at Dell Technologies World

play_circle_outline 35 Years of Dell and Microsoft: A Strong Partnership Shaping the Integration of Azure Stack and Dell Infrastructure

play_circle_outline Unifying data across industries for digital transformation

play_circle_outline Unlocking the Power of AI: Leveraging Enhanced Infrastructure and Validated Designs on APEX Cloud

Info

Todd Lieb | Dell Technologies & Deepak Setty | Microsoft

Todd Lieb

Vice President, Cloud Partnerships Dell

Deepak Setty

Sr. Director of Worldwide Partnership Sales Microsoft

search

>> Everybody, welcome back to Dell Tech World 2024. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage. I'm Dave Vellante and here with Bob Laliberte. Come on inside theCUBE. We got Todd Lieb here. He's the Vice President of Cloud and Data Center Partnerships at Dell Technologies and Deepak Setty, who's the senior director of Worldwide Partnerships Sales at Microsoft. You've heard of them. Dell and APEX, we're going to talk about Dell APEX cloud platform for Microsoft Azure, 35-year partnership between Microsoft and Dell. That means, Michael Dell was 24 when that partnership started?

Todd Lieb

>> And Bill was probably in about the same ballpark.

>> Right. Right, right, right. All right. Let's get the update since you guys launched last September. Is that right, with APEX on Azure? What's the update? What's the momentum look like?

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. So we came out of a business where we had the traditional Azure Stack business humming along. So what was that? I don't know. Seven or ten years we've been working together between Microsoft and Dell and this was an accelerator. So think about more integration, taking more of what makes Azure and the public cloud the place where workloads are going to bring in that capability into the data center and matching it with the Dell infrastructure. So that integration and everything we were doing, so the momentum has been take Azure Stack and put it on steroids maybe, is a good way to say it.

>> Yeah. And I wonder if you could comment, Deepak, because I mean, Azure Stack, before you guys became this cloud giant, it was different. It was good. It's a great idea but it wasn't like it is now. I mean, now it's like true cloud.

Deepak Setty

>> You bet. You bet. I think... Firstly, really excited about this partnership of Microsoft and Dell accelerating outcomes for our customer's digital transformation journey. What is also inspiring and energizing for this partnership is customer feedback on how this APEX Cloud Platform or hybrid cloud infrastructure is really so close to our customer's priorities. Let me just give you a feel of that, right? So now more than ever, our customers are needing to make data-driven decisions as close to the origination or source of that data. That creates a huge opportunity for ACP, for Azure, and our hybrid cloud platform to play into the customer priorities. The second, I would say is, repeatable approaches for rapid deployment. Given a lot of these deployments that we are seeing is in edge and far-edge scenarios, customers really want to make sure that when it gets deployed, it goes from POC to pilot to production really quick in areas where there is not much of deep technical expertise, right? So that repeatable approach is very important. Finally, I would say the desire to have everything as a service. So almost map technology to business outcome. So can I get business outcome as a service? When you deploy technology, is it as close to a business KPI that we're trying to meet? What is exciting as we hear from customers deploying these technologies is all of these are front and center to what these products are being designed for and how they're meeting the customer needs. So it's a great moment for us to be here and the future is all the more promising and inspiring.

Bob Laliberte

>> That's great. We talked about... Dave said, "This isn't your father's Azure Stack platform," right? You've got something new. So maybe you could spend a few moments and just talk about what's really new about the platform and what's different about it and what the customers are finding so appealing about the platform itself.

Deepak Setty

>> So let me give you a feel of what the platform is today and what we announced at the event today as well and I'll let Todd add more to it. So one of the two core tenets to what we announced and what this platform brings in which is simplification and being able to deliver outcomes at scale in a very cost-effective approach. So when our customers think of retailers deploying these at around 3,000 locations or going into oil rigs or think about petrol stations in rural areas, that rolls up into thousands and thousands of those instances. When you think of those things, it is that simplification and cost-effective approach which is so important. So what we announced today was essentially taking an approach of what are customers using these technologies for and what services are getting included in that? Like Azure Kubernetes services, containerization of their solutions to protect it and secure it and delivered at rapid scale. So Windows Server data center, HCI operating system, Kubernetes services, pre-packaged at factory by Dell. So it's completely curated. So Day 0, it connects to cloud and customers see outcome. We are able to do this in a very cost-effective approach because it is repeatable. It's factory designed, factory engineered, so it becomes easy for customers to deploy. So that's what we announced today which is really groundbreaking. And that's the value that we can not only provide to the biggest customers, but even to the small and medium businesses which really need the simplification. Todd, would you add to that thought?

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Were you going to ask a question?

>> I was going to ask what's underneath.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned like, "It's not your father's Azure Stack." So I was in Minneapolis last week with customers and I would ask them a question, "When was the last time you looked at Azure Stack?" They said, "A year and a half, two years ago," and I'm like, "Yep. It's time again." And so, here's what I would say, we've gone from dating to getting married. So what's underneath, right? There is a set of compute and storage nodes in a configuration called PowerFlex. So we've talked a lot about PowerFlex over the past couple days here or, I guess, a day at Dell Tech World. But think of it as a software defined storage layer that brings performance, it brings scalability, it brings cost efficiency to that Azure platform. So you take the Azure capabilities Deepak described, you add Dell's storage and compute expertise to that. Then, you integrate it and you do that integration over and over again. Like I said, we've gone from dating to marriage, right? We have engineering teams woven together in a way that they haven't been before. That makes a difference. So does that answer the question, what's under the covers? At least part of it.

>> Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, plus, it's... A lot of times you see these Barney deals, "I love you, you love me," and I always ask, "What's the engineering like? Do you have engineering teams that are actually putting resource into this?" Because otherwise-

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. so-

>> You're going to be the engineering team as the customer.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Deepak mentioned the idea of simplicity. So the difficult things are firmware, patching vulnerabilities, a disk drive goes bad. All of that is woven into what we're doing in a unique way. So we're talking about constant updates. We're talking about validation where Microsoft makes a change and that's rippled through the infrastructure. Dell makes a change, it's rippled through the software layers. So all of those components deeply engineered together. So if you take what we've been doing together for 35 years and just accelerate that in the data center and attaching that data center to the Azure cloud.

>> How do I engage? What am I actually buying as a customer? What's the engagement model? When I sign, what am I getting? Is there a model number? Is there a... What is it that I'm-

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Do you want to answer that one?

>> Because there's some good news around that one.

Deepak Setty

>> So what I referred to earlier is one of those SKUs that we will be introducing today which is essentially taking a lot of those services, pre-populating that, and providing that as a perpetual capability for our customers.

>> That's a SKU?

Deepak Setty

>> That's a SKU and that SKU gets pre-populated in a Dell factory along with that infrastructure that Todd was just describing. So it comes as a complete solution to the customer. The magic really happens when that infrastructure starts plugging to Azure instantly and it gets connected and gets recognized by Azure and the broader IT estate of our customers. So they're able to see a holistic view of what is on-prem, what is on-cloud. Using the APEX cloud platform and the integration to Microsoft arc, the customers then are able to manage that entire estate, update, security, name it, and they're able to see it as one instance in one console. So that's the magic of what this whole ecosystem coming together delivers for a customer.

>> So it was a big... I'm thinking the business case. It's got to be a big labor reducer for the customers that they don't have to do all this heavy lifting. The SKU makes it easy to buy, right?

Deepak Setty

>> Yep.

>> So what are you hearing from customers in terms of the business impact? Like when they do the business case, "I'm not going to do all this heavy lifting because it's a SKU. Procurement's going to be simpler. I'm going to save time, save money, and go."

Todd Lieb

>> Dave, you nailed it. I mean, that's it, right? That's the simplicity of... So if you think about customers have had Microsoft relationships, everybody has a Microsoft relationship-

>> Yeah. Ubiquitous.

Todd Lieb

>> Ubiquitous. And the Azure public cloud capability have expanded and grown and become that enterprise class place where you put the stuff that really matters. So now, all of that is now being delivered into places that are not in the cloud edge, far edge. That's done in a way that's operationally simple, cost-efficient. You can either use your Microsoft license or you can buy it in one SKU, right? All of those pieces come together in a simple way.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. It's really about... I think about it, the environments today are getting so much more complex. They're so much more distributed and everyone talks about hybrid cloud but you brought up the great point of talking about the edge. You've got applications in your private data center. You've got them in the public cloud, multiple public clouds. You've got them at the edge. So how do organizations, like you said, drive that operational efficiency? Having this single stack, single SKU, a solution that it's... I like to think of it as that principle of least astonishment. If I go from managing my data center to the cloud to the edge, it's all the same thing. So driving tremendous efficiencies for organizations, hence reducing costs and so forth. But you've also got a couple of cool things. You talked about the SKU and the integration. Also, you said connecting to the cloud there's some AI services that are concluded as well, correct?

Todd Lieb

>> Bob, I'm proud. It took you almost 10, 12 minutes to say AI.

Bob Laliberte

>> I was holding it back. I was holding back.

Todd Lieb

>> That was good. It usually comes up first and then we go into the other stuff. But anyways, I interrupted your question though.

Bob Laliberte

>> No, no. It was just about talking about the AI services that you have, including... Making sure people are aware of what capabilities they're able to get from this as well.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. So this was an announcement we did today as well which was an AI validated design on top of this APEX cloud platform that we've been describing. So if you think about the goodness of AI inside Microsoft, the OpenAI pioneering work they did starting November, a year and a half ago. Now, that is porting directly onto this infrastructure platform with the same operational control business case, all those pieces. So now, it's put AI to work, right? Maybe you want to experiment inside the Azure public cloud. But now, you have data or training or something that needs to be in something that you can control or you want to push that inference model to the edge, whatever it may be. We now have that AI capability sitting right on top of the infrastructure. So now, we get to work as opposed to figuring out how to build it.

Deepak Setty

>> Let me add a little bit more color to what Todd said and go back to where we started. So customer's desire and need to make data-led decisions as close to the data source as possible. So if you look at that as a paradigm... Let me walk you through an example, something that Todd and our teams are working jointly on, a large retailer who are embarking on a journey of creating frictionless, touchless transactions for their customers. And so, here's the scenario. So there is a customer who is walking in with a cart and has a camera on top of it, a plethora of things in there. And here's what the customer really wants, is that he wants that whole cart items to be recognized to the dexterity of being able to differentiate between an organic banana and a simple banana within a one millisecond latency. So get all those items connected to the billing system and have that insight by customer, by cart, by counter, within that latency and help have a frictionless transaction experience for that customer. That is groundbreaking capability of taking that video streaming content, analyzing that, and creating instant decisions. Here is the second aspect with... That is the more challenging piece is, as much as you want to have a great experience, one of the things which challenges the retail industry is about theft and fraud. So what they also want to do is illegitimate transaction to be intercepted at the exit. So by the time this transaction happens and the person reaches the exit, you want to intervene so that transaction gets stopped. So it is managing that whole ecosystem within a millisecond capability is what this infrastructure with what we call as Azure Video Indexer. Those are the new AI cognitive services that is able to run on this infrastructure and deliver to that promise for that customer. That's the magic of AI.

>> It's really interesting because a couple things, observations, I'd love to get your thoughts. So cloud is no longer a set of remote services that's somewhere in the cloud. It's on-prem. It's in the cloud. It's at the edge. It's where the data is, as you described, your original premise. What you just described in this basically near real-time system has a lot of implications. You mentioned one example in retail. I can see examples in supply chain where today, supply chain is really a big batch job. It's like, "Oh, it wasn't there so we'll just ship part of the order and frustrate the customer." What you're talking about is a whole new set of intelligent applications that I can now build on top of this infrastructure which I couldn't do before because the infrastructure couldn't do it at low enough cost or in real-time. It wasn't smart enough.

Deepak Setty

>> Yeah. Yeah. Do it.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Dave, there are no shortage of ideas of how to apply this technology. What you described while you were talking... I thought you were going to say healthcare, right? It's-

>> I was going to go there too. Yeah.

Todd Lieb

>> Healthcare supply chain, the retail story. There's no shortage of ideas, there's a shortage of talent and capability to bring those ideas to life, right? So when we start to take infrastructure and data capabilities, put it in a way that is validated such that the customer knows it'll work. We can accelerate their time to getting to the answer to the shopping cart with the organic banana or the regular banana. I'm going to use that one. That's a good one, by the way. And so, that's really what we're in the business to do.

Bob Laliberte

>> Excellent.

Todd Lieb

>> And I think-

Bob Laliberte

>> So... Sorry. I was just going to say, does that mean we should expect to see maybe some more verticalized solutions for some of these various industries?

Todd Lieb

>> That's a great question, Bob. I'm not sure I'm prepared to comment on that. No. Just kidding. Here's what I would say, I would say that the platform that we provide and that we're building together applies to all industries. But as the industries put it to use, we're going to see use cases that are shared. So I'm not sure that we'll be building... I can't say whether we'll build for a particular industry. But once they start to use it, we'll absolutely be sharing across those industries. Microsoft has a deep industry expertise. We've built ours as well. And so, the combination, we'll see it deployed that way.

Bob Laliberte

>> Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense.

Deepak Setty

>> A lot of them are repeatable, to Todd's point, right? So as you look at industry, so there is financial services, retail, having an intersection of customer experience. So how do we innovate that customer experience? How do we reinvent an employee experience with devices and technologies? So all of this are so interchangeable across industries. And so, it's very easy to bring the context of that industry to a potential use case and morph it back to that scenario.

>> Well, digital transformation has obviously taken a back seat to AI but we've been going through a digital transformation that was forced upon us during COVID and digital transformation is all about data. So to your point, Deepak, a lot of these industries which used to be stovepipes, the data is this unifying factor for a lot of the potential processes. And so, not completely but there's a lot of potential here, to your point, to leverage expertise across industries because of that horizontal data platform, if you will.

Deepak Setty

>> Yeah. So-

Todd Lieb

>> The way Dell is thinking about it, if you take block file and data protection, you software define it and you tie it to Azure capabilities in an edge location, in a data center, and in the Azure public cloud, now we're striping data on a common storage layer between all these locations. That then, the AI story starts to play out in a unique way, right? Because the hardest problem is getting all that data together to look at it.

>> I keep coming back to Super Cloud. It's AI-enabled Super Cloud. It's true. Guys, congratulations on 35 years of awesome partnerships and really appreciate you coming on theCUBE.

Todd Lieb

>> Thank you so much for having us.

Deepak Setty

>> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure being here.

>> All right. This is Dave Vellante for Bob Laliberte and Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Tech World 2024. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break.

Todd Lieb | Dell Technologies & Deepak Setty | Microsoft

search

>> Everybody, welcome back to Dell Tech World 2024. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage. I'm Dave Vellante and here with Bob Laliberte. Come on inside theCUBE. We got Todd Lieb here. He's the Vice President of Cloud and Data Center Partnerships at Dell Technologies and Deepak Setty, who's the senior director of Worldwide Partnerships Sales at Microsoft. You've heard of them. Dell and APEX, we're going to talk about Dell APEX cloud platform for Microsoft Azure, 35-year partnership between Microsoft and Dell. That means, Michael Dell was 24 when that partnership started?

Todd Lieb

>> And Bill was probably in about the same ballpark.

>> Right. Right, right, right. All right. Let's get the update since you guys launched last September. Is that right, with APEX on Azure? What's the update? What's the momentum look like?

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. So we came out of a business where we had the traditional Azure Stack business humming along. So what was that? I don't know. Seven or ten years we've been working together between Microsoft and Dell and this was an accelerator. So think about more integration, taking more of what makes Azure and the public cloud the place where workloads are going to bring in that capability into the data center and matching it with the Dell infrastructure. So that integration and everything we were doing, so the momentum has been take Azure Stack and put it on steroids maybe, is a good way to say it.

>> Yeah. And I wonder if you could comment, Deepak, because I mean, Azure Stack, before you guys became this cloud giant, it was different. It was good. It's a great idea but it wasn't like it is now. I mean, now it's like true cloud.

Deepak Setty

>> You bet. You bet. I think... Firstly, really excited about this partnership of Microsoft and Dell accelerating outcomes for our customer's digital transformation journey. What is also inspiring and energizing for this partnership is customer feedback on how this APEX Cloud Platform or hybrid cloud infrastructure is really so close to our customer's priorities. Let me just give you a feel of that, right? So now more than ever, our customers are needing to make data-driven decisions as close to the origination or source of that data. That creates a huge opportunity for ACP, for Azure, and our hybrid cloud platform to play into the customer priorities. The second, I would say is, repeatable approaches for rapid deployment. Given a lot of these deployments that we are seeing is in edge and far-edge scenarios, customers really want to make sure that when it gets deployed, it goes from POC to pilot to production really quick in areas where there is not much of deep technical expertise, right? So that repeatable approach is very important. Finally, I would say the desire to have everything as a service. So almost map technology to business outcome. So can I get business outcome as a service? When you deploy technology, is it as close to a business KPI that we're trying to meet? What is exciting as we hear from customers deploying these technologies is all of these are front and center to what these products are being designed for and how they're meeting the customer needs. So it's a great moment for us to be here and the future is all the more promising and inspiring.

Bob Laliberte

>> That's great. We talked about... Dave said, "This isn't your father's Azure Stack platform," right? You've got something new. So maybe you could spend a few moments and just talk about what's really new about the platform and what's different about it and what the customers are finding so appealing about the platform itself.

Deepak Setty

>> So let me give you a feel of what the platform is today and what we announced at the event today as well and I'll let Todd add more to it. So one of the two core tenets to what we announced and what this platform brings in which is simplification and being able to deliver outcomes at scale in a very cost-effective approach. So when our customers think of retailers deploying these at around 3,000 locations or going into oil rigs or think about petrol stations in rural areas, that rolls up into thousands and thousands of those instances. When you think of those things, it is that simplification and cost-effective approach which is so important. So what we announced today was essentially taking an approach of what are customers using these technologies for and what services are getting included in that? Like Azure Kubernetes services, containerization of their solutions to protect it and secure it and delivered at rapid scale. So Windows Server data center, HCI operating system, Kubernetes services, pre-packaged at factory by Dell. So it's completely curated. So Day 0, it connects to cloud and customers see outcome. We are able to do this in a very cost-effective approach because it is repeatable. It's factory designed, factory engineered, so it becomes easy for customers to deploy. So that's what we announced today which is really groundbreaking. And that's the value that we can not only provide to the biggest customers, but even to the small and medium businesses which really need the simplification. Todd, would you add to that thought?

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Were you going to ask a question?

>> I was going to ask what's underneath.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned like, "It's not your father's Azure Stack." So I was in Minneapolis last week with customers and I would ask them a question, "When was the last time you looked at Azure Stack?" They said, "A year and a half, two years ago," and I'm like, "Yep. It's time again." And so, here's what I would say, we've gone from dating to getting married. So what's underneath, right? There is a set of compute and storage nodes in a configuration called PowerFlex. So we've talked a lot about PowerFlex over the past couple days here or, I guess, a day at Dell Tech World. But think of it as a software defined storage layer that brings performance, it brings scalability, it brings cost efficiency to that Azure platform. So you take the Azure capabilities Deepak described, you add Dell's storage and compute expertise to that. Then, you integrate it and you do that integration over and over again. Like I said, we've gone from dating to marriage, right? We have engineering teams woven together in a way that they haven't been before. That makes a difference. So does that answer the question, what's under the covers? At least part of it.

>> Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, plus, it's... A lot of times you see these Barney deals, "I love you, you love me," and I always ask, "What's the engineering like? Do you have engineering teams that are actually putting resource into this?" Because otherwise-

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. so-

>> You're going to be the engineering team as the customer.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Deepak mentioned the idea of simplicity. So the difficult things are firmware, patching vulnerabilities, a disk drive goes bad. All of that is woven into what we're doing in a unique way. So we're talking about constant updates. We're talking about validation where Microsoft makes a change and that's rippled through the infrastructure. Dell makes a change, it's rippled through the software layers. So all of those components deeply engineered together. So if you take what we've been doing together for 35 years and just accelerate that in the data center and attaching that data center to the Azure cloud.

>> How do I engage? What am I actually buying as a customer? What's the engagement model? When I sign, what am I getting? Is there a model number? Is there a... What is it that I'm-

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Do you want to answer that one?

>> Because there's some good news around that one.

Deepak Setty

>> So what I referred to earlier is one of those SKUs that we will be introducing today which is essentially taking a lot of those services, pre-populating that, and providing that as a perpetual capability for our customers.

>> That's a SKU?

Deepak Setty

>> That's a SKU and that SKU gets pre-populated in a Dell factory along with that infrastructure that Todd was just describing. So it comes as a complete solution to the customer. The magic really happens when that infrastructure starts plugging to Azure instantly and it gets connected and gets recognized by Azure and the broader IT estate of our customers. So they're able to see a holistic view of what is on-prem, what is on-cloud. Using the APEX cloud platform and the integration to Microsoft arc, the customers then are able to manage that entire estate, update, security, name it, and they're able to see it as one instance in one console. So that's the magic of what this whole ecosystem coming together delivers for a customer.

>> So it was a big... I'm thinking the business case. It's got to be a big labor reducer for the customers that they don't have to do all this heavy lifting. The SKU makes it easy to buy, right?

Deepak Setty

>> Yep.

>> So what are you hearing from customers in terms of the business impact? Like when they do the business case, "I'm not going to do all this heavy lifting because it's a SKU. Procurement's going to be simpler. I'm going to save time, save money, and go."

Todd Lieb

>> Dave, you nailed it. I mean, that's it, right? That's the simplicity of... So if you think about customers have had Microsoft relationships, everybody has a Microsoft relationship-

>> Yeah. Ubiquitous.

Todd Lieb

>> Ubiquitous. And the Azure public cloud capability have expanded and grown and become that enterprise class place where you put the stuff that really matters. So now, all of that is now being delivered into places that are not in the cloud edge, far edge. That's done in a way that's operationally simple, cost-efficient. You can either use your Microsoft license or you can buy it in one SKU, right? All of those pieces come together in a simple way.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. It's really about... I think about it, the environments today are getting so much more complex. They're so much more distributed and everyone talks about hybrid cloud but you brought up the great point of talking about the edge. You've got applications in your private data center. You've got them in the public cloud, multiple public clouds. You've got them at the edge. So how do organizations, like you said, drive that operational efficiency? Having this single stack, single SKU, a solution that it's... I like to think of it as that principle of least astonishment. If I go from managing my data center to the cloud to the edge, it's all the same thing. So driving tremendous efficiencies for organizations, hence reducing costs and so forth. But you've also got a couple of cool things. You talked about the SKU and the integration. Also, you said connecting to the cloud there's some AI services that are concluded as well, correct?

Todd Lieb

>> Bob, I'm proud. It took you almost 10, 12 minutes to say AI.

Bob Laliberte

>> I was holding it back. I was holding back.

Todd Lieb

>> That was good. It usually comes up first and then we go into the other stuff. But anyways, I interrupted your question though.

Bob Laliberte

>> No, no. It was just about talking about the AI services that you have, including... Making sure people are aware of what capabilities they're able to get from this as well.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. So this was an announcement we did today as well which was an AI validated design on top of this APEX cloud platform that we've been describing. So if you think about the goodness of AI inside Microsoft, the OpenAI pioneering work they did starting November, a year and a half ago. Now, that is porting directly onto this infrastructure platform with the same operational control business case, all those pieces. So now, it's put AI to work, right? Maybe you want to experiment inside the Azure public cloud. But now, you have data or training or something that needs to be in something that you can control or you want to push that inference model to the edge, whatever it may be. We now have that AI capability sitting right on top of the infrastructure. So now, we get to work as opposed to figuring out how to build it.

Deepak Setty

>> Let me add a little bit more color to what Todd said and go back to where we started. So customer's desire and need to make data-led decisions as close to the data source as possible. So if you look at that as a paradigm... Let me walk you through an example, something that Todd and our teams are working jointly on, a large retailer who are embarking on a journey of creating frictionless, touchless transactions for their customers. And so, here's the scenario. So there is a customer who is walking in with a cart and has a camera on top of it, a plethora of things in there. And here's what the customer really wants, is that he wants that whole cart items to be recognized to the dexterity of being able to differentiate between an organic banana and a simple banana within a one millisecond latency. So get all those items connected to the billing system and have that insight by customer, by cart, by counter, within that latency and help have a frictionless transaction experience for that customer. That is groundbreaking capability of taking that video streaming content, analyzing that, and creating instant decisions. Here is the second aspect with... That is the more challenging piece is, as much as you want to have a great experience, one of the things which challenges the retail industry is about theft and fraud. So what they also want to do is illegitimate transaction to be intercepted at the exit. So by the time this transaction happens and the person reaches the exit, you want to intervene so that transaction gets stopped. So it is managing that whole ecosystem within a millisecond capability is what this infrastructure with what we call as Azure Video Indexer. Those are the new AI cognitive services that is able to run on this infrastructure and deliver to that promise for that customer. That's the magic of AI.

>> It's really interesting because a couple things, observations, I'd love to get your thoughts. So cloud is no longer a set of remote services that's somewhere in the cloud. It's on-prem. It's in the cloud. It's at the edge. It's where the data is, as you described, your original premise. What you just described in this basically near real-time system has a lot of implications. You mentioned one example in retail. I can see examples in supply chain where today, supply chain is really a big batch job. It's like, "Oh, it wasn't there so we'll just ship part of the order and frustrate the customer." What you're talking about is a whole new set of intelligent applications that I can now build on top of this infrastructure which I couldn't do before because the infrastructure couldn't do it at low enough cost or in real-time. It wasn't smart enough.

Deepak Setty

>> Yeah. Yeah. Do it.

Todd Lieb

>> Yeah. Dave, there are no shortage of ideas of how to apply this technology. What you described while you were talking... I thought you were going to say healthcare, right? It's-

>> I was going to go there too. Yeah.

Todd Lieb

>> Healthcare supply chain, the retail story. There's no shortage of ideas, there's a shortage of talent and capability to bring those ideas to life, right? So when we start to take infrastructure and data capabilities, put it in a way that is validated such that the customer knows it'll work. We can accelerate their time to getting to the answer to the shopping cart with the organic banana or the regular banana. I'm going to use that one. That's a good one, by the way. And so, that's really what we're in the business to do.

Bob Laliberte

>> Excellent.

Todd Lieb

>> And I think-

Bob Laliberte

>> So... Sorry. I was just going to say, does that mean we should expect to see maybe some more verticalized solutions for some of these various industries?

Todd Lieb

>> That's a great question, Bob. I'm not sure I'm prepared to comment on that. No. Just kidding. Here's what I would say, I would say that the platform that we provide and that we're building together applies to all industries. But as the industries put it to use, we're going to see use cases that are shared. So I'm not sure that we'll be building... I can't say whether we'll build for a particular industry. But once they start to use it, we'll absolutely be sharing across those industries. Microsoft has a deep industry expertise. We've built ours as well. And so, the combination, we'll see it deployed that way.

Bob Laliberte

>> Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense.

Deepak Setty

>> A lot of them are repeatable, to Todd's point, right? So as you look at industry, so there is financial services, retail, having an intersection of customer experience. So how do we innovate that customer experience? How do we reinvent an employee experience with devices and technologies? So all of this are so interchangeable across industries. And so, it's very easy to bring the context of that industry to a potential use case and morph it back to that scenario.

>> Well, digital transformation has obviously taken a back seat to AI but we've been going through a digital transformation that was forced upon us during COVID and digital transformation is all about data. So to your point, Deepak, a lot of these industries which used to be stovepipes, the data is this unifying factor for a lot of the potential processes. And so, not completely but there's a lot of potential here, to your point, to leverage expertise across industries because of that horizontal data platform, if you will.

Deepak Setty

>> Yeah. So-

Todd Lieb

>> The way Dell is thinking about it, if you take block file and data protection, you software define it and you tie it to Azure capabilities in an edge location, in a data center, and in the Azure public cloud, now we're striping data on a common storage layer between all these locations. That then, the AI story starts to play out in a unique way, right? Because the hardest problem is getting all that data together to look at it.

>> I keep coming back to Super Cloud. It's AI-enabled Super Cloud. It's true. Guys, congratulations on 35 years of awesome partnerships and really appreciate you coming on theCUBE.

Todd Lieb

>> Thank you so much for having us.

Deepak Setty

>> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure being here.

>> All right. This is Dave Vellante for Bob Laliberte and Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Tech World 2024. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break.