Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Dell Technologies Storage Portfolio Update. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Rod Hall. Sir, the floor is yours.

Yes. Thanks, Catherine, and hello, everyone, for our first-ever Zoom webcast, at least for me anyways. So welcome, everybody. I hope everybody that's on the webcast is healthy and safe. Before we get going here on a storage update for Dell, I've got a couple of disclosures to read and then we'll kick into it, and I'll give a couple of intros as well. So first of all, for Goldman Sachs, we're required to make certain disclosures on public appearances about Goldman Sachs' relationships with companies that we discuss. The disclosures relate to investment banking relationships, compensation received for 1% or more ownership. We're prepared to read out all the disclosures for any issuer upon request. However, these disclosures are available in our most recent reports available to you as clients in our firm portals. Disclosures and updates to these disclosures are also available by ticker on the firm's public website. And then for Dell, I'm going to go ahead and read theirs too because I'm so good at this. Dell Technologies' statements that relate to future results and events are forward-looking statements and are based on Dell Technologies' current expectations. Actual results and events in future periods may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements because of a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors, including those discussed in Dell Technologies' periodic reports filed with the SEC. Dell Technologies assumes no obligation to update its forward-looking statements. All right. So with all that, welcome, everybody, to today's Dell Technologies Storage Portfolio Update. On the Technologies IR website, you're going to find an accompanying presentation intended as a supplement to this call, although we're not necessarily going to just go through those slides. Let me introduce the 2 speakers we've got from Dell today. First of all, it's our pleasure to have Jeff Boudreau on the line with us. He's the President of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG. In his role as President, Jeff oversees the storage servers, data protection and integrated products and solutions for Dell. Jeff has been with Dell Technologies since 1998 and has more than 25 years of engineering and business management experience in the IT industry. So welcome, Jeff.

Thank you for having us.

And then also with us is Travis Vigil, he's the SVP of Product Management for Storage and Data Protection. And Travis is responsible for storage and data protection product strategy. He joined Dell Technologies in 2004. So Travis, thanks for joining. Good to have you as well.

Thank you, Rod.

All right. So let's kick off with a quick walk-through. Maybe, Jeff, you can take us through the ISG strategy and how you're positioning your ISG portfolio in today's environment.

Sure. Well, first, I would like to say thank you for having us. We appreciate the opportunity and look forward to the discussion. From a strategy standpoint, at Dell Technologies, our vision is to be the essential technology company in the data era. And the ISG strategy is directly aligned in a key part in realizing that broader Dell Technologies vision. We've listened to our customers, specifically around simplifying our portfolio and accelerating our innovation engine. If you think of the ISG strategy, it's really a 2-pronged approach. I would say the first, if you think about it, it's win the consolidation game of the core infrastructure markets that we compete in. And what I mean by that is we innovate within our existing product categories, ensure we remain best-in-class and best-in-breed within those domains. So think service, storage, network, HCI, CI. And you've seen a lot of these innovations already across the Power portfolio, again, from service to storage, to data protection and network, into HCI and CI. And today, we're really excited because we're announcing PowerStore. And that's our next-generation mid-range offer that was built for data-intensive applications in the data-intensive world. And you'll also see more innovations coming real soon to help with some future consolidation as well. The second part of the strategy is really how we drive, expand into new opportunities and deliver differentiated value by innovating and integrating across, I would say, ISG, Dell Technologies and then the broader ecosystem. So if we're thinking about innovating across ISG, that's delivering a simple interconnected portfolio of products that really improves customer experience. An example of that from today's release is Cloud IQ. And that's a SaaS-based monitoring software that we provide to our customers, that provides them great insights around anomaly in failure detection, proactive and predictive analytics for continuous health of their infrastructure, really helping them solve operational challenges. It's a big step towards realizing the autonomous infrastructure that people are really driving towards. Cloud IQ really began in the storage division, and now we're expanding that across all of Dell Technologies and all of the ISG portfolio. We're innovating across Dell Technologies, bringing differentiated value to our customers with offerings like VMware Cloud Foundation, you might know it as VCF, or VxRail, our industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure solution, or Dell Technologies Cloud. Another example from today's release is the co-development we've done with VMware for PowerStore. So from day 1, we're going to have the best integration in the storage industry with VMware, running any VMware virtualized application directly on PowerStore. We're also leveraging the best-of-breed technologies and assets across the entire Dell Technologies family and portfolio to solve big challenges, think data management, think edge, think 5G, think telco. And a lot of this is accelerating right now in the world we're living in as -- it's never been -- I think technology has never really been -- never been so important as we kind of figure out the new world or the new normal as we go forward. And a lot of our customers are looking for more strategic vendors as they accelerate through this digital transformation, and we believe we're uniquely positioned to help with that. So I guess stay tuned. There's going to be a lot of innovation that we're going to accelerate together and really push -- put us in a greater and a stronger position as we go forward.

All right. Thanks, Jeff. So some of the comments you made suggest -- you were talking about it, I'm sure we'll get into more detail on this, the deep integration with VMware. Maybe could you expand on that a little bit from an ISG portfolio strategy point of view and just talk a little bit about further intentions in terms of integration? Maybe this is one of the first examples. I guess there are probably others. VxRail, VxRack is a good example, but how do you intend to move forward with VMware integration across the whole portfolio?

Sure. So as we were just discussing, the collaboration and innovation for VMware is critical to both our strategy but also the VMware strategy. And really, our customers are demanding it, right, especially as they look for fewer and more strategic and more trusted partners as we just discussed. The relationship has never been better. And I think you've heard this from Michael, Pat Gelsinger and Jeff Clarke, we put together a model, if you will, an operating model that allows us to work across Dell Technologies to really do some joint product planning and development, collaborative innovation around integration, which we just talked about, and really to deliver better end-to-end solutions for our customers. Some quick examples of that one. We're integrating an ISG-leading infrastructure. So think of VxRail, with VCF in NSX, which is our virtual networking stack, to provide the industry's best cloud solution. And that's really intended to address the challenges of the multi-cloud world. We've seen an increased traction with our co-engineered solutions, and you mentioned a couple, but I'll highlight a few on the client side, especially today, with everybody going work-from-home. Unified Workspace ONE, that's a joint VMware-Dell Technologies innovation. On the infrastructure side, we have VxRail. We have -- and we also have, in the networking space, SmartFabric Director and NSX. So really huge innovations that we're doing together, and as we just talked about with PowerStore, it is going to be the best integrated storage available. We partnered with -- directly with VMware from day 1. And we're integrating in multiple ways, things like vSphere APIs, our VCF integration, vRealize orchestration. And this all allows a VMware admin to easily operate PowerStore to go forward. So again, you can expect us to continue to innovate across the portfolio and across Dell Technologies to provide the industry, as you all know, I would say, most tightly our integrated portfolio, really meeting customer and exceeding customer expectations.

Okay. Great. So we want to -- we definitely want to dive into PowerStore, but since we've got the benefit of having you here, I wanted to ask, there's -- with all the work-from-home and the lockdowns, there's been a lot of focus on accelerated migration to the cloud. And I wonder if we could get your perspective on that. Are you concerned about it for the business? How do you see things developing as a result of all this work-from-home that we're all doing now?

Sure. It's a great question. So I'm going to start and finish with this probably the same way, in the spirit of cloud is good for Dell. Right? And we have the best hybrid cloud solutions in the business, and we are the #1 cloud infrastructure company in the world. Our strategy around cloud is pretty simple. It's bringing the best of the public cloud to the data center and then taking the best of the data center and bringing that back to the public cloud. And that remains unchanged. This was a pre-COVID strategy. So it hasn't just changed with this. What we have seen in the industry is a surge in utilization of multiple SaaS collaboration platforms. I mean I think of what -- the technology we're using right now. Right? You just mentioned this as the first Zoom analyst panel you've done to date. But if you think of work-from-home, collaborate-from-home, ed-from-home, there's a whole bunch of things going on around streaming video and streaming data. All of this is not public cloud. Some of it is public cloud-based. But a lot of these SaaS providers own and operate their own infrastructure, and their investments, I guess, we've seen increased investments or demands on their investments as we go forward. So for the industry, we're actually seeing a broad-based surge in technology investments to really accelerate digital transformation. That's if you're having more clients, so people could work from home, so PCs, monitors, displays, that's going to connect to something, think compute nodes and network. And eventually, that's going to be stored off or something, which would be storage arrays or hyperconverged reading cloud. Right? And so we believe giving our customers choice and we believe in giving cloud when and where they need it. And that's really important as they accelerate in this new world order. Just think it through a couple of examples, like the stand-up and support of a remote workforce. Companies will need cloud IT infrastructure. They need VDI solutions. They will need public and private cloud and hybrid cloud environments. So multi-cloud, hybrid cloud is where we see the accelerating -- acceleration going. A multi-cloud strategy will really help customers support a variation on different workloads and a variety of workloads as they go forward. So most companies that we know or the most businesses that we see are already running and trying to manage 5 or more cloud environments, often through multiple vendors, both from public and private clouds. And this drives a lot of complexity. And with Dell Technologies Cloud, our customers can reduce that complexity by really leveraging our technologies to deliver a consistent cloud experience across that environment. It helps them manage and operate, develop our services, security, really helping them decide where the best workload, where the workload should really reside. And with the PowerStore release, we're allowing customers to deploy in ways that meet their cloud strategy and business deals. An example, we introduced a managed service to connect PowerStore to all major public clouds and actually providing DRaaS or DR-as-a-Service to VMware on AWS. So bottom line is we power both private and public cloud environments. And many of these SaaS businesses are experiencing major growth, these streaming video companies and streaming collaboration companies, and they're big customers of ours and we see that continue. So again, cloud is good for Dell. We have the best hybrid cloud solutions in the business, and we look forward to helping our customers.

All right. Good. So with all that in mind, kind of big picture, could you take us into the storage market a little bit more deeply? How do you think about that market given all of what you said about SaaS and these SaaS platforms, how do you see that market developing over the next few years?

Sure. So we're in the data era. It's no news to anybody, and the world continues to grow. Data continues to grow at just an amazing rate, and it's growing more and more from everywhere as we think about it. If you think about what's going on today, customers and data is being created all over the place, right, especially with work-from-home and ed-from-home. A whole bunch of new end points and entry positions. But -- so bottom line is customers are going to continue to need more external storage. Today, we're the #1 player in the storage market. We have about 30% share. We're bigger than our -- if you think about our competitors, you could take #2, 3 and 4, add them together, we're still bigger. And our #1 position includes a whole bunch of things. That's high-end storage, it's mid-range storage, it's entry storage. It's all-flash arrays, it's hybrid arrays, HCI, CI, SDS and data protection. So any way you want to slice up the market, we're the clear leader across the board. Now if you think about where the market is going just using the latest IDC forecast, the external storage market, which is a very large market and a large multibillion-dollar TAM, is expected to grow about 3% to 4% CAGR from 2020 to 2023 in terms of revenue. And we would expect to grow at a premium to the industry. So as a leader in this market, we think we're very well positioned, and we want to make sure we grow at a premium. Within storage, the key areas for growth we're seeing is all-flash. It's unstructured data. It's HCI, and it's software-defined. And as I stated, we're a clear leader in each -- in all of these segments, and we'll continue to invest and innovate in all of these areas so we can extend that leadership. But there's so many tremendous opportunity, specifically if I take unstructured, the unstructured space. 80% of all new data being created is going to be unstructured. Now I think about the wearables like the smartwatch I'm wearing or the verticals like media and entertainment, so think of the streaming videos we just talked about. I think about it, automotive with ADAS in autonomous driving. Just think of all the sensors on a car and how much data that's going to throw off. So there's just an explosion of data and data growth that's coming our way. And I just think that we're extremely well positioned with what we have. I think a huge trend you're going to see is our customers are going to demand and push for footprint and we'll continue to adopt more agile and flexible consumption models, and that could be OpEx versus CapEx in a flexible consumption. So that gives them more leverage, if you will, in deployment models. So we talk about purpose-built arrays. We talk about software-defined storage. We talk about converged. We talk about cloud. Customers want choice, and they want to make sure they have the right data in the right place at the right SLA. And it's really driven by that workload. So we really are looking forward to -- our customers are looking at more complementary solutions that they can benefit, no matter if it's a hybrid cloud world, a multi-cloud world, that they can get leverage off of those assets, no matter if it's in the cloud or in the data center. And if you think about post-COVID, we see the data. We think there's an opportunity here where data creation is going to accelerate even faster and faster. And with that said, we think the size of the market could be underrepresented or underappreciated, if you will, especially if you think about the work-from-home scenarios that we were talking about before with all the additional data now being created. So another thing that I think about a lot is the potential economic downturn that we're seeing. People are talking about the shape of the curve, how long, how deep. We expect this to put some pressure on some of our competitors that might not be as diversified or as profitable as we may be. So that could help drive some consolidation in the market as well. So bottom line is with our size, scale and just diversification, we think we're going to benefit, and we're really excited about the opportunity as we move forward.

Yes. We started to ask ourselves whether these kind of Zoom calls are going to be recorded in the future worryingly and searched and all that kind of stuff, but you can imagine that might happen.

It's going to happen. It's already happening.

So one of the things, extending on that question just a little bit, I wonder if you could talk -- one of the problems we've got with modeling the storage market is determining how much of it is replacement demand and how much of it is competitive win, sort of driven demand. And when you launch a new product like this, there's obviously a ton of replacement opportunity out there. So could you just talk about those a little bit in your own mind? How do you think about your business? Is it -- how much is replacement? How much is new competitive wins?

So I kind of look at it as -- so as we talked about before, we have about 30% of the markets. And then an easy math is 70% of the market I don't have. Right? And so I want to make sure that we go after that space for that incremental opportunity. But I do look at it as we have our existing base, which is very loyal customers. We're a trusted adviser. We want to make sure we serve those. So that's a huge opportunity for us to go refresh the base. We have the largest installed base in the world. Like I said, we have a great relationship with those customers, and we want to make sure we support that for the long-haul for investment protection. In those same customer environments, there's new and new workloads. If it's the traditional application or the cloud-based application, new emerging cloud-native applications that they're running, so there's new workloads coming in that really is creating incremental opportunities even within that current base. So it's not just a refresh of the existing storage array, there's new use cases and new workloads that are coming on. But then going back to your point, is there's 70% of the market we don't serve today, and that's an area that's right for us to go after and really get some incremental extension as we go after in really realizing this large market and growth market.

Great. Okay. So Jeff Clarke has talked about storage portfolio simplification over the last couple of years. Could you provide a little bit of an update given this announcement on where you're at with simplification, how far through that process do you think you are?

Sure. We -- just a final -- we were just -- you hit me on the last 2 years of my life. So thank you. Now so Jeff shared this a couple of years ago, so it's not new news, but we heard from -- directly from our customers and our partners and our sellers. Right? They were loud and clear to us saying that our portfolio was too complex and got a lot of overlapping offerings, especially as we have different acquisitions that we are bringing together. And we really need to take a long-term view in actions to address that. And what that did was we really focused on a simplification effort around the portfolio. And for me, what that means is simplification equals more focus. That more focus led for more innovation. And so now I have more engineers working on the newer platforms and the newer innovations, really leading to better outcomes for our customers. So I have more software and hardware engineers focused on fewer offerings that are going to be very targeted to specific markets and use cases. And we're going to deliver -- overdeliver in regards to what we're going to do for innovations on those platforms. We've made a ton of progress. I think in 2000 -- I apologize, or 2018, we announced PowerEdge, the update to the PowerEdge server. We announced PowerMax for our high-end storage, and we announced PowerVault, so having one lead offering in the high-end in the entry space. Last year, so 2019, we announced PowerSwitch in the networking space. We announced PowerProtect in the data protection space. And we announced PowerONE for converged in infrastructure. And now today, we launched our lead mid-range offer, PowerStore, which is going right at the heart of the largest and the fastest-growing segment of the external storage market. So we've made a lot of progress. We're excited about that progress that we've made. I think if you step back, we've gained almost 215 -- a little over 200 bps of external storage share over the last 2 years, something we're real proud of, and we're going to continue to extend that leadership. I guess the big takeaway for me is when I talk to our sales teams, I've never seen them more bullish about our portfolio, the whole Power portfolio across ISG in recent memory. And that was before today's launch, so it just keeps getting better and better. And again, we have more technology coming down the pipe as well.

Great. Okay. Thanks, Jeff. So we don't want to leave Travis out of this. So I wanted to maybe ask a more PowerStore-specific question here. So maybe, Travis, could you tell us a little bit -- we've had some early indications of where PowerStore might be going from a directional point of view. Could you just talk to us about what it is and why it's important now?

Yes. Sure, Rod. So PowerStore is a brand-new modern storage platform that we really designed for the data era that Jeff was just talking about. And it's part of our top-to-bottom approach that we have with our leading portfolio to drive an unwavering focus on innovation, simplicity, performance, reliability and quality. And it really does represent the culmination of work over the last couple of years of my life as well as Jeff's life to drive that mid-range simplification that he just talked about. And it's actually the first new product that we've introduced as a combined company that was built from the ground up using best-in-class technology and experience from across our infrastructure business. There's some pretty interesting stats about its development that I would like to share with you. It's actually the result of the hard work and dedication of more than 1,000 engineers across Dell Technologies, including VMware, and 85% of those engineers were actually software engineers. And if you look at the sum total of time invested to bring this innovative new product to market, we put in over 4.4 million person hours into bringing it to market. And I think it's also important to note that we got over the finish line during COVID with many of our engineers working remotely, which is extremely impressive because they didn't miss a beat. So I guess to put it simply, I think PowerStore is probably the biggest, most important and strategic launch within our Infrastructure business since the combination of Dell and EMC.

Great. Okay. Maybe, Travis, you could dive into it a little bit more in detail. Talk to us a little bit about the technology, mainly the key differentiators, like what differentiates this product, others it's competing with and maybe prior products at Dell and EMC at that?

Yes. So when I think about PowerStore's key features and differentiators, I would like to tie them back to the pressing needs in the IT industry that Jeff was just talking about and in particular, the fact that customers are demanding cloud-like simplicity for all of their on-prem solutions. And if you look at PowerStore at its core, what it does is it allows IT professionals to handle 2 simultaneous but sometimes conflicting pressures, and that PowerStore allows IT administrators to manage this avalanche of data, this avalanche of diverse data that's being generated, while at the same time, it provides the operational simplicity needed to increase IT agility and reduce total cost of ownership. And so to speak specifically about the differentiation, I like to think about it in 3 ways. First, PowerStore is a data-centric architecture that was built for the modern data center. And if you look at that architecture, what it is, is a net new container-based operating system that optimizes system performance, scalability and storage efficiency to support any workload without compromise. So what that means specifically is that PowerStore has some pretty impressive specifications like 7x the number of IOPs and 3x lower latency versus our prior leading mid-range solution. It also scales up and scales out, which provides the ultimate in flexibility, and it also guarantees 4:1 data reduction. The second area of key differentiation is related to how PowerStore provides intelligent automation. And Jeff talked a little bit about this. But in particular, we built machine learning directly into the product, directly into the platform. And that enables the system itself to eliminate dozens of time-consuming tasks and decision points for IT administrators, which in some of the testing that we've done can reduce administrative costs by up to 99% versus traditional environments. PowerStore is also a programmable architecture, which means that it enables seamless integration with VMware and a broad ecosystem of leading DevOps and open management frameworks like CSI, Kubernetes, Ansible and vRealize orchestration. And that really allows IT administrators to automate workflows, and they can automate those workflows across a broad range of deployment scenarios. And Jeff talked a little bit about this in his section as well, but I wanted to hit on it because it's very important. We provide health analytics with Cloud IQ, which really offers state-of-the-art predictive analytics, anomaly detection and proactive monitoring. Now the third area of differentiation when it comes to PowerStore, it comes in its adaptability. I talked a little bit about PowerStore's flexible architecture. And what that really enables, from my perspective, is 3 key things. First is the ability to natively host user applications directly on the storage array with our industry-only AppsON capability. The second is this tight integration into the larger VMware ecosystem that Jeff talked a little bit about and I want to expand upon. And third is the ability to have flexible deployment models, which are becoming increasingly important to IT buyers. So first, AppsON. AppsON provides a built-in DMR hypervisor, and that allows PowerStore to provide multiple IT services at the same time. So you can simultaneously provide a scalable storage capacity for applications that are running on external hosts across the data center or across the enterprise. And at the same time, you can host data-intensive applications directly on the storage array. We believe that this is a game-changing feature. And since VMware is the underlying foundation of that AppsON capability, administrators can move workloads seamlessly between these services, which means that PowerStore cluster management, combined with VMware tools, including VMotion and storage VMotion, enable easy workload mobility in and out of PowerStore to other VMware targets. And last, but certainly not least, we provide multiple deployment models to modernize the core, the edge and the cloud. And in particular, we have a new Anytime Upgrades offering, which is a component of our future-proof program. And it's a prepaid data-in-place upgrade offering for PowerStore, and it's a service that allows PowerStore infrastructure to be modernized without forklift upgrades, downtime or application impacts, ensuring that our customers can always have access to the latest technology at a predictable cost. So the bottom line is that while we have a significant #1 position in the mid-range segment, which was 28% share in 2019, we believe that the release of PowerStore is going to allow us to extend this lead.

Great. Okay. One thing I want to dig in on that, Travis, is the app, the built-in hypervisor and app-running capability. Can you say a word or 2 about what kinds of apps you would expect people to run there? Is that like a data query gets pushed off to the storage array and then it comes back with an answer? Or what sort of thing is running that app support capability thing?

Yes. It's a great question, Rod. So when we think about the AppsON capability, we've really looked at -- as Jeff mentioned, we have the broadest installed base of mid-range storage in the market. And we're also #1 in hyperconverged. And as we looked across our customers, what we found was that hyperconverged is often deployed right alongside 3-tier architectures, which include external storage because they're highly complementary because of the different workloads that they're optimized to support. So if you think about HCI, it's really optimized for general purpose or compute-intensive workloads and provides full stack automation and life cycle management. But if you look at external storage like PowerStore, it's optimized for these storage or data-intensive workloads, which either means that it's a workload that is extremely latency-sensitive or a workload that requires a lot of capacity but relatively little compute. So some of the more modern AI workloads are a good candidate for this and some of the -- some databases would also be a good candidate for this.

Okay. So that's a good -- that kind of leads into -- or really answers my next question, which is how does this integrate with VxRail, VxRack because we had perceived maybe VxRail, VxRack to be selling into mid-range storage opportunities. And now you got this product and that, and it sounds like you feel they fit synergistically together. Do you think that you'll see some of the existing VxRail, VxRack business you've been doing shift back toward PowerStore now that it's available?

Look, I think it's an expanding buy. I mean what we found is that even if you look in a single customer, they deploy HCI right alongside 3-tier architectures. And so this product was really optimized for those workloads that we were talking about. And we -- with the increased VMware integration, it's actually easier and you can use VMware as the control plane to work both across PowerStore and VxRail. So we see them as being highly complementary from that perspective.

Okay. And then could you fit it into the bigger product portfolio for us a little bit beyond just the VxRail products, but the rest of the storage portfolio, how does it -- can you just kind of describe how this fits into the rest of the portfolio?

Yes, absolutely. So it's pretty simple. From a primary storage perspective, PowerStore is our lead all-flash mid-range solution going forward. And that means that PowerStore is targeting some of the fastest-growing subsegments in the external storage market. In particular, it targets the mid-range, which is the largest subsegment of external storage, representing over 50% of the market. And it's also forecast to be the fastest-growing part of the external storage market going forward. Additionally, PowerStore is unabashedly all-flash, with NVMe support and support for next-generation media, specifically Storage Class Memory, SCM, not just used as a cache but used as persistent storage. So we're targeting those subsegments. And since it is all-flash, as Jeff mentioned earlier, it plays in that segment, which is one of the fastest-growing deployment choices within mid-range and within external storage overall. But I think it's also important to note that while PowerStore represents the consolidation of Dell EMC's mid-range storage array, this is going to be a multiyear transition with numerous on-ramps, allowing customers to migrate nondisruptively and at their own pace. We're not announcing any mid-range EOL at this time, and we expect that PowerStore will coexist with current Dell EMC mid-range offerings in the portfolio for some time. We're dedicated to supporting those customers and educating those customers on the benefits of migration to PowerStore. And I think there's one final point I would like to make, which is that PowerStore is going to ramp in the market focused on all-flash, but Unity XT will be -- will continue to be our lead hybrid primary storage mid-range solution because hybrid deployments remain a large and important part of the market. So the way I look at it, we're in a unique position to provide customers the right recommendation, the right tool for the job because we do have all of these things in the portfolio. We are simplifying the portfolio with PowerStore, and I think, competitively speaking, to an earlier question, we feel really good. With this announcement, we are releasing some pretty compelling third-party testing that shows us achieving superior performance results versus a leading competitor. And that's not to mention any of those key architectural differentiators that I spoke about in the previous question.

Okay. On the all-flash point you're making there, does that mean -- what's your intention in terms of distribution? Would you go out to extreme I/O customers and see whether this is something they might be interested in using instead? Or how do you intend to go to market with this as an all-flash solution?

Yes. I mean it's really more about targeting the -- obviously, our installed base is a big asset for us, and we want -- and we built in migration capabilities that make it very easy for customers to move to PowerStore. We have invested significant engineering resources to provide new native tools that automate entire migrations directly from the PowerStore manager in as few as 7 clicks. And we also have many other migration options in the portfolio. We have host-based tools such as VMware's VMotion. We have guided migration options from Dell Technologies' global services. So basically, whatever mid-range platform customers are running today, we can make sure that they get to PowerStore quickly and smoothly, keeping their data fully secure along the way. And so that -- I think that is one of our strengths, and that will be one of our go-to-market motions. But ultimately, it's about the workload, as we talked about earlier. There are certain workloads that benefit from a 3-tier architecture. There are certain workloads that benefit from a hyperconverged architecture. And we will be -- make sure to position the right tool for the right job.

Okay. I want to broaden it back out a little bit again as we kind of get close to the end of the call here, a little bit closer anyway, and just ask, it's hard to talk in the day and age we're living in here without talking a little bit about the downturn and what businesses are facing, the challenges they're facing as they go through this. And I wonder if you guys, maybe, Jeff, this would be something you could answer, but how are you approaching your customers now? How do you help them get through this situation that they're in and continue to transform as they go through it?

Sure. So we're doing a lot of things. We're innovating across -- if it -- Travis was highlighting technology pieces. There's programmatic things that we're doing, and there's also financing capabilities. So we're doing a whole bunch of things across Dell Technologies to really help our customers as they, I guess, as they accelerate their digital transformation with everything going on around us. We want to make sure that we're supporting them. If it's through our client side, in the supply base that we have, in procurement and buying power and how we enable them, the technology changes. We have an amazing, what I call, future-proof program that allows our customers to optimize the life cycle of their infrastructure with a lot of confidence. And really, what it takes is the technology stuff that Travis was just talking about around Anytime Upgrades and really turns that into a program around having the most flexible controller upgrade program. And one of the biggest pain points our customers ever talk about was moving data, right, and it was around being able to migrate data, always being online, being seamless, being transparent. We've done that with native tools in the arrays so customers can migrate from PowerStore in just a few clicks, as Travis just mentioned. On the sales side, we're working with our financing arm, our Dell Financial Services, or DFS, if you will, to introduce a payment flexibility program, including 0 interest rates for Dell Technologies service, storage, network solutions customers. So they have access to the technology and there's no upfront payments required. So in some cases, we'll defer some of the customer payments for the first 180 days on all data center infrastructure and services, right, to really help them manage some of their cash flow and constraints that we have going on in today's world. So a lot of things that we're putting in place around the technology side, the programmatic side or the financial services side, if you will, to really help support our customers through these changes. We've also actually just recently added a 1-year term flexible consumption offering as part of the Dell Technologies On Demand program. We're allowing customers to scale their Dell Technologies converged, hyperconverged or hybrid cloud, storage and data protection solutions on a pay-as-you-go or pay-as-you-use type program. So again, a lot of new innovations coming up to really help support our customers during this time.

And what about -- just to kind of finish that one off, have you seen any changes in technology behavior that you think might persist after we get through the downturn? Especially with regards to storage, do you think that people will change the way they're consuming technology shorter term? Or do you think it's just these longer-term trends playing out?

I think that people are using the term "a new normal." I do think there's a new normal. We're learning a lot right now in regards to how people are consuming, deploying and leveraging technology. As I said before, we see a major spike in demand for all technology. As we've talked about the cloud earlier, from PCs to displays to storage arrays and data center infrastructure, we're seeing it across the board. So I think there's a new normal here as we go forward. I think work-from-home, it might change a little bit, but in regards to how work-from-home, ed-from-home, entertain-from-home, there's a lot of opportunities here as we go forward. And I think leveraging the technology is going to be very important versus as we go forward. But there's a new normal that's going to be established as we go forward.

Okay. And then I guess the last question for me. And of course, it's a tough question to ask when you're rolling out such a big product that's taken so much work. But what other things are in store -- I mean you guys have a lot of further portfolio simplification that could be done. What else is on the road map? What's next? Maybe what are your priorities in terms of what to do next?

So I do appreciate the question. It's a great question. We have a lot of -- as I said before, we're really focused on serving our customers, especially today, making sure that we deliver, in the current challenges they have, making sure that we support them as they go through their transformations. You should expect to see us share some more insights, I guess, in the near future on some upcoming innovations, again, as I mentioned earlier. So there is more to come. I can't really offer too much specifics on that right now because of the product road map and where we are. But we're really excited about what we're building and how we're going to help enabling our customers as we go forward. I will note, we have Dell Technologies World coming up in October. So that was supposed to be -- actually, I was supposed to be there right now. And with everything going on, we shifted that to October. So look forward, and stay tuned to that.

All right. And before we close up, I'm going to hand it over to you, Jeff, to say a couple of closing comments. But just to remind everybody too, we're not doing Q&A today because Dell is in their quiet period. So they wanted to get out and talk about this technology, but no Q&A. But I'm sure after earnings, the team would be happy to talk to people. So Jeff, I want to hand over to you, see if you've got any last comments for us as we close the call out here.

Sure. And as you noted, we're in the quiet period, and we will have results on May 28. So I'm happy to go into more details post -- on May 28. But I guess the selling points are our portfolio is stronger than ever. It's all powered up from servers, to storage, to data protection, networking, CI, HCI. PowerStore is just the latest innovation in the Power portfolio. Our product teams are excited. Our sales teams are excited. Our customers are excited. And we think we're really well positioned to take share. We are extremely focused on helping our customers, especially during this trying time of COVID-19, and we'll help them today in post-COVID, make sure we stay close to them. And again, the quarterly results will be -- and outlook will be on May 28. So please stay tuned. And I would like to thank you for the opportunity today, Rod.

Great. All right. No problem. Thanks, everybody, for joining us on the first-ever Zoom fireside chat.

Thanks for having us.

All right.

Thank you very much. Have a great day.