Dell Technologies World 2026 | Varun Chhabra, Dell Technologies & Fritz Oswald, Fraport AG

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More from Dell Technologies World 2026

Varun Chhabra

SVP, Product Marketing

Dell Technologies

Fritz Oswald

SVP IT Infrastructure

Fraport AG

play_circle_outline Managing Real-Time Decisions to Handle Unpredictable Flight Disruptions Across Fraport's 29 Airports Serving 174 Million Passengers

play_circle_outline Frankfurt hub: Terminal 3 supports 90M passengers and 15,000 IT components.

play_circle_outline Dell Private Cloud and Azure Local Deliver Hybrid Edge-to-Cloud Edge AI for Aircraft Turnaround Using 600 Cameras and Private 5G

play_circle_outline Passenger impact: fewer delays, smoother journeys, optimized just-in-time staffing.

play_circle_outline Autonomous/connected vehicles use system data like pushback clearances for safer routing.

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Varun Chhabra, Dell Technologies & Fritz Oswald, Fraport AG

Varun Chhabra

SVP, Product Marketing Dell Technologies

Fritz Oswald

SVP IT Infrastructure Fraport AG

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody, welcome back to Dell Tech World 2026. We're here at The Venetian in Las Vegas. This is day three of our live coverage, wall to wall coverage. I'm Dave Vellante. John Furrier is also here with Gemma Allen. We're excited to have Varun Chhabra is back, he heads product marketing for Dell Technologies. And Fritz Oswald, the Senior Vice President of IT Infrastructure at Fraport AG. Gents, welcome. Welcome back. Good to see you.

Fritz Oswald

>> Thanks for having us.

Varun Chhabra

>> Thank you, Dave.

Dave Vellante

>> So when we think of your organization, obviously, Frankfurt based, huge hub, but you guys managed 29 airports, right? 174 million passengers. So that's pretty complex. Wow. I got rerouted on the way here, but they got us here safely, so I was happy about that. Talk about how you guys with cargo and maintenance, how do you keep it all together?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. Same actually happened to me. I got rerouted as well because of the wind. And I mean, it shows how complicated the airport business is, right? You can't really plan ahead. You really have to make real-time decisions just as it's ongoing, because there are a lot of things happening. Airplanes come in late. There's better thing like the one that hit us on Sunday. Yeah, as you said, we are operating airports around the world. And for us, the most important thing is to offer a smooth journey for our passengers, a safe and smooth journey. Alone in Frankfurt, we had around 60 million passengers last year. So it's a big hub and at a big hub, there's a lot of things going on, a lot of processes. Everything has to come together. The small pieces have to fit together to ensure smooth operations. Yeah, we are doing our best from IT infrastructure side to support that and to bring systems to life that help us operate the airport smoothly and bring the passenger a nice journey.

Dave Vellante

>> So when we got rerouted, I pulled up the app and so we were in a holding pattern for a while and then we were running out of fuel so we had to go. But I pulled up the app, there must have been 40 planes you could see in this holding pattern. And then we landed in LA 45 minutes later and I said, "Well, we're never going to make it back." But then maybe within an hour, it had cleared up and I just can't imagine the complexity of that and the data that you have to wrangle, the flexibility of your infrastructure that you need. So paint a picture of what that looks like from your standpoint.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. I mean, the airport is a big IT playing ground. We have a lot of IT there. We just opened a new terminal in Frankfurt, our Terminal 3. It's designed for 90 million passengers, and there alone we have around 15,000 IT components that are connected with each other. So what we are trying to ensure is that we have the right shared services in place to have everything connected. We have a good network, we have our own private 5G network, we have a LoRaWAN. So we bring all those data points together, but the data really is, a lot of times, in silos at the moment. So what we want to achieve in the future, and we're working on that is bringing all that data together and really making intelligence systems and intelligence decisions on the data we have already.

Dave Vellante

>> So Varun, I wonder if you could talk about the relationship, maybe parts of your portfolio I would think these guys touch. There's maybe even some edge use cases in there. Take us through that.

Varun Chhabra

>> Yeah. I think Fritz and his team, they've been using the Dell Private Cloud and they're using Azure Local. So I think really cutting edge use case, when you think about the spectrum of hybrid, when we talk about hybrid edge, local processing all the way up into the cloud. And organizations that are using the Dell Private Cloud, really taking advantage of that flexibility. I think we talked about cargo handling, passenger buses, all of that workloads, a lot of them are very latency sensitive and you need to be able to run some of the analytics on that locally, and then be able to take advantage of the Azure services in the cloud as and when you need them. So getting that balance right, I think Fritz and his team are like a really, really great example of we talk about hybrid all the time, but this is as hybrid as it gets and it's the balance of real-time and making decisions in the cloud.

Dave Vellante

>> And lots of data. I imagine you get a lot of video going on. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with moving that data around, making sure it's low latency?

Fritz Oswald

>> So one of our key processes at the airport, what we're talking about now is the turnaround of the aircraft. So one aircraft comes in, has to be unloaded, everything has to be cleaned, refueled, and stuff like that and then reload it and we turn it around. That's why we call it turnaround. We turn it around and it goes out again. And that's a very complicated process with a lot of process steps and it happens a lot that you know it probably as passenger. You come to the airport, you're in time, you go through security, you go to your boarding gate and, yeah, boarding team is there, aircraft is there, everything seems to be fine and then you get the announcement, boarding is delayed for 30 minutes and you ask yourself, "What happened?" And for us as airport operator, we had the same question and we said, "What was happening here? Why did we have the delay now?" Because those turnaround processes really been a data black box for us. We couldn't really see what was the problem, because all those process steps rely on each other. So if one is delayed, you have a problem in the total process. So we thought about that and we found that we already have cameras in place. So we have three cameras around the aircraft stand, one in front, one on the left, one on the right. We have around 200 aircraft stands in Frankfurt, so we're talking about 600 cameras with high resolution video streams, 24/7 on. And I talked to my team and said, "We should use this data we already have." And they told me, "Don't think about getting 600 video streams to the cloud and using it there, because it's a lot of data and our network is good and it's big and reliable, but you don't want to get 600 video streams to the cloud." So, yeah, actually two years ago when I was here at this conference, I had a chat with Michael there and I asked Michael, "What do you think where the AI workload in the future will be? Will it be in the cloud or on-prem?" And he answered to me wherever the data is. And that's what we took two years ago with us to Frankfurt and we thought about it and we said, "Let's try this edge computing stuff and process those video streams on the edge where the data occurs." So we did that and now we can analyze the video streams with AI on the edge right where it occurs and we generate timestamps for every process that is happening, and the first time we can really see what is happening on the aircraft stand during the turnaround of an aircraft.

Dave Vellante

>> Am I correct that the maintenance is the responsibility of the airline? Is that correct? What role do you play and how do you connect to that data, maybe predict what kind ... Because that's really the mission-critical system. People think of the booking system, but that's not really ... I mean, if you lose a booking, it's an annoyance, but it's not mission-critical. The maintenance system is the mission-critical part of it.

Fritz Oswald

>> It's actually a lot of partners that come together. It's the airport, it's the airline, it's ground handling companies, it's like catering companies, cleaning companies. And that was one of the problems in the past that if a problem occurred, people started finger pointing at each other and told us it was them, it was them. And you have a lot of process steps that rely on each other. For example, we have this small process step putting pylons around the aircraft, around the engine. And before, you don't have the pylons in place, you're not allowed to work on the aircraft. So if the guy's missing who puts the pylons, you can't really start operating at the aircraft. And that was one thing we saw on the data now that we have problems there from time to time. So we started a project now with autonomous pylons that drive there automatically and drive back if the aircraft is done. Stuff like that is really insights we gain out of the data now.

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, interesting. Okay. Take us through a little case study of when you started, maybe take us through a modernization initiative and what did that look like? What role did Dell play? What were you pushing them to help you with?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. So actually, a couple of years ago, we already decided to have a cloud-first strategy. We're doing a lot with Microsoft in Azure and Azure Cloud. And I've been working together with Dell for a couple of years now and have a great relationship there. So for us, it was pretty clear to bring those two worlds together, use the logic we have in Azure and use the great hardware and solutions that Dell can offer. And, yeah, we had a great teamwork there. Dell helped us a lot with sizing the systems, building it up. The delivery was really fast. We could set up the first systems in weeks after we had the sizing. And, yeah, we started to process the data and now that we have the data in there, we are finding a lot of use cases and a lot of benefit we can use out of the data, and that's really, really exciting for us.

Dave Vellante

>> So how do you think about this, Varun? I mean, you probably hear this a lot from customers, although this is a unique use case. Just from a security standpoint with the private cloud, what's your point of view on that?

Varun Chhabra

>> Yeah. We've always said there's no one size fits all, right? Every organization has their unique requirements. And security, latency, governance requirements, they're all different. And I think you put them in the pot and then a strategy emerges based on those unique factors on what you want to do. I think Fritz and his team are really embodying some of what that means. I mean, they're using PowerStore to really do a lot of the data and analytics, and we're continuing to drive a relationship with them on newer capabilities and all those things. And the balance of the security, the latency requirements and the, I'm assuming economics as well, are a huge part of what drives this for all of you. And the value of Dell Private Cloud is customers like Fritz who've decided we're going to go in on the Azure ecosystem. They have the flexibility to pick Azure Local and then have those seamless operations between on-prem and off-prem. There are other customers that are making other decisions around what that platform is. Our goal is to really support customers wherever they are, Dave, as you know. And in this case, it works out really, really well because the capabilities they have in Azure bringing them on-premises with Azure Local and then vice versa. That consistency of experience for analytics and operations that Fritz and his team have is really powerful.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. And may I add that regarding the data severity, it's a quite important point for us as well. We are a highly regulated business as airports. We have a lot of processes where we're not allowed to give the data outside of our campus of our systems. So there, it's really interesting for us the private cloud solutions that we have now to keep the data where it belongs on our campus and we can process it there and don't have to give it away. Yeah. We have a lot of mission-critical processes as well. So if something occurs in the internet connection to the cloud, we are independent from that. The system will run anyway, so we are really happy with the solution there as well.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So you've got compliance in there and you've got essentially reliability and uptime is a piece of that. To translate this into something that everybody can understand, which is what does it mean for the traveler? How is that?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, that's the most important point for passengers. We want them to come to the airport and don't worry about hiccups at the airport, right? We want them to start their vacation at the airport and not when they arrive at their destination. So come to Frankfurt Airport and have a smooth travel. And we are really achieving that with those systems already. We have less delays and less hiccups, because we are getting the process steps right now. I can give maybe one or two example what we're doing with the data already. There's one thing is, for example, unloading of the cargo that we have on the aircraft. Normally, we have one team unloading and one team driving the cargo away. If the team that is driving the cargo away is not at the stand, the cargo will block the next process step, so you will get a delay for the passenger. So what we did in the past was to prevent delays, we provided the team that is driving it away quite early to the aircraft stand. So we had waiting times there and average 16 minute waiting times at an aircraft stand for the driving team. And those 60 minutes, they're just blocked. They can't help at another stand for another aircraft, so maybe you have a delay there. And what we can do now is the data, we can really adjust it like we bring the team just in time so they can be there and drive directly and we don't have waiting time. So in the end for our passenger, it's all about having a smooth travel and no delays there.

Dave Vellante

>> You hear about smart cities, you like building a smart airport in a lot of ways.

Varun Chhabra

>> They're like smart cities basically. The amount of data and the number of technology pieces you have there, it's no smaller than what a lot of smart cities have.

Dave Vellante

>> Do you have a comment?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, I just wanted to say we always say that an airport is like a small city, right? You have everything there. You have the fire department, the hospital, you have shopping mall, you have the parking. There's a lot going on at the airport. And for us, it's really, we have this vision of a highly connected airport. We're looking a lot of autonomous vehicles at the moment, a lot of about robotics. And when we talk about autonomous vehicles, for example, we don't really want an autonomous vehicle, we want a connected vehicle which uses the data that we have in all the other systems and bring that really together. Maybe I can go a little bit into that, because I think it's a nice use case. For example, when you're driving on the airport, there's one critical point when you drive behind an aircraft because you always have to check might there be a pushback going on. And if the pushback is going on, you're not allowed to drive behind the aircraft anymore. So that's a pretty hard task for a LiDAR sensor to check if the pushback might occur in a few seconds. But we have the information in our systems, so we have the pushback clearance in our system. We have timestamps for that. So why not give the autonomous vehicles this information and they can know what is happening before they arrive at an aircraft stand? They can even reroute another route through the apron to avoid getting in conflict with the pushback that is going on. And that's like things that we have in mind when we talk about a connected airport.

Dave Vellante

>> That's a great example. Like you said, they don't even need the LiDAR at that point. Of course, they use the LiDAR for safety, but they just read the data.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So this is a good physical AI sort of example as well. What about this whole agentic wave? Where are you with that? Are you guys deploying agents, checking them out in the sandboxes? How are you approaching that?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, that's like the big topic at the moment and we discuss it a lot. We started with a lot of small agents in our operations, in our administrative teams. We have agents in the IT department at the moment that help us, for example, with incident management when we have major incidents in our IT systems. We have this agent that looks over all this data and give hints and tells us, "Have you thought about that? Have a look there. We found some data points there that could be related." There was a change happening yesterday, so maybe there's a correlation. Things like that, we are already doing. We don't have a lot of agentic AI already with our keen operations. So we're just evolving that and see what the opportunities there, but we think it's going to be big. And, yeah, that's for us, as IT infrastructure people, important, as I said before, to keep the base layer right and have the shared services in place. So what we are discussing now with Dell as well is how can we provide a shared service that is like token management to provide tokens for our agents, for our AI. And we want to bring together on-premise tokens and cloud tokens and make it smooth and cost-effective.

Dave Vellante

>> So a question for both of you. As you think about the Agentic future, what has to change in infrastructure to support that?

Varun Chhabra

>> I mean, I think I can take a stab maybe, and Fritz, you can provide your perspective. But for us, the Agentic AI conversations has to start with the data. Ultimately, agents act on context. The more context you can give an agent, the more accurate there will be and the better outcomes will be. So getting your data strategy right and I think we're having conversations with Fritz and his team about that. That's a huge part of it. And what we announced this week at Dell Tech World with the AI data platform has really helped customers. And I'd say the airport scenario is a perfect example. You've got data in so many places from so many sensors being created. How do you ingest that? There's a lot of real-time data coming in. How do you tag it, curate it and make it decide what you want to make available to which model? And the agents I think is going to be a huge part of it. And then the other piece is really agentic governance, right? What permissions do you allow your agents to have and what permissions do you not allow them to have? As we found is with OpenClaw, agents can be very persistent. You ask them to go do something. If they find one avenue shut, they'll go do it somewhere else. So having that secure foundation to be able to ... An organization like the Frankfurt Airport, minimizing that risk is a huge, huge part of that. So being able to deploy that, having the confidence that, hey, it's going to do only what we ask you to do, I think is going to be a big part of this for a lot of organizations.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, that's totally right. And for us as a mission-critical industry, we have a lot of security processes, security issues, and we need 100% solutions in a lot of cases. I always tell the people, if we bring 99% of the aircraft safely to the ground, it wouldn't be enough. Nobody would fly from Frankfurt anymore. So everywhere where our air operations, safety operations is involved, we think we will have a human in the loop for quite a long time, but we have a lot of other processes going on where we have backend processes and stuff. Yeah, the challenge for us and for all the other companies I believe is really bringing the innovation with those agents together with a good governance and managing it right.

Dave Vellante

>> What could Dell do to make your life easier, better? What do you want from Dell?

Fritz Oswald

>> I think they're doing a lot already. So what we heard here with the new private cloud offering, it opens up much more opportunities for us regarding the edge computing that we already do. My team was really excited about the easier management, easier, faster deployment of the systems and also to have the opportunity to bring different storage units in, have the PowerStore really integrated. So that offers us opportunity to store a lot of data in the edge and have a cost-effective way to do that, and I think that excites us for the next years.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, Varun, we'll give you the last word. I appreciate you bringing Fritz on for the great customer story and not only just a customer story, but a really interesting one with physical AI, you've got autonomous vehicles, you've got sensors, you've got video, very complex environment. So thank you for that, but give you the last word.

Varun Chhabra

>> I think the thing that's amazing about this and very emblematic about what's happening right now in the industry is we're learning along with our customers. The examples Fritz has shared, they're often groundbreaking, new things that they're trying. They have, I think, an amazing track record of applying technology and thinking about data very differently. And he shared some amazing examples of that. The great thing is not only do we get to solve these problems for Fritz and his team, we also learn along with them, and then that helps inform our innovation flywheel. So I wouldn't be surprised if some of the things we learned with Fritz and his team show up as announcements next year. So it's just a great virtuous cycle of innovation that really comes with partnering with amazing customers like Fritz.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, we'll look forward to that at Dell Tech World 2027. Thanks you guys. Appreciate you coming on.

Varun Chhabra

>> Thank you for having us.

Dave Vellante

>> All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante. For Gemma Allen and John Furrier, live from Las Vegas Dell Tech World 2026. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.

Varun Chhabra, Dell Technologies & Fritz Oswald, Fraport AG

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody, welcome back to Dell Tech World 2026. We're here at The Venetian in Las Vegas. This is day three of our live coverage, wall to wall coverage. I'm Dave Vellante. John Furrier is also here with Gemma Allen. We're excited to have Varun Chhabra is back, he heads product marketing for Dell Technologies. And Fritz Oswald, the Senior Vice President of IT Infrastructure at Fraport AG. Gents, welcome. Welcome back. Good to see you.

Fritz Oswald

>> Thanks for having us.

Varun Chhabra

>> Thank you, Dave.

Dave Vellante

>> So when we think of your organization, obviously, Frankfurt based, huge hub, but you guys managed 29 airports, right? 174 million passengers. So that's pretty complex. Wow. I got rerouted on the way here, but they got us here safely, so I was happy about that. Talk about how you guys with cargo and maintenance, how do you keep it all together?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. Same actually happened to me. I got rerouted as well because of the wind. And I mean, it shows how complicated the airport business is, right? You can't really plan ahead. You really have to make real-time decisions just as it's ongoing, because there are a lot of things happening. Airplanes come in late. There's better thing like the one that hit us on Sunday. Yeah, as you said, we are operating airports around the world. And for us, the most important thing is to offer a smooth journey for our passengers, a safe and smooth journey. Alone in Frankfurt, we had around 60 million passengers last year. So it's a big hub and at a big hub, there's a lot of things going on, a lot of processes. Everything has to come together. The small pieces have to fit together to ensure smooth operations. Yeah, we are doing our best from IT infrastructure side to support that and to bring systems to life that help us operate the airport smoothly and bring the passenger a nice journey.

Dave Vellante

>> So when we got rerouted, I pulled up the app and so we were in a holding pattern for a while and then we were running out of fuel so we had to go. But I pulled up the app, there must have been 40 planes you could see in this holding pattern. And then we landed in LA 45 minutes later and I said, "Well, we're never going to make it back." But then maybe within an hour, it had cleared up and I just can't imagine the complexity of that and the data that you have to wrangle, the flexibility of your infrastructure that you need. So paint a picture of what that looks like from your standpoint.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. I mean, the airport is a big IT playing ground. We have a lot of IT there. We just opened a new terminal in Frankfurt, our Terminal 3. It's designed for 90 million passengers, and there alone we have around 15,000 IT components that are connected with each other. So what we are trying to ensure is that we have the right shared services in place to have everything connected. We have a good network, we have our own private 5G network, we have a LoRaWAN. So we bring all those data points together, but the data really is, a lot of times, in silos at the moment. So what we want to achieve in the future, and we're working on that is bringing all that data together and really making intelligence systems and intelligence decisions on the data we have already.

Dave Vellante

>> So Varun, I wonder if you could talk about the relationship, maybe parts of your portfolio I would think these guys touch. There's maybe even some edge use cases in there. Take us through that.

Varun Chhabra

>> Yeah. I think Fritz and his team, they've been using the Dell Private Cloud and they're using Azure Local. So I think really cutting edge use case, when you think about the spectrum of hybrid, when we talk about hybrid edge, local processing all the way up into the cloud. And organizations that are using the Dell Private Cloud, really taking advantage of that flexibility. I think we talked about cargo handling, passenger buses, all of that workloads, a lot of them are very latency sensitive and you need to be able to run some of the analytics on that locally, and then be able to take advantage of the Azure services in the cloud as and when you need them. So getting that balance right, I think Fritz and his team are like a really, really great example of we talk about hybrid all the time, but this is as hybrid as it gets and it's the balance of real-time and making decisions in the cloud.

Dave Vellante

>> And lots of data. I imagine you get a lot of video going on. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with moving that data around, making sure it's low latency?

Fritz Oswald

>> So one of our key processes at the airport, what we're talking about now is the turnaround of the aircraft. So one aircraft comes in, has to be unloaded, everything has to be cleaned, refueled, and stuff like that and then reload it and we turn it around. That's why we call it turnaround. We turn it around and it goes out again. And that's a very complicated process with a lot of process steps and it happens a lot that you know it probably as passenger. You come to the airport, you're in time, you go through security, you go to your boarding gate and, yeah, boarding team is there, aircraft is there, everything seems to be fine and then you get the announcement, boarding is delayed for 30 minutes and you ask yourself, "What happened?" And for us as airport operator, we had the same question and we said, "What was happening here? Why did we have the delay now?" Because those turnaround processes really been a data black box for us. We couldn't really see what was the problem, because all those process steps rely on each other. So if one is delayed, you have a problem in the total process. So we thought about that and we found that we already have cameras in place. So we have three cameras around the aircraft stand, one in front, one on the left, one on the right. We have around 200 aircraft stands in Frankfurt, so we're talking about 600 cameras with high resolution video streams, 24/7 on. And I talked to my team and said, "We should use this data we already have." And they told me, "Don't think about getting 600 video streams to the cloud and using it there, because it's a lot of data and our network is good and it's big and reliable, but you don't want to get 600 video streams to the cloud." So, yeah, actually two years ago when I was here at this conference, I had a chat with Michael there and I asked Michael, "What do you think where the AI workload in the future will be? Will it be in the cloud or on-prem?" And he answered to me wherever the data is. And that's what we took two years ago with us to Frankfurt and we thought about it and we said, "Let's try this edge computing stuff and process those video streams on the edge where the data occurs." So we did that and now we can analyze the video streams with AI on the edge right where it occurs and we generate timestamps for every process that is happening, and the first time we can really see what is happening on the aircraft stand during the turnaround of an aircraft.

Dave Vellante

>> Am I correct that the maintenance is the responsibility of the airline? Is that correct? What role do you play and how do you connect to that data, maybe predict what kind ... Because that's really the mission-critical system. People think of the booking system, but that's not really ... I mean, if you lose a booking, it's an annoyance, but it's not mission-critical. The maintenance system is the mission-critical part of it.

Fritz Oswald

>> It's actually a lot of partners that come together. It's the airport, it's the airline, it's ground handling companies, it's like catering companies, cleaning companies. And that was one of the problems in the past that if a problem occurred, people started finger pointing at each other and told us it was them, it was them. And you have a lot of process steps that rely on each other. For example, we have this small process step putting pylons around the aircraft, around the engine. And before, you don't have the pylons in place, you're not allowed to work on the aircraft. So if the guy's missing who puts the pylons, you can't really start operating at the aircraft. And that was one thing we saw on the data now that we have problems there from time to time. So we started a project now with autonomous pylons that drive there automatically and drive back if the aircraft is done. Stuff like that is really insights we gain out of the data now.

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, interesting. Okay. Take us through a little case study of when you started, maybe take us through a modernization initiative and what did that look like? What role did Dell play? What were you pushing them to help you with?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. So actually, a couple of years ago, we already decided to have a cloud-first strategy. We're doing a lot with Microsoft in Azure and Azure Cloud. And I've been working together with Dell for a couple of years now and have a great relationship there. So for us, it was pretty clear to bring those two worlds together, use the logic we have in Azure and use the great hardware and solutions that Dell can offer. And, yeah, we had a great teamwork there. Dell helped us a lot with sizing the systems, building it up. The delivery was really fast. We could set up the first systems in weeks after we had the sizing. And, yeah, we started to process the data and now that we have the data in there, we are finding a lot of use cases and a lot of benefit we can use out of the data, and that's really, really exciting for us.

Dave Vellante

>> So how do you think about this, Varun? I mean, you probably hear this a lot from customers, although this is a unique use case. Just from a security standpoint with the private cloud, what's your point of view on that?

Varun Chhabra

>> Yeah. We've always said there's no one size fits all, right? Every organization has their unique requirements. And security, latency, governance requirements, they're all different. And I think you put them in the pot and then a strategy emerges based on those unique factors on what you want to do. I think Fritz and his team are really embodying some of what that means. I mean, they're using PowerStore to really do a lot of the data and analytics, and we're continuing to drive a relationship with them on newer capabilities and all those things. And the balance of the security, the latency requirements and the, I'm assuming economics as well, are a huge part of what drives this for all of you. And the value of Dell Private Cloud is customers like Fritz who've decided we're going to go in on the Azure ecosystem. They have the flexibility to pick Azure Local and then have those seamless operations between on-prem and off-prem. There are other customers that are making other decisions around what that platform is. Our goal is to really support customers wherever they are, Dave, as you know. And in this case, it works out really, really well because the capabilities they have in Azure bringing them on-premises with Azure Local and then vice versa. That consistency of experience for analytics and operations that Fritz and his team have is really powerful.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah. And may I add that regarding the data severity, it's a quite important point for us as well. We are a highly regulated business as airports. We have a lot of processes where we're not allowed to give the data outside of our campus of our systems. So there, it's really interesting for us the private cloud solutions that we have now to keep the data where it belongs on our campus and we can process it there and don't have to give it away. Yeah. We have a lot of mission-critical processes as well. So if something occurs in the internet connection to the cloud, we are independent from that. The system will run anyway, so we are really happy with the solution there as well.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So you've got compliance in there and you've got essentially reliability and uptime is a piece of that. To translate this into something that everybody can understand, which is what does it mean for the traveler? How is that?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, that's the most important point for passengers. We want them to come to the airport and don't worry about hiccups at the airport, right? We want them to start their vacation at the airport and not when they arrive at their destination. So come to Frankfurt Airport and have a smooth travel. And we are really achieving that with those systems already. We have less delays and less hiccups, because we are getting the process steps right now. I can give maybe one or two example what we're doing with the data already. There's one thing is, for example, unloading of the cargo that we have on the aircraft. Normally, we have one team unloading and one team driving the cargo away. If the team that is driving the cargo away is not at the stand, the cargo will block the next process step, so you will get a delay for the passenger. So what we did in the past was to prevent delays, we provided the team that is driving it away quite early to the aircraft stand. So we had waiting times there and average 16 minute waiting times at an aircraft stand for the driving team. And those 60 minutes, they're just blocked. They can't help at another stand for another aircraft, so maybe you have a delay there. And what we can do now is the data, we can really adjust it like we bring the team just in time so they can be there and drive directly and we don't have waiting time. So in the end for our passenger, it's all about having a smooth travel and no delays there.

Dave Vellante

>> You hear about smart cities, you like building a smart airport in a lot of ways.

Varun Chhabra

>> They're like smart cities basically. The amount of data and the number of technology pieces you have there, it's no smaller than what a lot of smart cities have.

Dave Vellante

>> Do you have a comment?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, I just wanted to say we always say that an airport is like a small city, right? You have everything there. You have the fire department, the hospital, you have shopping mall, you have the parking. There's a lot going on at the airport. And for us, it's really, we have this vision of a highly connected airport. We're looking a lot of autonomous vehicles at the moment, a lot of about robotics. And when we talk about autonomous vehicles, for example, we don't really want an autonomous vehicle, we want a connected vehicle which uses the data that we have in all the other systems and bring that really together. Maybe I can go a little bit into that, because I think it's a nice use case. For example, when you're driving on the airport, there's one critical point when you drive behind an aircraft because you always have to check might there be a pushback going on. And if the pushback is going on, you're not allowed to drive behind the aircraft anymore. So that's a pretty hard task for a LiDAR sensor to check if the pushback might occur in a few seconds. But we have the information in our systems, so we have the pushback clearance in our system. We have timestamps for that. So why not give the autonomous vehicles this information and they can know what is happening before they arrive at an aircraft stand? They can even reroute another route through the apron to avoid getting in conflict with the pushback that is going on. And that's like things that we have in mind when we talk about a connected airport.

Dave Vellante

>> That's a great example. Like you said, they don't even need the LiDAR at that point. Of course, they use the LiDAR for safety, but they just read the data.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So this is a good physical AI sort of example as well. What about this whole agentic wave? Where are you with that? Are you guys deploying agents, checking them out in the sandboxes? How are you approaching that?

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, that's like the big topic at the moment and we discuss it a lot. We started with a lot of small agents in our operations, in our administrative teams. We have agents in the IT department at the moment that help us, for example, with incident management when we have major incidents in our IT systems. We have this agent that looks over all this data and give hints and tells us, "Have you thought about that? Have a look there. We found some data points there that could be related." There was a change happening yesterday, so maybe there's a correlation. Things like that, we are already doing. We don't have a lot of agentic AI already with our keen operations. So we're just evolving that and see what the opportunities there, but we think it's going to be big. And, yeah, that's for us, as IT infrastructure people, important, as I said before, to keep the base layer right and have the shared services in place. So what we are discussing now with Dell as well is how can we provide a shared service that is like token management to provide tokens for our agents, for our AI. And we want to bring together on-premise tokens and cloud tokens and make it smooth and cost-effective.

Dave Vellante

>> So a question for both of you. As you think about the Agentic future, what has to change in infrastructure to support that?

Varun Chhabra

>> I mean, I think I can take a stab maybe, and Fritz, you can provide your perspective. But for us, the Agentic AI conversations has to start with the data. Ultimately, agents act on context. The more context you can give an agent, the more accurate there will be and the better outcomes will be. So getting your data strategy right and I think we're having conversations with Fritz and his team about that. That's a huge part of it. And what we announced this week at Dell Tech World with the AI data platform has really helped customers. And I'd say the airport scenario is a perfect example. You've got data in so many places from so many sensors being created. How do you ingest that? There's a lot of real-time data coming in. How do you tag it, curate it and make it decide what you want to make available to which model? And the agents I think is going to be a huge part of it. And then the other piece is really agentic governance, right? What permissions do you allow your agents to have and what permissions do you not allow them to have? As we found is with OpenClaw, agents can be very persistent. You ask them to go do something. If they find one avenue shut, they'll go do it somewhere else. So having that secure foundation to be able to ... An organization like the Frankfurt Airport, minimizing that risk is a huge, huge part of that. So being able to deploy that, having the confidence that, hey, it's going to do only what we ask you to do, I think is going to be a big part of this for a lot of organizations.

Fritz Oswald

>> Yeah, that's totally right. And for us as a mission-critical industry, we have a lot of security processes, security issues, and we need 100% solutions in a lot of cases. I always tell the people, if we bring 99% of the aircraft safely to the ground, it wouldn't be enough. Nobody would fly from Frankfurt anymore. So everywhere where our air operations, safety operations is involved, we think we will have a human in the loop for quite a long time, but we have a lot of other processes going on where we have backend processes and stuff. Yeah, the challenge for us and for all the other companies I believe is really bringing the innovation with those agents together with a good governance and managing it right.

Dave Vellante

>> What could Dell do to make your life easier, better? What do you want from Dell?

Fritz Oswald

>> I think they're doing a lot already. So what we heard here with the new private cloud offering, it opens up much more opportunities for us regarding the edge computing that we already do. My team was really excited about the easier management, easier, faster deployment of the systems and also to have the opportunity to bring different storage units in, have the PowerStore really integrated. So that offers us opportunity to store a lot of data in the edge and have a cost-effective way to do that, and I think that excites us for the next years.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, Varun, we'll give you the last word. I appreciate you bringing Fritz on for the great customer story and not only just a customer story, but a really interesting one with physical AI, you've got autonomous vehicles, you've got sensors, you've got video, very complex environment. So thank you for that, but give you the last word.

Varun Chhabra

>> I think the thing that's amazing about this and very emblematic about what's happening right now in the industry is we're learning along with our customers. The examples Fritz has shared, they're often groundbreaking, new things that they're trying. They have, I think, an amazing track record of applying technology and thinking about data very differently. And he shared some amazing examples of that. The great thing is not only do we get to solve these problems for Fritz and his team, we also learn along with them, and then that helps inform our innovation flywheel. So I wouldn't be surprised if some of the things we learned with Fritz and his team show up as announcements next year. So it's just a great virtuous cycle of innovation that really comes with partnering with amazing customers like Fritz.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, we'll look forward to that at Dell Tech World 2027. Thanks you guys. Appreciate you coming on.

Varun Chhabra

>> Thank you for having us.

Dave Vellante

>> All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante. For Gemma Allen and John Furrier, live from Las Vegas Dell Tech World 2026. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.