Good day, and Welcome to Dell Technologies World. This is day three of Dell Technologies World with 7,000 of our customers and closest friends. I'm Rob Williams. I head the investor relations functions here at Dell, and with me today are Michael Dell, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Welcome, Michael. Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Operating Officer.
Good morning.
Good morning. Chuck Whitten, Co-Chief Operating Officer.
Hi, Rob.
Sam Burd, president of the CSG Group, and Jeff Boudreau, president of ISG. Before we get started, let me jump in with just a couple of housekeeping items. I wanna just remind you that all statements made during this call that relate to future events are forward-looking statements and are based on Dell Technologies' current expectations. Actual results and events could differ materially from those expressed or implied by those, by us and Dell Technologies. Those forward-looking statements, because of a number of risks and uncertainties and other factors, including those discussed in Dell Technologies' periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Dell Technologies assumes no obligation to update our forward-looking statements. I'd also like to remind you that we are in quiet period.
This call is focused on our innovation, our software, the announcements that we made today at Dell Technologies and, of course, yesterday and the day before. We would ask you to keep those questions directed towards those topics. One question, if you'd like to drop back into the queue for a follow-up, that would be great, and we'd be happy to take your follow-up question. With that, let me turn it over to Chuck to introduce things.
Well, thanks, Rob, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. It's been a great few days here at Dell Technologies World catching up with customers and partners and getting a chance to showcase our innovation, which is the topic of the day. I'm gonna set the stage today. Jeff and I are gonna set the stage a bit by maybe connecting some dots, and I'd like to go back to our September securities analyst meeting as maybe the starting point. At that meeting, Michael laid out a vision of Dell Technologies as the logical center of the multi-cloud world, and then Jeff and I laid out a long-term strategy that had really two strategic thrusts.
The first is our objective to consolidate and modernize our core businesses, which sit in large, stable, growing markets where we are leaders from a market position standpoint and where we have enormous headroom to grow. Second is to grow into adjacent markets where we have the ability to leverage our advantages that we built in our core business, our advantages like our services layer, our go-to-market, our supply chain, and importantly, our innovation engine, including growing in places like delivering true multi-cloud. Dell Technologies World is our opportunity to highlight innovations on both of those dimensions. Maybe I'll start with what we talked about on day one, and then I'll hand to Jeff to talk about day two. Day one was focused on multi-cloud.
Mm-hmm.
I think the conversation we had with customers was the debate is over. Customers are not solely in the public clouds. They're not solely on-premise. 75% of customers are operating three or more clouds today, and that is a strategic decision. They are saying, "I wanna access all of the innovation of the hyperscale public clouds. I see real value for the right workloads on-premise, the security, the control, the efficiency." Private clouds aren't going away. Increasingly, as data explodes at the edge and customers recognize that in order to deliver the real-time autonomous experiences that are part and parcel of this era of digital transformation, you can't afford to send data back to, you know, back to a private cloud or a public cloud.
Edge clouds are prevalent, and it means multi-cloud is the reality and the future that we live in. On Monday, we made a number of multi-cloud announcements reinforcing both that strategic intent but also our position as a natural partner in the ecosystem and solving the challenges of multi-cloud. We first announced a new partnership with Snowflake that had two really exciting use cases. The first is enabling our storage arrays to easily bidirectionally copy data between a private cloud and Snowflake's Data Cloud. And then, you know, second, and this was generated a lot of excitement with customers, the ability to leverage Snowflake data services on-premise with our storage as the underlying primary storage environment.
That's the first time that Snowflake has partnered and integrated with an on-premises storage infrastructure player, so a really exciting set of announcements. We announced a series of ongoing collaborations with the public clouds to extend our cyber recovery solutions. We announced CyberSense for AWS, which adds adaptive analytics to our existing cyber recovery solution in AWS. We announced PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Microsoft Azure, so an isolated data center environment in Azure delivered via our isolated cyber recovery vault. We continued a steady drip of APEX innovation, notably our cyber recovery solution, a full stack service now managed by us in cyber recovery. We highlighted there's many more of those services to come this year, including high-performance computing, AI, ML as a service, and VDI.
Jeff's gonna talk more about it. We also highlighted Project Alpine, as, you know, one of the key thrusts in our multi-cloud agenda. Jeff's gonna talk more about that. Look, taken together, day one was, I think, an exciting set of proof points on that strategy that we described last September and importantly our role as a partner in this multi-cloud ecosystem. With that, maybe I'll hand to Jeff for day two.
Sure. Day two was fun.
We got a chance to showcase the technology that Jeff and Sam built for us. I sort of set up the day bridging from day one to day two, talking about a number of technology trends that really led into the technology that we showcased. Fundamentally, our world now is one where there's no doubt we have a hybrid worker that's trying to change the way they work and the way we respond to enable them and empower them in this new normal that we've created. I walked through how fast the world's digitizing, how fast data's growing. Talked about where the data's being created is very different tomorrow than where it's been for the previous decades, specifically out on the edge, out into the real world, and how that will be a force of gravity pulling the compute resources and storage resources with it.
I talked about under construction, there is a new digital highway, Fifth Generation Cellular. We talked about that being then a lead-in to software development and software-defined leading hardware innovation. Then, we talked about mini clouds, and then those mini clouds forcing a new operating model that ultimately will be connected by, for lack of a better way of describing it, a data fabric that drives intelligent and automated systems, ultimately empowering developers. That was the setup. We had fun talking about that's going to drive a new wave of innovation. Buckle up for a heck of a ride 'cause it's going to be a lot of fun. We pivoted over to Sam's area, and we talked about the PC, how it's become more essential coming out of the pandemic.
Always a great productivity device, now it's the essential device of this new hybrid work, play, learn, and buy play. It's a lot of fun when you think about the PC. We actually talked about some of the innovation that we built around collaboration, connectivity, and helping engage people. We showcased some embedded software, particularly around the AI engine that we put in it, that's allowed us to now use the touchpad differently, do connectivity differently, collaboration differently. We moved into a discussion around a future concept around low carbon footprint and changing product life cycle or life cycle management with Concept Luna, so a new concept aligned to our 2030 goals. I got a chance to pivot that into Mr. Boudreau's area.
We spent a lot of time talking about the innovation we call the trifecta of software-driven innovation in the organization, of the new software features that we put into PowerMax, PowerStore, and PowerFlex. Really trying to illustrate the level of innovation and the industry firsts and the differentiations in each of those stacks. In no particular order, I'll highlight a few of them. We started with PowerMax, and we took the world's most mission-critical and made it the most secure mission critical storage on the planet. We talked about how we put in multi-factor authentication, an isolated vault. We had a lot of fun talking about 65 million immutable snapshots, 30x more than our next nearest competitor. We talked about the industry's first and only mainframe compression, how we guarantee 4:1.
We talked about advancements in the underlying architecture, which actually doubles the performance and improves response time by 50%. That led our way into PowerStore, which we talked about similar sorts of things, how we've done ease of integration with VMware, how we've done ecosystem advancements, how we've improved response time, boosted mixed level, mixed workload performance. My personal favorite, we landed in the trifecta around PowerFlex, which, in our words, is the only software-defined infrastructure that knows no bounds, scales almost limitlessly to help customers consolidate, automate, scales compute and storage independently, all software. Today, my favorite thing that we talked about was the only platform on the planet that does bare metal, all hypervisors, file, block, all on a single platform. Pretty exciting. We turned that into reality. We talked about what that means.
We took a practitioner, our own CIO, Jen Felch, and we actually took Project Alpine that Chuck referenced earlier, which is really taking our enterprise class data services and making them available on the public cloud. You can do cloud bursting, you can do test dev, you can do cloud-based analytics, you can do data mobility or data and container mobility, and Jen showcased it. It was so wonderful to have someone that's like the audience, encountering the same problems that all of them do, get on the stage and talk about how this works. What it really, I think, captured was multi-cloud is real, and the types of things we're trying to build around this orchestrated, distributed platform, multi-cloud, we're actually building the underlying capabilities to do it. That's what we had fun doing.
Awesome.
Michael?
Yeah. I'd say, you know, it's been a great event. The customer reaction to all the announcements that Chuck and Jeff just talked about has been terrific. The multi-cloud message absolutely resonates. I mean, we've been hearing this for a long time, you know, we don't create any of these things in a vacuum. All these are created with customer input. You know, the capabilities that we're rolling out have been super well-received. The Cyber Vault, you know, I think. We've had tremendous traction in the market with that. Chuck talked about over 2,000 implementations and, you know, it's sort of become a must-have for a mission-critical business in today's world. We also talked about making all of our infrastructure programmable and the pivot to developers.
You know, there's sort of this arc in the industry where the IT organizations want to spend much more time on apps and data and creating competitive advantage and less time managing and running infrastructure. The path we've been on for some time with you know, appliances and converged infrastructure, hyperconverged, and now the shift to consumption-based models with APEX Flex On Demand is all super consistent with you know, automating all that infrastructure and making it fully programmable. You know, customer adoption's been super positive. You know, turnout, the event has been quite strong. We weren't really sure what to expect coming back from a pandemic, but it was more than we anticipated. We had standing room only in all the keynotes and you know, customer-partner reception has been super positive.
All right. Appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. It's pretty amazing actually to think about, you know, the buzz out on the floor has been really good, and obviously the evolution of our solutions portfolio and multi-cloud portfolio over the last few years is, you know, really phenomenal. Really phenomenal stuff.
I think what's one consistent theme I've heard from partners and most importantly customers, "multi-cloud is more real than I thought." They're
Yeah. For sure.
I think they're leaving this, "Oh my gosh, this is closer to reality.
Yeah
than I thought." Chuck used this the other day in his keynote where they've kind of got to multi-cloud by default.
Yeah.
Now they see a path to multi-cloud by design, and I love that phrasing of it.
Yeah.
'Cause I think it really tells you that the hodgepodge that we got into, there's now architectural answer long term that can actually simplify this for our customers.
The edge is real.
Yeah
We've been seeing this in manufacturing, in retail, in transportation, logistics, and, you know, hospitality and, you know, we're seeing the demand. Customers are putting intelligence out there in field, and that's requiring new kinds of infrastructure. Of course the development of 5G and private 5G is just gonna reinforce that cycle of data being created at the edge. A lot of it's gonna stay at the edge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For sure. Well, let's jump into Q&A.
Sure.
Okay. First question's from Samik Chatterjee at JPMorgan. Samik, you've got the floor. Take it away.
Yep. Hi. Hope you guys can hear me. Thanks for the opportunity here to ask a question. I guess I wanted to start with the
I know it, Samik.
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Yes. We can hear you.
Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, great. The question I really wanted to get into was the announcement with Snowflake, and it's a really
I don't think Samik, if you could repeat your question or.
Yeah
We've lost you.
If you can
I hear. You got it?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah. The question was really on the announcement with Snowflake. It's a very interesting announcement, particularly being able to leverage their analytics on on-prem applications here. Maybe talk a bit about the opportunity you see there. Is this something that you are hearing from customers that they want you to sort of increasingly look at? There were customers asking for it, or is this more about you now trying to go and create a new sort of market itself? How much further can you take this sort of down the road? I mean, we all know the multi-cloud opportunity, but enabling cloud services, in some cases on-prem, could be an opportunity in the long run. How do you see that market evolving? Thank you.
Sure. You know, let me start with that and maybe.
All right. Sure.
Jeff can get some top thoughts on this. First of all, this came from customers. Customers were asking us for a way to be able to use the Snowflake analytical capabilities with their on-premises data. Plenty of customers have unique data, secure environments, data that can't leave their premises or a colo. We've done some unique things with special customers but now kind of rolling this out at scale. Look, I think if you take any of these born in the cloud companies, another big theme here at Dell Technologies World has been the edge. If you think about, there are 600 data centers in all the public clouds combined.
There are 7 million cellular base stations which are all becoming multi-access edge compute data centers with our equipment in many cases inside those mini data centers. I think a lot of these born in the cloud companies are coming to us now to say, "We need a multi-cloud architecture." Customers don't wanna be locked into one environment. They want their workloads to be able to move, and compute is gonna follow the data.
Yeah. For me, I'm super excited about the innovation. I'm super excited about the opportunity and the partnership with Snowflake. I will be very clear, it was customer driven. We talked a lot about this show. It's been about data. It's about the multi-cloud, which basically means data's gonna be everywhere, and we need to embrace that. If that's in, you know, the edge, the core, or the cloud, it doesn't matter, and that's what this is all about, and really delivering that for our customers. That's the joint innovation. Where Michael was going, if you think about, and what Jeff said just a few minutes ago, where data's gonna be created. You know, 80% of the data in the next two-three years is gonna be created out of a core data center or the cloud, right?
It's gonna be out at the edge is what Michael was referring to. That data has to be processed and stored and analyzed in real time if you want real-time insights. I think it's a huge opportunity. It's a great partnership. It also shows as part of the multi-cloud, we've talked about having a modern open architecture, but it's also important to talk about the open ecosystem, and this is just another example of that. Going back to the edge where Michael was, and I know we didn't talk about it in the keynote, we had some amazing announcements around edge, right? One was around a validated design for the retail edge. We did that in partnership with VMware and DeepNorth, going back to the open ecosystem.
We also announced the design validated designs for our manufacturing edge as well at the show here today, and that was with PTC and also Litmos. Again, creating a broad open ecosystem, helping our customers solve real problems.
Well, Jeff, I think you'd agree since it's an innovation.
Yeah
Discussion, Customers asking for persistent on-prem storage is a key attribute.
Key.
You enable that with direct access or the bi-directional copy capability.
Yep.
That we've worked with Snowflake to achieve. When you look at the technology that we've built between the two companies to solve the problems that both Michael and Jeff talked about, this is pretty advanced and sophisticated, and it leads to perhaps more opportunity. Then probably the last point I'd make is we talk about the multi-cloud ecosystem, another example.
Yeah.
Yeah. For sure.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Great. Our next question is from Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America. Wamsi, go ahead.
Yes, thank you so much. Thanks for doing this. Can you guys talk a little bit about how investors should think about the pricing and economics of as-a-service solutions relative to on-prem? How different will the go-to-market be? It sounds like there's a lot of pull from customers. How different will this go-to-market be? Any CapEx impact as well as you build this out?
Maybe I can jump.
Do you want to?
Yeah, maybe I'll jump in, and then Jeff and Jeff, you guys should try. Look, it is, it's one dialogue with customers right now about their consumption models, right? We have customers that say, "I wanna continue to consume as I always have as CapEx." We have ones that say, "Look, I would like to see all of your portfolio as a subscription." The natural sort of continuation of our leasing business has existed for a long time, but a much more modern instantiation of it in APEX. Some that say, "No, I want you to do it for me. I want a managed service on top of that." Often it's the same customer consuming three different ways.
From a go-to-market standpoint, Wamsi, obviously, there are changes whenever you end up in a fully managed service standpoint, right? The software companies out there talk a lot about their customer success motions. You've gotta have that as part of getting the most out of the technology that we're gonna put in front of customers. I would just start by saying it's one dialogue, and it's often with the same customer. What we're trying to provide through APEX is choice across our portfolio, the choice to be able to consume it as a subscription, as a service with real outcome-driven metrics behind it or in a traditional CapEx model.
Yeah. I guess for me, talking to customers, they're all in different spots in their journey.
Yeah.
In regards to where they offer subscription. Not one size fits all. They're looking for different models both on financing, consumption, deployment, managed service, configurability, depending on what markets you serve. That's something we're very focused on. You know, APEX for us is that consistent experience for our customers that they can come to and have that regardless of the offer or the service that we're gonna provide. Right now, the feedback's been fantastic. Customers are really bullish about the opportunity. They're, you know, looking forward to the services we just announced, but even more to come as we pick up our innovation.
Yeah, I would say the sales motion we're evolving to outcome-based approach. You know, not all of our 35,000 sellers are there, but you know, that's clearly the direction we're heading in. You know, reception's been positive.
Great. All right. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
All right. Next question from Toni Sacconaghi with Sanford C. Bernstein.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the question.
Hey, Toni.
I hope you can hear me.
Yes.
Okay, good. Thanks for the nods. You know, a lot of your announcements at Dell Technologies World have been software related, and I would imagine the vast majority of your R&D and engineers are working on software rather than hardware. I'm wondering if maybe you can zoom out a little and talk about sort of software as a business within Dell. Do you view it more as enabling technology, or maybe you can characterize. I know, you know, there are very defined software products that you sell within the storage group. Obviously, PowerFlex is an emerging software product. But maybe you can zoom out and just talk about besides software being an enabler for a Project APEX and other things, you know, is it, you know, 20%- 30% of kind of storage revenue?
I know some of that's kind of deferred over time. How does an investor think about the importance of software beyond just being an enabler for some of your partnerships, Project APEX? Where do we see it as a line item in the income statement, and how should investors think about that either growing faster or slower and the revenue recognition associated with it? Thanks.
Yes. Toni, maybe a couple thoughts, and then the rest of the team can jump in. How you described it is the very discussion that's underway primarily with Jeff's business of how do we take what has historically been embedded software into our products to ultimately build software-based only products. This maturation that we're going through, I think, is going to be pretty profound over the next several years. You're going to see us offer, in fact, we just had an architectural discussion and ultimately a pricing discussion most recently on the inherent value of PowerFlex as a software product. Not part of a server, not part of an appliance. What's the inherent value of that piece of software?
If I think about the software assets that we'll make available in the public cloud with Project Alpine, the same conversation. What's our file, what's our block, what's our object, what's our data protection software worth as customers use it? I'm not gonna sit here and say we know the answer today. We are in a discovery phase. The very question you asked, we are beginning to think about how we extract what has been an enabler or inherently embedded into our products as specifically built packaged software offerings offered as a service, and continuing to build out that portfolio. Jeff mentioned the edge. When we look at our long-term edge plans, it really is about adding the software for edge on top of a platform, not integrated in it.
I think that's what you'll see from us. I'm not gonna get into when will you see it in the bottom line, what's our forecast for software revenue? I'd like everybody to walk away with the thought, we are absolutely moving to a model where our most valuable assets are software, and we are going to package them as traditional software products and extract value for that. Jeff, am I missing anything?
No, I think you nailed it. Project Alpine's all about enabling exactly what you just said. You know, that's a key component here. It's taking our you know, industry-leading software and storage and appliance assets, and then abstracting them from the underlying hardware and being able to deploy those anywhere we want. The only thing I'd add besides file, block, object data protection is there will be more advanced data services layers that we'll bring in as well that we'll be able to monetize as well.
Yeah. Yeah.
No, those are all great points. I think it's so important when you think about multi-cloud and our ability to kind of sit at the center of that for our customers. That fabric, that management orchestration layer is going to be really important.
Well, that substrate that's gonna
Yeah
connect clouds
For sure.
That substrate that brings this together as an orchestrated, distributed system.
Yeah
That is absolutely distinct value. You ought to think of us pricing it accordingly for the value that it provides our customers.
Yeah. Good.
All right. More to come on that.
For sure.
Okay, great. Yeah, this question is from Steven Fox from Fox Advisors. He was somewhere that was pretty noisy. We're in a spot that's pretty noisy too. We can relate to Steve there. Let me ask his question for you. The company is arguing for a dramatic shift to data compute storage to the edge over the next three years. For example, the statistics we've used that says 75% of the data processed outside of traditional data centers in the next, I think it is, five years. What does this transition, when does it truly start? When does it become apparent to us, being us as investors or analysts? You know, what are the use cases?
You know, what can we see, you know, what's occurring? What's the impact on the enterprise hardware sales? When do we start to see that manifest itself through the results of the company?
Well, maybe I'll start.
Happy to jump in.
Team can jump in. Look, the edge is evolving now.
Right now.
As is.
For sure. Yeah.
Will continue to do so. Again, what our comments through the first keynote, the second keynote, some of Michael and Jeff's comments today, this notion of everything becoming digital in our world, and these things, as a result, create data on the edge of the network, is absolutely in front of us today.
Yeah.
What we're hearing from customers consistently, "What do I do with all that data?" Increasingly, what people want is to deal with the data they're collecting in real time. Well, that absolutely draws a distributed architecture, and the architecture has to be distributed near where the darn data is collected. You can see compute resources, storage resources moving to the edge. What are examples? Factories today.
Yeah.
Smart hospitals, smart cities, the transportation sector. There are a number of places where we see this. We just announced an Edge Retail. Retail's a great example.
Edge in retail.
Of where data's being collected in various stores, various retail formats. They're wanting to do something with it. This is going to evolve. What I think is important to know is new workloads, the applications that are gonna take advantage of all of this are in their infancy.
Yeah, to me, that's a key indicator. If people wanna look at it, if you think about the rise of the cloud, if you look back, you'd see all the born in the cloud companies. The applications and the software features that were being built were built for the cloud native. You're gonna start seeing a major pickup of all the app developers and the new software being built for the edge. To me, that's a leading indicator. As things shift more and more, people are gonna come in and provide additional value. That's where you're gonna see new apps created, and it's gonna be all around taking advantage of the edge.
And then.
Yeah
Sorry, Michael.
I was just gonna say, one of the fastest growing solutions we have is our VxRail satellite nodes.
Yeah.
Yep
which we announced, I think, about a year ago.
Yep.
You know, if you think about a multi-location retailer, we've got many of them, whether they have 100 locations, 1,000 locations, a manufacturer with 150 locations around the world, they're putting, you know, one, two, five, 10 VxRails in every location at the edge, and, you know, using that as part of their multi-cloud, you know, network that they're creating. It's happening. Those 7 million cellular base stations that I mentioned, all of those are becoming data centers. You know, 5G is not about connecting people, it's about connecting things, and that's gonna move and require a lot of compute power, data, analytics, and storage.
A substrate to connect them all.
Yeah.
Yeah. For sure.
You can't have all of these isolated data centers or edge clouds, as we like to call them. They have to be aggregated.
I guess I'd channel my Tom Sweet here and say it's up to us to make that real from a disclosure standpoint over time, to find the right ways to help the investment community understand what's happening in Jeff's business and Sam's business and across the company. We'll. That's a to-do item for us over the next year or so.
Yeah, sure. I mean, look, it is driving, you know, the edge because it's real today, it's driving what you see in the infrastructure markets as they accelerate.
Yeah.
Yeah, how we count it and what is an edge, you know, incremental edge growth versus what's part of our core infrastructure growth, you know, hard to parse, but it's real today.
It's not even just core infrastructure. Like my friend here, Sam, if he, the more devices he sells, there's more data being created, it's a good thing.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Great. All right.
All right, our next question is from Erik Woodring from Morgan Stanley. Eric?
Thank you guys for taking the question. I honestly appreciate it. Maybe I'll direct this question towards the CSG side of the business. You know, regardless of how you feel about the trajectory.
Mm-hmm.
Of PCs over, let's call it, the next one to two years, it's clear that, you know, the PC is entering a new paradigm where it is a higher value to the user, regardless of whether you're in the home, in the office or a gamer. I guess my question is, you know, what features of the PC do you believe are becoming higher value to the user? Really how is that dictating not only your product launch cadence, but maybe where you're dedicating resources to R&D and development?
Do you want me to do that one?
You're the man.
Okay.
That was a lot.
This is for you. This is your moment.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, we're absolutely excited about the lessons of the last couple of years, thinking about this work from home, do from anywhere environment, and delivering the kind of experience on our PCs that allow people to be productive and get done what they need to do. You know, features we see, it's really the marrying we've been talking about a little bit here. We're seeing really hardware and software be fused together in the devices we're putting together. Cutting-edge innovation, Jeff talked a little bit about our Latitude products, collaboration touch pad, super thin, mobile, long battery life. Our XPS 13 Plus, boldly reinventing a product many consider to be the absolute best ultraportable system out on the market. Zero-lattice touch pad, a zero-lattice keyboard, a seamless glass touch pad.
You put all that together with software that let people get stuff done. Jeff talked about in the keynote on our day two here, you know, building an AI engine in our systems that allow intelligence around privacy, collaboration, connectivity. Think about things like onlooker detection, automatic lockdown of the screen, so when someone's looking at your screen, it blurs and you get privacy. You look away from the screen, it locks. We have the industry's first multipath connectivity, so for less latency, faster bandwidth, higher transfer rates. It's really putting together all those different pieces that fold into the usage models we're seeing today that make the commercial space. It was vibrant pre-COVID, vibrant during COVID. We see that demand for technology really important so people can get things done. Same thing in the higher ends of consumer space.
We've gone from a one PC per household to each household member having a PC and wanting it to be one they can really get stuff done for productivity, for gaming, for the things they wanna go do in life. It's that marrying of hardware and software, great features in each, deliver the experience our customers want, and it's in the spaces where we've really targeted with our engineering teams for some time. They're the ones that are stable, producing growth in the past, and we think will do that in the future.
You've done a really good job talking about the end user experience and the peripherals that go around that with the opportunity, particularly what we learned through the pandemic. Maybe a little bit on some of our peripherals and the engineering that goes with that to create a collaboration system, the ability to work in today's modern world.
Yeah, we see that. It's a great point, Jeff, and Michael, thank you for that thought. Well put, number one.
Boom.
You know, we see a great opportunity around the device. The other thing we've learned over the last couple of years is people want to connect peripherals and other devices. You think about keyboard, mouse, display. Our studies show 42% more productive when you put all that together. It just lets you get more stuff done. You think about cameras, microphones. Do that in a seamless, easy way. We had a couple of great concepts we were showing off here around how you can collaborate wirelessly, connected with intelligence using Wi-Fi 6 to just be seamless moving between workspaces. We looked at collaboration concepts we have that allow you to engage and be connected with people in hybrid worlds. We're looking at the whole space in peripherals, where we have the number one displays business.
We have over 20% share in displays. Gained nice share last year. Have been a leader in that space for a long time. There is a peripherals opportunity outside PCs that's about half the size of the PC business, it's about twice the margin rates of the PC business, and our customers are asking us to go into that space, make it all seamlessly connect, and deliver the kind of experience they want. Again, hardware with software that is good for our customers and a great opportunity for our business.
Yeah. I think, you know, organizations have figured out that the employee experience that is represented by a, you know, a super capable end user environment is unbelievably important in a period of, you know, a shortage of skilled knowledge workers. You know, employees in organizations most associate the technology of a firm with the thing that's right in front of them. You know, it's been elevated to be a first-class experience and, you know, we continue to invest in that, you know, commercial productivity experience. You know, Sam and his team have led nine consecutive years of share gain in the client business. You know, you saw in the first quarter, IDC data, certainly. You know, we're continuing to have that momentum.
Yeah.
Hey, Michael, that's a great point. We started seeing that, you know, 5-6 years ago and started talking about it. I go fast-forward to today, every CIO I talk to is saying the experience really matters. It used to be it was the, you know, the super enlightened companies. Everyone sees that.
That's right.
You look at a page today when you start at the company, you know, social media. It's the picture of the kit you got, and it's you. You want your employees. It's kind of a bragging thing of get me the right stuff so I can get my job done, which is?
If a company is not investing in that, you know, people will leave the company.
Yeah.
because they don't have the right tools.
Yep.
Yeah.
Great. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
All right, next question is from David Vogt at UBS.
Great. Thanks, guys. Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Great. Thanks for taking the question and doing this event. It's incredibly helpful. Can you talk to the conversations you're having with customers around their technology roadmap, specifically around the new software offerings? I ask this because, for example, I think Cyber Recovery was available last year on AWS. Now you announced an Azure announcement. Does that validation from AWS open new doors going forward, and then has it increased interest? Also, is that opportunity or is this new opportunity already contemplated in the growth rate for the framework that we're thinking about for ISG going forward, or is this incremental and could potentially be margin-accretive over the longer term? I know it's nascent, but just trying to get a sense for what's been contemplated in sort of the expectations going forward. Thanks.
I'll start with the software in regards to what we did. Yes, we had, as Jeff Clarke and Chuck Whitten and Michael Dell talked about, we did Project Alpine, which was about having the right endpoints in the cloud. A lot of that goes back to data. It goes back to multi-cloud. We talk about how that is for our customers, the issue what they're having is that drives a lot of complexity, right? What customers are looking for, if you think about infrastructure complexity, you think about, you know, operational complexity and their IT staff and the demands and what you guys talk about, productivity of the teams, our customers are asking us for leveraging similar tools in the different ecosystems.
If they could have an on-prem experience and an off-prem experience, they don't have to continue to train their IT admins. They don't have to have different staffs and different training and all that stuff. That's really been the big lift. It's really going back to addressing a customer pain point specifically. Yes, we did have the offering last year. We did get some lift on that, in regards to that, and that's why we're actually deploying across all the cloud players, the major cloud players as we go forward. That's gonna be a consistent theme, because our customers have it. Part of multi-cloud, we have the large hyperscalers, and then they have the private clouds as well. We wanna make sure we enable that whole ecosystem as we go forward.
I won't get into the financials, but.
Love to, Jeff, if you take what you said, and again, tying what we've tried to message these two days, we've had our data protection assets in the public cloud for years with DDVE.
Yes.
I think we quoted yesterday. Caitlin might even said it, 10 ZB of data protection.
Exabytes.
Yeah. I got it. Sorry, missed that. Missed something. Really sorry.
You gotta correct, Jeff.
Yeah. Thank you.
The 10's right.
Exactly. Sorry. We think about that as the foundation that we've been in the public cloud. Now, cybersecurity.
Yeah.
The announcements of File.
Yeah.
We've been into file with our OneFS. We think about what we're doing in block. It's really building out this, our enterprise data storage services in the public cloud is this ecosystem that we think is very important. Then if you take the specific part of cyber, we should have delivered a consistent theme yesterday. Every announcement we made in the enterprise and on day one and day two had cyber in it.
Yeah.
We talked about cybersecurity, cyber resiliency. It's a conversation that none of us can have with any of our customers or that we have with our customers where cybersecurity resiliency doesn't come up. Whether they buy it as a fully packaged service, the first time we've ever done that in APEX, or extensions in the public cloud, our own Cyber Vault, or the technology we just put into the three arrays that we talked about yesterday and announced.
Yeah.
It is absolutely top of mind and an opportunity, and what we put out yesterday differentiates our storage assets over everybody's.
We already have customers that are doing it today. I mean, you know, when you see us introducing something, you know, on the stage here at Dell Technologies World, these are heavily customer-driven innovations where we already have some of our lead customers that have, you know, worked with us to make these things happen for their, you know, unique environments. Look, we're proud to be able to serve, you know, 99% of the Fortune 500 in some of the most complex environments out there.
Yeah. You know, talking about customers, Chuck was on theCUBE yesterday, and Dave Vellante asked him, you know, "What's the most important asset that you have?"
What was your answer?
It's our customer relationships. I mean,
Absolutely.
Michael, you hit it so well. I just think we talk a lot about our durable competitive advantages, and there are many of them. I think the fact that we touch more customers than anyone in technology and have, as you said, forward-thinking, what's your biggest problem? What's the unsolved problem you're working on? We're working on the next sort of Dell Technologies World today with those customers. That's how real stuff happens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well said. All right. Great. Next question is from Jim Suva at Citi. Jim, go ahead.
Thank you very much. You know, we've known your company and have followed you for decades. When we think back about the securities analyst meetings that you've given over the past several years, is multi-cloud going kind of the direction that you expected at the rate? Or is it accelerating, or is it kind of continuing to change its character and you're just agilely adapting to it so much we seem like it's always been part of the plan and just a natural fit? Thank you.
You know, I think it kind of, you know, it sort of started as hybrid cloud. You probably remember that term was from 10- 12 years ago. But, you know, as the world has moved more towards software-defined, it's gotten a lot more real. Certainly, the move to containers and Kubernetes and sort of programmable infrastructure, you know, software-defined everything has accelerated all of that. You know, as Jeff said, every customer is at sort of a different place in the journey, but there's a resounding signal around multi-cloud. You know, even the sort of public cloud-only companies are coming to the multi-cloud conclusion, you know, as we saw with some of the announcements here.
You know, it's not super surprising to us, but I'd say the pace of adoption for multi-cloud as the correct operating model is accelerating.
I agree with data growth and data, you know, as we talked about being decentralized in regards to that growth, that allows for more clouds to be built if it's a private cloud or a public cloud or what have you, which drives more multi-cloud. I do see it accelerating to that pace. You know, a lot of it, as we talked about, is decentralization of IT. It's about distributed compute. It means, you know, I have to process data in real-time. I got to store that data in real-time. I got to recover that data in real-time. I got to secure that data. I like it.
You know, IoT was a topic 10 years ago, and that sort of morphed into the edge as sort of a broader conception of, you know, intelligence in the entire physical world, and that's becoming real.
Yeah.
You know, if you take, for example, some of the examples we talked about in manufacturing and retail, if you went to those companies 5- 10 years ago, and you said, "What are you doing with IT?" They were taking it out of the factory floor and out of the retail location and putting it in the center somewhere. Now they're going the other way because they need real-time insights and real-time action, and you know, it's the build-out of the edge, which just reinforces the whole multi-cloud.
Yeah. This goes back to this idea that, you know, we talk about this when we talk about strategy, which is that, you know, IT is really at the center and of our customers', you know, digital transformation. It's really, it is a part of the global economy and the fabric of the global economy. They are inseparable today. I mean, it's just, it's not like IT was something different in the economy, you know, and GDP is something different. They're intertwined in a way that means that the importance is just going to continue to grow, in my humble opinion.
To that point, I actually think the personas actually evolved a bit more. We traditionally think about the IT ops, but there's the IT ops, there's dev ops, going back to Michael's point of developers. There's the data ops team, the data science team, there's the business analytics team. They all want access to this data in real time.
Yeah.
Right? That's how we're going to try and drive through. I think the personas are growing, which again creates opportunity for us.
Yeah. For sure. All right, we're gonna take one final question.
Amit.
from Amit Daryanani at Evercore.
Perfect. Thanks a lot for squeezing me in there. You know, one of the topics that really struck me through some of the keynotes, especially Michael's, was this focus of Dell around making developers the center of focus where some versus perhaps I think it used to be around infrastructural appliance back in the day. Can you just talk about, you know, what is driving that dynamic? How does Dell differentiate from the peers when you talk about, you know, Michael, I think you said embracing the developer in your keynote. How's that different from what your peers are doing right now? You know, maybe to the extent you can weave in Project Alpine broadly in that discussion, it'd be really helpful to understand how that's different from what, again, some of your peers are doing there from perspective.
Right. Well, you know, when you make things programmable or you make things, you know, provide things as a service, it kinda matters what you're actually, you know, what the base layer of functionality and capability is. You know, when you think about storage and the unprecedented leadership that Dell Technologies has in file, block, object, and all kinds of storage technology, it's a clear leadership position. You know, I'll say we've had lead customers that have been pulling on us for some time to make the infrastructure programmable. You know, some of our newer team members have been pushing us along the way. Yeah, I mean, it's a full embrace of developers. Jeff, you wanna speak to sort of?
Yeah, it kinda goes back to the comment we just mentioned about the personas have evolved over time from the IT ops and the IT admins to the developer community. For all them, it's about accessibility, right? They want access to the technology. What we have to do, if I think so, I have a large development team, so I understand the space. You know, the first step is around configurability. Think about our partnerships with people like Ansible or Terraform or HashiCorp, you can see there. The next big is all around containers, as you're going back to, like, containers, orchestration with Kubernetes and things to that effect. We get into workflow and automation standpoints and observability.
The key point of that whole thing is just the developer community, and what they're looking for is access to the technology to make themselves and the teams more productive, leveraging our technology. Michael talked about making it more programmable, but that's exactly what we're doing, right? Think of it like infrastructure as code. Everything you saw with Project Alpine, right? It's software, so that way it can be deployed anywhere. Depending on the SLA that you're trying to provide, you might get a better thing on a physical appliance versus a cloud endpoint, but it allows you to have a consistent user experience. It provides more access, more flexibility to their teams to really innovate more. It's really about how do we help them be more productive? How do we help them innovate better and faster?
Right. What software developers want, we see it in our own community. Jen described it yesterday in our IT organization, Jeff, in our product development organization. They want easy, accessible infrastructure fast that they feel empowered by. If you look at Project Alpine, at the core of all of the words that we use, think of it as the first time we now have a pool of storage, file, block, object, data protection, enterprise class, all public clouds. Developers across the world now have an easy access to a single pool of storage. As a developer, isn't that, doesn't that make you happy?
It's super cool in regards to that. You can extend to the cloud for an endpoint or cloud endpoint as an example. If you have a PowerScale file system on-prem and you have a certain attribute, but you can't get access, you could spin something quickly at an endpoint up in the cloud, you get your development project going, and then when you need more of a predictable SLA, you come back to your on-prem use case and what have you.
Put it back in production, which is the exact example.
Right.
Jen described yesterday.
Yeah.
All with the same environment.
Same environment.
Same tools.
Same tools.
Yeah. Same amount, yeah.
Same workflows.
Same amount. Same as it.
Hey, thanks for joining me, and thanks, you know, for being here for our customers. I think it's been a great week to showcase the things that we're doing really with innovation in software, which was a big topic today. I appreciate that. Thanks everyone for joining us today. We'll of course see you for our earnings announcement on May 26, and look forward to catching up then. Take care.