Dell Gets ‘Assertive’ About How Off-Prem Private Cloud Is Designed

Lately, the cloud platforms team at Dell has been spending a lot of time figuring out the best ways to abstract IT infrastructure the company sells to make the experience of using it as similar as it can be to the experience of using infrastructure AWS or Azure sell as services. As a result, you can now order rows of equipment racks, packed with hardware and software, all pre-integrated based on your specifications, all delivered to and deployed in your own data center within what Dell promises will be no longer than 14 days.

Sure, it’s not clicking on an EC2 instance and seeing it up and running in a few minutes; but it’s infrastructure of your choice – that you don’t have to manage – up and running in a facility of your choice within a relatively short time frame. And you pay for what you use, as you use it. It’s not public cloud, but it’s as close as you can get to having that experience in your own data center today – without having to fit into one of the provider-prescribed hybrid cloud frameworks, such as Azure Stack or AWS Outposts. That’s, of course, if you have the data center capacity ready to go.

Leveraging its vast global supply chain and tight integration with its subsidiary VMware (whose ubiquity in enterprise data centers simplifies integration with customers’ existing environments), Dell Technologies has managed to squeeze the delivery and deployment window down to a couple of weeks. But those are things the company controls. Customer data centers vary widely in terms of connectivity and physical parameters, making the facilities the biggest bottleneck in the “everything-as-a-service” model Dell – and its biggest rivals, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise – have yet to resolve.

Related:Dell, Switch to Build Edge Computing Infrastructure at FedEx Logistics Sites

“While, on one end, we’re abstracting the complexities of our products from our customers, on the other end, we are trying to figure out the right way to abstract the diversities of different data centers and their setups from how the products are delivered to the customers,” Deepak Patil, who leads Dell’s cloud business, said in a  (scroll down to listen). “It’s a phenomenally interesting challenge.”

Patil, senior VP and general manager of Dell’s Cloud Platforms and Solutions group, has been leading Dell’s cloud strategy for about one year. About a decade ago, working for Microsoft, he was one of the senior engineers who built the first Azure cloud platform. He left Microsoft at the end of 2015 to lead Oracle’s latest foray into the cloud infrastructure business.

Most customers that have deployed Dell’s infrastructure in the new as-a-service manner (several hundred so far, according to him) have done it in their own enterprise data centers. But Patil expects a big part of the solution to the facilities-related bottleneck will be colocation. Much more standardized than enterprise computing facilities and always maintaining extra capacity (that’s part of the business model), colocation providers can become yet another abstraction layer in the everything-as-a-service stack.

Dell’s biggest recent effort in this area is its partnership with FedEx and the data center provider Switch. Even the largest data center providers don’t have real estate portfolios as distributed as FedEx’s logistics operations. The three are deploying Switch-designed modular data centers across the shipping giant’s package-processing real estate. Eventually, Dell customers will be able to have their IT infrastructure shipped to and spun up in any of those locations.

“The announcement we made... with Switch and FedEx is an example of us starting to get really assertive about how the off-prem private cloud paradigm gets designed and developed,” he said. “Off-prem private cloud is a massive category.”

For a lot more about Dell’s cloud strategy, its inextricable links to VMware (a business Dell is considering spinning off), and Patil’s views on the big trends in the broad enterprise data center technology market, listen to our full interview on The Data Center Podcast (Apple Podcasts, ):

The Data Center Podcast: Dell's Strategy for Cloud and Delivering Data Centers as a Service

A conversation with Deepak Patil, senior VP and general manager of Dell’s Cloud Platforms and Solutions group.

Full transcript:

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Hi everybody. Welcome to the Data Center Podcast. We have with us today Deepak Patil. He's Senior VP and DM of the Dell Cloud Business. Deepak, thank you so much for joining us.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Thank you for having me Yevgeniy. I'm really excited to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Deepak was one of the engineers who started and built the Microsoft Azure platform. Then he went to Oracle after, I think about, was it 15 years at Microsoft?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

That's right.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

At Oracle, he led the launch of its second-gen cloud platform. He's now a Dell Technologies, leading all things cloud strategy and business. He joined Dell just over a year ago. Back in '16, when we last talked, Oracle platform was about to launch. You said what was attractive about going to Oracle to do that was you like to take the chance to build a cloud platform from scratch using the experience of building Azure and I guess many of your colleagues felt the same.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Now you're at Dell. What brought you to Dell? I'm sure there's a lot of innovation happening at Dell, but they're not perceived as a company breaking new ground.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

That's right. Dell is definitely not perceived to be the company breaking new cloud ground yet. Definitely perceived to be a company that is driving some incredible innovation in infrastructure through our work in partnership with VMware, because VMware is part of Dell Technologies family, the entire virtualization, Lifecycle Management, security stack, storage, compute, networking. We are a 170,000+ people company.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

So definitely the tip of the sword in terms of just innovation across the entire stack of infrastructure. While Yevgeniy, I have been in my role in Dell Technologies for about a little over a year now, I've been part of the Dell Technologies family for close to three years now. I actually joined Virtustream to lead product and engineering and technology and operations for Virtustream. I was asked by the leadership team to take on the role to actually lead the Dell cloud business, primarily because of both where we are at as a company in terms of the generational transformation, we are driving across everything as a service and more importantly, where the rest of the industry is in terms of just the general inflection around how hybrid and multicloud are shaping to be the default operating paradigms for how the workloads are designed and modernized and how overall the conversation around cloud and the concept of cloud is shaping up to be an operating model and not a destination.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Both the opportunity to drive the change and overall maturation in the industry about how we all look at cloud and then drive a generational transformation inside Dell Technologies about the role we have to play towards that evolution are the two things that kind of drew me to the opportunity. It's been a phenomenal journey. Very happy. Of course, we got a tall hill to climb and there's no confusion about that in anybody's mind. But the level of commitment, investments and the sense of energy inside the company is just incredible.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

This is a different role for you in that it's... In your prior roles, you were focused 100% on technology, on building the infrastructure, building cloud platforms. This role is less of that and more of business strategy, operating models, etc.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

It's a combination. Of course the teams that I directly lead are the engineering teams. We announced that the Dell Technologies Cloud Console at the Dell Tech World a couple of months ago. My organization leads design development, delivery of the Dell Technologies Cloud Console. A big part of the role as you correctly called out is really drive transformation across the company.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Everything from our finance models to go-to market motions to our, of course, engineering systems and services. Working with my colleagues and peers across the company in driving transformation is actually one of the more exciting parts of my job.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

And transformation of Dell Technologies, not just transformation of your customers, right? We're not talking about digital transformation of enterprises.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

That's right. That's right. That's right.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Okay. And so hybrid cloud is the course everybody seems to have agreed on. When at Microsoft building Azure, did you at the time, think public cloud was the future and all workloads would eventually run that way or did you always feel that there would always be a mix?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Well, when I was at Microsoft, we... It was kind of the top of the first [inaudible 00:05:50] in terms of evolution of cloud. 10 years ago, we wouldn't have seen how ubiquitous the cloud operating model would become. Even then, when we launched for example, one of the first things that we launched in Azure was the Azure appliances and then Azure Stack and kind of similar things that would bring the cloud experiences to customer data centers.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

So while there was a general belief that public cloud is going to be a key component of how this operating model evolves, there was also this acknowledgment that over time, the need to meet customers where they're at and bring cloud experiences to customers' data centers, that has always been a theme across the industry, not just Microsoft. Some companies have embraced it more willingly and more openly than some other companies.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

But everybody who's been building cloud platforms knows that for the last 15 years, we've been talking about the fact that everything is going to move to public clouds in next two years. Now, as you call out hybrid clouds, something that everybody is kind of starting to rally around and it's another inflection point in how we all look to cloud and the entire paradigm of cloud.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

AWS was kind of the powerful voice spinning that narrative that everything is moving to the cloud because they didn't have existing business interest on-prem data centers.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Yes. Even AWS has started to embrace this hybrid multi-cloud reality more than anything else through of course, announcements around outposts and the investments they're making there. As well as if you look at the last reinvent, EKS Anywhere, ECS Anywhere. General focus on outpost, it just underscores the commitment all of the cloud providers are making to the realization that they had is that workloads are going to stay on-prem in customer data centers. Workloads are going to be in [inaudible 00:08:23] providers data centers, the workloads are going to be in public cloud, workloads are going to be on the edge and workloads are going to be spanning across multiple cloud providers.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Customers want options. They want flexibility, they want choice, they want simplicity. Whoever delivers a consistent, seamless, simple experience across all of these different operating environments, allowing customers to focus on their business imperatives, performance, reliability, efficiency, security, extensibility, access to innovation in upper stacks of the platform, easy extensibility.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Development, democratization. Whoever provides kind of easy ways to achieve these types of business imperatives is going to succeed. Whether the cloud offerings stay within a hyper scalar data center or a customer data center, are means to that end and I think everybody's starting to realize that.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

There's the applications and their needs that dictate what sort of infrastructure will be underneath. So let's talk about Dell Technologies cloud platform, relatively new product. It's hyper converged infrastructure, on premises, sold and consumed as a service, runs in VxRail, VMware Cloud foundation. It's been what, about a year that has been on the market?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

The Dell Technologies cloud platform as an offering has been in the market for a year. It's been purchased by several 100 customers, several 100 large customers as well as small to run the kind of mission critical applications and important workloads.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

But the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is essentially a start at what we call the Rolling Thunder or a drumbeat of everything as a service. While we announced the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform at the last Dell Tech World in 2019 and have made a series of kind of multi-cloud capabilities across our storage portfolio, through the announcements we made with Google earlier in the year available to our customers, data protection portfolio is being delivered as a service.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

The announcements we made at this Dell Tech world around our commitment to Project Apex and the commitment to deliver everything in that portfolio as a service is really the path that we're on. Over time, the Dell Tech Cloud Platform will become one of the core components that offer everything as a service, direction and portfolio. But it was in more ways than one, a harbinger of things to come from us.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Interesting bit from that Apex announcement was... It was talking about everything that Dell sells delivered as a service, that includes PCs and laptops.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

That includes our consumer portfolio as well. You're spot on.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Companies will be able to basically rent laptops from Dell.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

How the offers are designed across the consumer portfolio, we have a few of them kind of we call them PC as a service today available on the truck. But the broad as a servicification, however you want to call it, of that entire portfolio is essentially work in progress. As the offers get rolled out, kind of customers partners, will learn more about that.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

And so geographic expansion of this offering has been gradual. Since this infrastructure gets deployed on-prem presumably the data center space is already there. What needs to be done... When you guys add a region to the list, what goes into adding a region?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

I think there are three or four things, three or four kind of big ticket items that go into geographic expansion. Of course, extending the entire console experience to all other geographies is a key component of it. By console, I essentially mean pay. It needs to be fully self-serve modern apex-based experience where our customers can go online through a fairly wide catalog of offers, they can browse through whatever we have to offer, pick and choose without needing human intervention and assistance, pick and choose what they want to purchase, actually go through the entire process of transacting the offer from us, then the IT teams can provision and deploy workloads, including hybrid clouds across a set of data centers, then they can monitor and manage those workloads, take actions like expand the infrastructure using real time data and insights and kind of assume that all of that just gets taken care for themselves.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Right. So the console itself is a cloud platform?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Console is essentially the core orchestration layer for the entire cloud operating model.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

So there's infrastructure work that needs to be done to implement it in your region?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

To implement it globally. That's number one element. The second element is essentially ensuring that all of our sales motions and seller tools and all of our financial models offer a real as a service apex-based pay-as-you-go subscription-type model are extended globally, that is the second big body of work. Third big body of work is delivering our one of the things that we are very keen on is leading the industry with a very modern and cloudy time to value.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Of course, as Dell Technologies, we have one of the best if not the best supply chain set of capabilities in the company. The Dell Tech Cloud Platform, our customers can essentially order and have it operational in their data center in 14 days. And extending that capability from purchase to Operational cloud in their data centers in 14 days or fewer is another capability that we are extending globally for example.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Did the pandemic and its pressure on supply chains expand that 14-day window?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Expand in what ways Yevgeniy? Make it harder or-

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Made it longer?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Not really. Actually, the customers who have purchased the Dell Tech Cloud Platform over the last eight months, which there have been many, we have been able to deliver on the commitment that we made around 14-day time to value. Part of it is of course, there's a component of pre-positioning long lead items and components using our demand forecasting and our capacity planning capabilities, which we have had done already pre-pandemic. The second element is actually one of... If you look at the growth of our PC business, through the pandemic, in terms of just how we have helped our customers shift into a work from home model overnight and a core aspect of our ability to be able to do that has been our supply chain.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

So if anything, our supply chains come out in spades over the last eight months in really reacting and responding to the needs of that accelerated delivery through the pandemic across the entire spectrum of our business.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

And even though customers consume this infrastructure as a service, it sits in their own data centers, how big is it typical deployment physically? Are we talking about one rack, full 10-megawatt data center?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Today we have anything from four nodes up. You can buy as few as four nodes or you can buy multiple racks and we have customers that span the entire gamut. And regardless of how small or big your deployment is, we will deliver it in 14 days, not just delivered, we'll get it operational in 14 days. We are working to kind of make the form factor even more flexible, go as small as two node deployments. Especially when customers expand, they can expand and as small increments as two nodes.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

And edge is part of the offering edge-type deployments. Have you seen customers use this model for consuming infrastructure at the edge a lot?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

So far, a majority of our deployments have been in kind of core data centers. We are actually coming up with kind of edge skews for our cloud offers. It's a big part of our focus and especially as we do the two node racks and smaller form factors, both for our infrastructure as well as the software footprint and the management and the control plane that sits on this infrastructure. We expect that to take off quite handily.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

As the product has been around for about a year, what sorts of iterations have you guys made since launch as you've observed it in the wild?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Well, one of the big transitions we made is essentially go from kind of selling customers nodes to selling customers what we call the instance capacity blocks. Where and you will see that in when we launch a storage as a service as well. Where when you buy storage as a service from us, you pick your storage type, you can take block for example block or file store, you can pick your performance tier, you can pick your capacity tier, you can pick your capacity buffer and your network configuration. And then we will assemble the parts for you behind the scenes.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

In some cases, we'll pull together power scale, some cases, we'll pull together power store, but we will abstract that complexity from our customers and deliver them what they want, based on the choices they make in a true as a service model for them. And we will manage that for them and we'll allow our customers to draw the line in terms of what they want us to manage versus what they want to manage themselves.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

A lot of the work over the last year has been really to abstract that products from our customers and really create this simple technological choices, for customers that they can decide upon based on the business imperatives that they are trying to drive towards.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Launch of an automated subscription model through the cloud console is another advancement where now, customers can essentially go online to the Dell Technologies Cloud Console and in a self-serve immersive way, just go through the entire mechanism process of discovering what we have to offer, purchasing what we have to offer, tracking the deployment of what we are offering online and then the storage as a service when it's in private preview today, set of select customers are actually using it already and we will make it generally available early next year.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

When storage as a service launches, it will be a fully metered service where we will meter and rate the service every five minutes and then it will be a true pay-as-you-go build and invoiced offer.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Are there are complications on the customer side adding to that 14 or adding to the, I guess, difficulty of fitting into that 14-day window? Primarily with the data center space, so you're delivering large blocks of computing capacity, the customer has to have the space ready to go, the appropriate power cooling. How is that piece figured out usually?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

You're spot on. And actually, it's one of the areas that continues to get better and it's an area we continue to learn and make investments in. Today, when you go to the Dell Technologies Cloud Console and you're going through the process of purchasing the Dell Technologies cloud platform, we do what we call the site survey. We essentially ask the customers online, of course, a series of questions to learn about their data center, their data center space, power, cooling, connectivity and all of that.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

I can tell you that that survey's matured so much over the last year based on the lessons you learn from the customers who have purchased and gone through this. It will continue to get better, it needs to continue to get better because every customer has their own challenges, as you called out, their own kind of specific requirements or their own specific connectivity issues and things like that. And that's kind of one of the things about how the entire private cloud model, hybrid cloud model will evolve as well and is evolving as well.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Because now, we want to... While we're on one end, we're abstracting the complexities of our products from our customers, on the other end, we are trying to figure out the right way to abstract the diversities of different data centers and their setups, from how the products are delivered to the customers as well. And it's a phenomenally interesting challenge.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Looking in from outside, it seems like the easiest way to handle the data center part would be to go into a colo or one of the more modern colos where those facilities are ready. They have space at the ready. They deploy all the time. They're really good at this, they have this dialed in. Have you seen most of these deployments go into colos or do most go into on-prem data centers?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

So far, most of them are gone to on-prem data centers. But I am a big believer of the off-prem private cloud model and the scale and scope of the growth for the off-prem private cloud model. I do think that there is a non-trivial number of customers who will want to essentially take the complexity out of their data centers, work with colo providers and will want to work in a private cloud kind of model so that they maintain control, they have choice and flexibility of the infrastructure that they can choose. And for whatever reasons, the public cloud doesn't work for them for performance, data sovereignty, security, access, control, whatever number of reasons.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

The announcement we made, I think, last month with Switch and FedEx is an example of us starting to get really kind of assertive about how the off-prem private cloud paradigm gets designed and developed. I'm actually very bullish about where that's going to go. The work that we already started to do with Switch and FedEx has been very interesting in terms of taking out the exact complexities that you talked about Yevgeniy in terms of diverse data center infrastructures and standardizing it on that end.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Can you talk a bit more about that? The FedEx announcement, to me, it seemed more about what... Well, first of all it doesn't deal with colos. These are edge deployments at FedEx logistics sites. You're talking about off premise private cloud. Are you looking at those FedEx sites as potentially places where other customers could put their hybrid cloud infrastructure?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Yes.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Not just FedEx because it's being built for FedEx from the start?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

That's exactly right.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

FedEx running essentially colocation facilities at their location, at their logistics sites?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Yes. Of course, in partnership with Switch as the... It's not built for FedEx, it's built essentially as an off-prem private cloud in partnership with FedEx, and of course, switch as a colo provider, connectivity provider in particular and Dell has bought the infrastructure, software and service provider. These locations will be powered with Dell Technologies Cloud platform, the entire stack and the storage compute services in future.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

What sorts of companies have been using the cloud platform service? Have you seen any trends in certain verticals, gravitating more to this type of offering?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Yeah, yeah. That's a really good question. It's also one that underscores how cloud adoption is evolving Yevgeniy. If we look at what has happened over the last 10 years, a very good portion of workloads that have moved to the public clouds have been dev test kind of experimental workloads. And it kind of makes sense, this promise of small form factors of capacity, near instantly available, is a very, very interesting and important value proposition for dev test type workloads.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

We do believe that the next important frontier for modernization is mission critical, important workloads are kind of life bloods of kind of a lot of companies. I do fundamentally believe that lift and shift doesn't exactly work for these workloads, because there's some element of reengineering involved. Integration with legacy systems and applications involved. Management infrastructure involved. But they still need to be modernized. That's really where meeting them where they're at and bringing the cloudy experiences to them becomes so much more important. There's more than 80 million VMs running VMware stack, virtualized workloads running VMware VMs across the globe and growing quite fast.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

We already have a fairly captive user base and customer base that loves the VMware ecosystem. Everything from the virtualization stack from VxRail and VCF, to service Lifecycle Management Stack to realized automation and other management technologies to now security stack. Customers who are running their mission critical applications and workloads in the VMware ecosystem, are one of the first and foremost in jumping into this model. Customers who have kind of more line of business workloads, SAP ecosystem, they're kind of workloads of systems of record and systems of tracking those types of workloads are embracing and adopting the Dell Technologies cloud platform.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Another element is that the spread of customers from small and medium businesses to large enterprises like for example Woolworth, we've seen a fairly even spread across the entire spectrum of size of the customers, but some very clear themes about the types of workloads that are embracing this private hybrid cloud model through Dell Technologies Cloud Platform.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

It's interesting. You mentioned SAP and ERP type workloads. I haven't really thought about those as workloads that need the kind of quick elastic scalability that cloud provides. Apart from the ease of deployment, why would customers want to subscribe to the infrastructure that runs those workloads?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

I think there's four or five components that customers find attractive. One element is customers who are already in the VMware ecosystem, love it, get to modernize without complete re-architecture of their VMware stack. Cost of modernization is very low. Secondly, especially accelerated by the pandemic, customers get to embrace this new subscription pay-as-you-go, usage based way of doing business and shift more into Apex driven models than capex heavy models. They love it. Thirdly, in an added service model, we abstract the product complexity from our customers and we manage it. Customers love it as well.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

I see. The ongoing management is off their hands?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Fourthly, the software bits are delivered over the network as service in a continuous integration, continuous delivery model. There is no concept of version one and version four and upgrades and things like that. We again, abstract that complexity of upgrades from our customers. They like it. Lastly, kind of one of the things that cloud as an operating model has done is democratized software development. Access to kind of software development tools and technologies is a key component of it, that we are just, especially with VMware Tanzu, that is part of VCF 4.2. VCF 4.2 is a key component of the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. Extending the power of kind of democratized container-based software development, through Tanzu to our customers has been a big value proposition as well.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Okay. And then, of course, easy integration with public clouds and all the tools that they provide.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Access to upper stack services is a big draw as well. You're right.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Okay. I'm glad you mentioned VMware, because that was my next question. Much of the strength in Dell's cloud strategy comes from the close relationship with VMware and VMware positions itself as cloud Switzerland, kind of we treat everybody equally, regardless of who owns us.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Still, from the outside, it's hard to believe that VMware treats HP or Lenovo the same as it does Dell, it's majority owner. Are there some sort of formalized guardrails or lines, we do not cross in the VMware and Dell relationship to ensure that there isn't preferential treatment? Which would undermine VMWare's own value proposition?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Yeah. Of course, I won't go into the specifics of the lines of the guardrails. But the thing that I can tell you is that there's a 20-year history of very, very close partnership between Dell and VMware that started way before VMware became part of the Dell Technologies family. It continues and it will continue in future. Our Dell Technology's cloud platform is founded upon very, very tight integration between VxRail and the VMware virtualization stack. It's not a tag-along integration. Our engineers have worked kind of right next door to each other for many, many months in driving really, really tight integration across Day Zero, Day one and day two operations.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

It's quite apparent in how for example, how service management Lifecycle Management is done, how dashboarding is done and how the combined value prop of VxRail and VCF is conveyed to our customers. So in many ways the proof is in the pudding with respect to how VCF and VxRail integrate with each other versus some of the other integrations. But beyond that, that level of partnership will continue.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Would VMware be able to do the same kind of engineer sitting next door to each other, with HP for example?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Well, I think that's their decision and as you correctly called out, VMware is Switzerland. I was kind of speaking primarily about the commitment we are shown on the Dell side to really make those bets and drive that integration. And that will continue.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

So if VMWare's finally spun off, will relationship basically continue the same?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Oh, absolutely. 100%. It's founded upon 20 years of deep technical integration and partnership and we built a symbiotic kind of relationship, built joint customer base and together, we always believed that together, we have phenomenal opportunities to help our customers modernize and then regardless of what happens, Michael's still the chairman of both the companies.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

There is a change in kind of the business structure, the technology relationship will not change? I want to go back a little bit to Switch and FedEx. I'm just curious about how that deal came about. It's very interesting. I know you said it's not built for FedEx. I do understand that FedEx is kind of the first user of it. Just tell me about how that happened. How did that start?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

It kind of stemmed Yevgeniy from the fact that we do believe and continue to believe that off-prem private cloud is a massive, massive category. And Switch has been a leader in both colo and an edge locations with fairly large footprint and presence and connectivity options and a track record of doing some really innovative work.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

FedEx came to the table with the options that they have and commitment to kind of carry their part of the bargain. We of course always believed about the power of our cloud operating model as well as the power of integrated innovation between Dell and VMware through the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. It felt like a phenomenal opportunity to kind of get three committed parties together to define a category that has been underserved by cloud providers in the cloud industry overall.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

That category being off-rem private cloud?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Off-prem private cloud.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

And so from what [inaudible 00:37:51], for FedEx, this is more than just off-prem private cloud, this is very much about the edge they're looking at automating their logistics sites, they're looking at drone delivery, robotics at the site.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

That's right.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

This is kind of the point for them in this infrastructure, right?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Very much so.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Okay, Intel, their iron grip on the data center market appears to be finally loosening. Maybe it just appears so but definitely seems like there's a lot of momentum that others have. AMD has hit it out of the park in x86 area, ARM has been gaining steam slowly but surely in servers, RISC-V servers are on the horizon. Do you think we'll get to a point finally where you have a variety of server chip vendors competing on more or less equal footing?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

I think the industry is going to go where the industry is going to go. It's interesting to see the competition, our relationship with Intel's strong. It has been strong in similar to kind of other partners. We've invested over many, many years. The specifics of kind of where we see this going, I think I'm going to leave that to my colleagues and the server and the chip parts of our business.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

I figured as a longtime cloud architect.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

As a longtime cloud architect, I think it's really interesting to see the industry wall and kind of just from my personal point of view, a lot of it is going to be driven by verticalization of workloads, more than what each player does and we have seen some of that with the way Nvidia has evolved and the way AMD is evolved as well. I think verticalization of workload modernization is going to drive a lot of essentially going to reshape where the chips fall, no pun intended in terms of foreign-

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Can you explain what you by verticalization of workloads? This is vertical as opposed to horizontal?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Well, what I mean by that is if you look at mobile workloads, if you look at specific industry work verticals and the need for specific industry verticals for their modernization, I think because every company is becoming a software company, the software driven TAM across each industry vertical is large enough now and getting to be large enough to require specific software and engineering innovation across the software and the cloud stack [inaudible 00:40:50] that industry vertical. And that's happening, not just in the chips and processor area but that's happening across the board. Specific innovation driven for industry verticals is a key theme across all cloud providers.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

So again, applications, workloads driving the infrastructure?

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

That's exactly right.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik, DCK:

Deepak, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for talking to us.

Deepak Patil, Dell Technologies:

Yevgeniy, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and happy holidays to you and I hope you're staying safe and doing well.