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

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to day 2 of Dell Technologies World. It's good to see everybody again. And I look handsome. Well, clearly, [ ChatDTW ] has poured some poor -- or was given some poor parameters on what handsome was. But I have hope that we can tune the model for next year, so it can do this for me, and I don't have to be here. I know the marketing team is now cringing with that. But let's start over. Welcome to day 2, our day for the techies. We're going to have fun this morning. We're going to be a little futuristic. We're going to be a little technical. We're going to dabble in some architecture. Hopefully, I'll have a surprise or 2. And then we're going to tie it all together by making it real over the next 60 to 65 minutes. And when I think about what's happened since we were last together in the workshop, it's been a heck of a year, a roller coaster in many, many ways. I think about a year ago shortages to now excess supply. Excess supply, I think about rising interest rates and rising inflation rates. We're in a high-growth market no longer than 365 days ago, and now we have a slowing economy globally, escalating geopolitical tensions, remote work to now hybrid work. Through it all, there was one constant, and that constant was innovation. And innovation has thrived at Dell. Quite possibly -- strike that. This has been our greatest year ever innovating in this company, period. With more than 120 new products launched in the last year, 30 infrastructure products launched in a 13-week period, Project Alpine, Project Frontier. You heard yesterday about our expansion of our APEX portfolio with compute, managed device services, cyber recovery, storage for public cloud and many, many others, over 2,000 new features across our storage portfolio. The increased capabilities in security with cyber vault in all 3 hyperscalers, Zero Trust Advisory Services and PowerProtect data manager and first to market with the next-generation AMD and Intel CPUs and our 16th generation server, which includes a purpose-built portfolio around artificial intelligence with products like the XE9680. This past January, at CES, we had this wonderful event where we won over 60 awards, many best ofs with Alienware our m16 and m18 gaming notebooks and best-in-class distinction with our ultra-sharp 32-inch monitor. An exciting time. And some personal pride, OptiPlex, which I was part of the original team, celebrated its 30th birthday. Precision, personal pride, celebrated its 25th birthday. And as you saw yesterday, our Latitude products have never been better. Last year was a breakout for our telecom business with the release of infrastructure blocks and a series of telecom servers with the XR8000, the 7620 and the 5610. And we've been leaders in the environmental area for a long time. We take the stewardship very, very seriously. Last year alone, we diverted more than 500,000 pounds of ocean-bound plastics that made its way into our products and packaging. If I think about what we've been able to do with 2,400-ish patents, last year alone, our company was granted 2,445 patents in calendar year 2022. To put that in perspective, just behind Intel and ahead of Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Worldwide, our portfolio includes 28,738 patents at this point today. And then lastly, another point of personal pride in this last year has been our supply chain has done an incredible job, particularly through this pandemic era. And we're going to make it better. We're investing to digitize it. We're investing to build more resiliency, and we'll do that by building greater geographic diversification across our global supply chain. Simply put, unmatched breadth of innovation in our industry. No one can come close to what we've done in the last year. Hence, our greatest year ever. And I hope you can tell a little bit of gleam and smile. I couldn't be more proud of our team and the work they've done. It was an extraordinary year. I wish you'd give them all a round of applause. And for you, our customers, you can count us to innovate, lead and help you on your digital journey. We're here for the long run, as you can actually see. Another way to think about this, and I want to bridge into what you heard yesterday. Yesterday, we talked about clouds. And we talked about clouds everywhere, public clouds, on-prem clouds, edge clouds, clouds and the co-location centers. And there was one reoccurring theme, is how do you get the right workload in the right cloud, how do you optimize that? We characterize this as the multi-cloud world. And for us and for you, our customers, we think the multi-cloud world has to have 4 distinct characteristics for you to operate any way that you want. It's got to be agile. It's got to be elastic. It's got to be dynamic, and it's got to be easily consumed. In other words, it requires a software-defined infrastructure, orchestrated to behave as a single distributed system, empowering developers, users, data and applications. Today, we're going to talk about multi-cloud by design, and we're going to dive into the architecture we developed to deliver a consistent experience across many different clouds with enterprise-grade capabilities wherever your applications and data are at a predictable and best cost. The reality is, from our vantage point, to make this multi-cloud world work, it all starts with your data. We believe that if you get your handling of the data right, everything else from access to tools, the choice of cloud to your ability to control and manage your cost becomes far more achievable. As a result, you heard Chuck and Michael talk about this a little bit yesterday. But as a result, our multi-cloud architecture is built around a common storage layer, a substrate, if you will. This connective fabric across clouds, that's going to bring this cloud world together. So it connects cloud. It connects workloads. It collects -- it connects data in a seamless and efficient way, bringing you data mobility between your on-prem assets and your public cloud storage in a way that you don't have to retrain your staff and minimizes refractory of applications. Think about that. We've built a connected tissue from public cloud to on-prem cloud. Chuck talked about this ground to cloud, cloud to ground. And this substrate that's allowing us to do that. This substrate is managed by a modern SaaS control plane, which enables centralized Dell storage software access, deployment, monitoring, discovery and life cycle management across multiple clouds, be it block, be it file, be it object or protection storage, with consistent operation or consistent orchestration, telemetry and serviceability capabilities -- tongue twister, sorry, for data no matter where it's located. And in the future, we'll bring native AI insights to be able to help you optimize workload placement, optimize cost and actually bring a new capability called proactive service disruption avoidance, a mouthful, to make sure this doesn't fail. And if we combine this with what we believe is happening in the world today, you look at modern applications and data pipelines that are distributed, our architecture increases developer and operator productivity by uniting data and applications where it makes the most sense. This common storage layer is the foundation that you heard about yesterday's APEX storage for public cloud. This connective substrate is the foundation that we built everything that you heard about yesterday on. So we take our best in industry storage software assets, PowerScale, PowerFlex, PowerProtection. And we think about that running in a way that enables you to run each of those assets in the public cloud, managed by a consistent set of tools, managed by a consistent set of tools. So bringing you the consistency that you've asked for and not having to manage these different environments each in their own way. Developers get our enterprise-grade data services with their performance, flexibility, scaling, security and compliance capabilities for a richer, better public cloud experience. The SaaS control plan that Chuck talked about yesterday, APEX Navigator, enables deployment, automates provisioning and life cycle management of your Dell storage software in the public cloud. It uses the substrate that we built to orchestrate mobility between your on-prem and public cloud environments, providing you the insights, the monitoring and health across your entire Dell storage estate. Across your entire Dell storage estate, no matter where it is. And then you heard us extend that yesterday working with Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware, where we've built APEX cloud platforms, a series of fully integrated turnkey solutions that extend their public cloud experiences on-prem, on our industry-leading PowerEdge servers. Guess what it's built on? The same common storage layer that I've been talking about is the foundation of our APEX cloud platforms. So whichever stack your developers prefer, the integration of this common storage layer in each one of those APEX cloud platforms makes it possible for you to place your workloads in an optimal location based on your requirements performance, freeing your developers from ever having to think about infrastructure or the location. This is powerful, really enabling developers the freedom they need to do what we want them to do, which is develop, and not have to worry about where it is, how to get it. This is multi-cloud by design. It's Project Alpine that we talked about a year ago made real. I couldn't be more excited about the architecture that we put in place that we showcased yesterday and our ability to now extend this and help developers across our customer base even be more powerful, pretty exciting stuff. Maybe now -- you can't be on the stage in this type of audience and not talk about the most talked about technology in our industry today, generative AI powered by large language models. This isn't new news. Natural language processing has been around for a very, very long time. However, the recent advancements have them passing what is an old benchmark, a 70-year-old benchmark, the turning test. And what's happening now is these models are game-changing and highly disruptive. They're incredible and powerful what they can do. And customers today, whether it's at the edge or in their on-prem data centers, are looking for ways to easily deploy the infrastructure that meets their computational and data requirements, so they can actually use their own data and business context to maximize insight and outcomes, trying to gather what they have about their domains, their specific processes to be able to run them in a way that they can gain greater insight and drive better business outcomes for their respective businesses. I had the opportunity recently to explore this. I sat down with an old friend of mine that I first met 27 years ago when we used to geek out talking about exciting things at least back in that day in our careers as they crossed around polygons, fill rates, shaders, rendering back on Dell and NVIDIA, we're actually disrupting the proprietary risk unit workstation marketplace. And I had a chance to sit down with Jensen. Please roll the video.

Hi, Jensen. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate the time you've taken out of your busy schedule to sit down with me and talk about one, if not one of the most disruptive technologies that we've seen in our 4 decades. Think about that, 4 decades together. Generative AI, pretty amazing stuff, isn't it?

Generative AI is a very, very big deal. Finally, for the very first time, really, since we've been talking about artificial intelligence, every company will be able to put AI to use to revolutionize their products and their companies. So I'm very excited about it.

Given what you and I do for a living, it has a chance to revolutionize the way we're going to innovate going forward.

You and I, we've seen the PC revolution, the Internet, cloud and mobile, but generative AI is a much, much bigger deal for several reasons. It's almost 3 things in 1 really. The application is just miraculous. It's easy to use, and it does amazing things as we've all experienced. And the second thing is that as an API, because it's able to understand almost any language and any form of input, you can connect it to just about anything. The third thing it does is that it's a whole new computing platform in the sense that it has a universal programming language called human and is incredibly flexible with these emerging capabilities that it's able to perform tasks either without training or with a little bit of fine-tuning.

I think about our latest generation of 16G servers that we purpose built for this AI world with a range of offers that meet these needs, all powered by NVIDIA GPUs. Enterprises are working to deploy these models and workloads on-prem to make full use of their data. If you think about how do they drive better insight, better outcomes for their business, they're looking at, I need my context of my business with this data, with these models and tools to really drive faster insights to my business. I assume you're seeing the same thing.

Yes, they have to do it on-prem because that's where their data is. They have to do it close to the edge because that's closest to the speed of light, and you wanted to respond instantaneously. You also wanted to be at the edge because in the future, you want to have information from multiple modalities. The more contextual information we get, the better grounded, the better inference that we can make. And so the ability to make those decisions as close to the edge as possible, where the action is, where all of the data is and where the responsiveness could be as high as possible is really essential.

I couldn't agree more. I think it's spot on. And I think as customers work to deploy these models and these workloads locally on-prem, they're going to face a new series of challenges, whether that be issues around how to secure the data, how to make sure the data keeps its integrity so it drives high-value results. Customers are going to have to figure out in the world that we live in around privacy and the regulations around the use of their data.

This is the essence of all companies, domain expertise and proprietary data. And nobody could upload that into the cloud. Nobody could discover that on the Internet. It is your domain assets.

We've been such great partners. I think about the work we announced not too long ago with VMware around virtualized GPUs for the AI environment. You and Michael set down in January, launched our new generation, our 16th generation of PowerEdge servers. Most recently, we just launched our PowerEdge XE9680 with our 8-way H100s from you.

It is incredible. And on top of that, Jeff, we have state-of-the-art AI foundation models that enables all the enterprises to be able to build their own custom models. So between the 2 of our companies, we have the infrastructure, the compute nodes, the networking, the computing fabric, the AI operating system, the large language models that customers can use to adapt to their own domain and adapt to their own data and teach it to operate in the domains that they care about. The part that I'm really excited about is we reinvented enterprise computing together. What the last wave was about was data centers for file storage and managing all of the employees' information. The next wave is really about harnessing our domain expertise, harnessing our proprietary data and transforming it into intelligence. The next generation is probably not going to be called data centers. You should probably call it AI factories. And all of our companies are built on intelligence. We're doing something really, really important together.

Couldn't agree more, and it kind of takes us to why we're here today. Why are we doing this video? It was a great straight man. We're here to announce a new collaboration between our 2 companies, what we call between us Project Helix. This is a full stack solution that enables enterprises to create and run custom AI models built with their knowledge on their business, our powerful infrastructure and software, NVIDIA's accelerators, AI software and expertise, this is unmatched, second to none in the industry.

Yes, Jeff, we've worked on a whole lot of stuff together over the years. Over the last 30 years, we've built a lot of things. Nothing is nearly this amazing, nearly this impactful. Every company is, at its core, about intelligence. And for the very first time together, Project Helix, the work that our 2 companies are collaborating and working so hard on, will help every company be an AI factory and be able to produce their intelligence, their domain-specific intelligence, their expertise and then do it at light speed and do it at scale. And so I'm super excited about work together.

The new data centers, AI factories, I love it. Jensen, thank you so much. You're the best. I'm really excited about what we're doing with Project Helix. But equally important, maybe even more important, is where we can go together with this. It's an exciting domain. We've just scratched the surface. There's so much more we could do together. Again, thank you for our nearly 3-decade partnership. It's been great. And I always love geeking out with you. You're the best. Thanks again.

Thanks, Jeff.

There you go. Dell and NVIDIA partnering again to change the game with Project Helix. Our trusted high-performance infrastructure like our PowerEdge XE9680 with 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, all into Dell validated designs for any scale wrapped around with AI consultant services. Game-changing, game on, time to make it real. And to do so, please help me welcome Kari Ann Briski, VP of Software Project Management at NVIDIA and an expert on generative AI. Welcome, Kari. Thanks for joining me today.

Yes. Thank you for having me. Jensen sends his best to all of you. He wishes he could be here. But I am here, and I am excited to talk to you about Project Helix. Generative AI is exciting. You've heard the buzz. You can feel the buzz. But it might be a challenge for every enterprise to build a large foundation language model from scratch. Still, many enterprises need a hyper-personalized large language model, or LLM, specific to their domain, trained on their data and reflecting their brand voice. Project Helix will give enterprises that jump start to incorporating generative AI into their business applications. For example, let's say there is a golf retailer called bunkers and hazards.

Bunkers and hazards. That's a pretty good name, kind of like my golf game.

Right? If it was like my golf game, it would be called the beer cart. But in all seriousness, let's take a quick look at a before and after scenario of a general-purpose large language model versus a customized large language model. Say you ask a virtual assistant powered by a general large language model to recommend a new golf club. Jeff, why don't you give us that?

Sure. [Technical Difficulty]

We know simply as we work with our different clients, one of the things they want to know is how do we create an experience in a workplace that everybody wants to be attracted to. [Technical Difficulty]

For example, it can help marketing tasks like generating a catalog of products with descriptions and images, creating a website and social media copy and even automating e-mails. When you connect your large language model to your knowledge base, it can fetch up-to-date information and summarize customer service engagements such as purchase history issues and returns, combining customization and factual data to a pretrained foundation model results in a better experience and higher ROI. In fact, even the voices power generated by these virtual assistants are generated by an NVIDIA pretrain model. So now let's try it with Caddy Chat.

Sure. I need a new driver.

Of course, Jeff. I remember you purchased a PowerStrike CR5. I bet we can find one that would be even better. What are you looking for specifically?

That would be funny if that was Bill Murray's voice, but nevertheless, how about I need a new driver with an 8.5 degree loft for swing speed of 110 miles an hour with a spin rate less than 2,000 RPMs?

Thank you for the information, Jeff. Considering your preferences and the characteristics of the PowerStrike CR5, I have a couple of recommendations for you.

See, we are using a large language model that is customized to the golf domain, stores data and your personal preferences. The suggestion is so much more personalized and accurate, and you can get a more natural interaction. So let's hear those recommendations.

I suggest the Helix ThunderX 1000 driver with 8.5 degrees of loft in a stiff shaft. This driver features a lightweight design with low torque for faster swing speeds and greater forgiveness due to its larger sweet spot.

Nice. That rolls off the tip of your tongue. I guess I'll try the Helix Thunder X1000.

Your custom Helix Thunder is ready.

Wow, only in Vegas would they hand somebody like me a stick on a stage. But if you think about it, what we tried to demonstrate here is adding your data and business context makes generative AI a powerful tool for your organization. In fact, highly disruptive.

Absolutely, Jeff. Let's drive this home. Project Helix will give businesses the tools they need for generative AI, turning their data centers into AI factories while maintaining control over their sensitive high-value data.

Thanks for showing us how generative AI can help and work and really change the game for our customers.

You're welcome. Thanks for inviting me.

Thanks for having me. I'll leave this with you. I'm sure they don't want me to have that. Everyone, Kari Briski from NVIDIA.

Now we're going to move to the edge. Infrastructure, if you think about it, compute and storage resources are being pulled to where the data is being created to minimize latency with a predictable quality of service to fuel new workloads and AI at the edge. And given that data is very expensive and complicated to move, the result is we have massively distributed architectures that have been difficult to manage, automate and provision. Then you add kind of what I call the Triple Lindy test here. The native edge use cases are growing exponentially. Devices are deployed in a variety of environments, many without the IT resources to install them, add some unreliable connectivity, and to finish the list off, one's got to secure the data. Last October, you might remember, we announced Project Frontier to solve these challenges. And today, we're going to close out Project Frontier. And I could not be more pleased that we're making it real with the launch of Dell Native Edge, a first of its kind edge operation software platform built to simplify edge operations, optimize investments and secure your data like never before. Fundamentally, Dell Native Edge accomplishes 2 things. First, it enables centralized deployment and life cycle management in a zero-touch manner with a zero-trust infrastructure. And two, the software platform enables centralized deployment of containerized and virtualized applications across your entire edge estate. Dell Native Edge is multi-cloud by design, enabling you to deploy your applications in new and in existing environments. Let's take a look at how one industry is taking their edge to deliver a better experience for their customer. [Presentation]

To tell us more about Dell Native Edge, please help me welcome Gil Shneorson, our Senior Vice President of Edge Solutions. Welcome, Gil.

Before we get started, I need to tell you a little bit about Gil. He's an interesting character. Engineer by trade, he's worked on many of our groundbreaking projects, programs, new businesses where we need someone that was maybe a little unorthodox.

You think?

Oh, I know. Maybe a little of the right stuff with the right attitude. That's the guy we've asked to build Dell Native Edge. Did I surprise you?

Did you? Yes, you did.

Lost for words. If you know, Gil, this is a first.

I had to create this whole video just to get some free ice cream.

Yes, shocker on that one. And if you think about what that video, I think, really shows is the fact that retail has progressed a long way. It's advanced in many ways and far more integrated than people imagine.

That's true. These technologies deliver far better experience for their customers. The data that they are now able to capture enables them to predict exactly which items need to be stocked at any given time, allowing them to optimize their supply chain. You're missing on supply chain, Jeff, right? So you can see how this allows them to carry minimal inventory and reduce spoilage and ensure that every customer gets what they want when they want it. Put together, a solution like this allows stores to dramatically reduce cost while optimizing the customer experience, increasing both profitability and customers' loyalty.

Right, if you think about it, how does our Dell Native Edge platform help our customers deliver better business outcomes?

Well, everything we saw in that video was being driven by workloads purpose built for and deploy at edge locations. Also, this customer experience was in one of hundreds of stores in a chain that all need to deliver a very consistent experience from the cow to the factory, from a ship connected via Starlink to the distribution center, and finally, from a 5G connected truck to the hands of that employee who put that pint of ice cream on the shelf. Every point in this chain benefits from sensors, cameras, compute, connectivity and edge specific -- edge native specific applications, both on-premises and in the cloud that all have to be deployed, life cycle managed, secured. This is not your typical IT environment. Can you imagine how challenging it is to deploy and manage all of that?

Well, this is where the real-world operations technology intersects or runs into the digital world information technology and now add thousands of devices in many, many locations. And for extra credit, how do we need to be responsive and fast? How does Native Edge provide or become an enabler for our customers?

Well, the sheer number of devices, workloads and locations require that our solution to this problem needs to be affordable, really simple to deploy and manage, highly secure and able to be deployed and managed across hundreds or even thousands of locations. Native Edge is the first platform that allows anyone at an edge location, even you, to simply plug a network and power and just walk away. This device will securely onboard itself, apply any updates and provision the application necessary to do this job. In this retail example, we chose to use a combination of devices based on workloads. In any given store, we may require a ruggedized PowerEdge XR4000 in the office to be -- to do the processing for analyzing data and the data streams in the store. We need an industrial PC like OptiPlex for point of sale. And we need gateways to connect to the smart shelf application.

And there are devices like this in every industrial setting isn't there?

Absolutely. Now after you select the device on the right hardware, we assemble and digitally sign it in the factory, and then we dropship it directly to any location. Now this is the interesting part. While it's in transit, IT is now able to claim entitlement to that device using a Dell-provided digital voucher and consider blueprint to predetermine what will be deployed on this device. To accomplish this, by the way, we had to be the first in the industry to commercially offer secure device onboarding at scale.

It's awesome. If we double-click on that, one of the opportunities is how do we help our customers ensure their configurations are updated and their applications are provisioned correctly?

Great question. Take a look at this. Everything is centrally managed and way more automated than before. Native Edge uses blueprints to deliver applications to any device at any locations at scale. We connected the Gateway 3200 to the ice cream freezer. You can see its pre-onboarded. It's going to stay like that until it's powered on for the first time. At first power on, this device is validated, certified that it has not been tampered with, and then the operating environment is installed. You can see it's now provisioning the device. And when done, this device is now provisioned. What this means, it's serving a dial tone of containers in VMs, right? From there, Native Edge automatically pushes infrastructure updates and application blueprints that you have predetermined should run on this device, including any supporting applications that may be running on other edge devices, your data center or cloud of your choice. So we can deploy and life cycle a complete outcome. This would happen to any new device. And as you can see, this device is now online with both applications deployed and running. And we can also take a more detailed view of the device in the estate. But we did all of this to connect and monitor the ice cream freezer. So check a look at this live dashboard that we just deployed as part of this blueprint.

So let me see if I summarize correctly. A single IT administrator can manage a fleet of devices in multiple locations, leverage blueprints to deploy and manage all of this hardware, and more importantly, these edge native applications remotely all from a single pane of glass?

Absolutely. With Native edge, we simplify the deployment of -- and day 2 operations of infrastructure and workloads across the entire estate. Through tagging and workflow definition, we could create batch operations that allow us to work on multiple devices and locations in bulk. And we ensure the secure operation with zero trust security capabilities. Now by the way, we talked about a cold chain example. These -- those very steps can be applied to -- oh, I'm sorry, and I want to say we deploy this, but we deployed an application to manage the temperature of the ice cream. Next thing you want to do maybe is a loss prevention machine based. And so with Native Edge, you can just deploy another application using blueprints on the same infrastructure or an existing infrastructure to optimize your investment. So it's as simple as deploying a blueprint to, well, thousands or hundreds of locations. By the way, we discussed this as a cold chain. It's -- the same steps are applicable for energy or manufacturing or transportation, many more, a wide variety of environments and connectivity scenarios. To conclude, Michael Dell talked about yesterday how an idea forming in one side may spawn an ecosystem of innovation. So maybe while I'm talking some of you were thinking, well, what does it take today for me from an idea all the way to deploying a complete outcome at my age. And so hopefully, if you compare this to the experience I just showed you, you can start thinking and seeing what we see and why we are so excited to bring our own innovation to all of you.

Awesome. I just love it, Gil. When you see our technology in action, turning it from a concept now into a real product offering, it's just so exciting. Thanks for joining me today to talk about your baby.

Jeff, can I get ice cream for a moment?

Do I have a choice?

It's just that we have such a great audience, and I know many of the Dell team members are watching us live. I just want to thank, first of all, our design partners, design customers that are sitting here with us today, helping us design and bring Native Edge to market. So thank you very much. And all of the Dell team members, hundreds of them that have been working for months and months tirelessly to bring this to all of you, so thank you very much. And thanks for including me.

Great color, Gil. Thanks for joining me. And go easy on the ice cream.

So next up, Zero Trust. I've mentioned this several times already. It was recently pointed out to me that Zero Trust is an awful marketing name. And I guess you can tell us engineers named an architecture that trust no user, no device, authenticates everything and gives permission only as specified. A way to summarize that, I guess we call them like we see them, where we see them like we call them, it really doesn't make a difference. And clearly, I would have a short-lived marketing career, so I guess it's pretty good I stayed as an engineer. But to help me really talk about our plans around Zero Trust, I've invited a new colleague of ours, Herb Kelsey, to join me on stage. Herb, I don't even know what this title is. Industry CTO Government, here's what I call them, Chief Smart Guy of All Things Zero Trust. He's going to join me on the stage. This is Herb's coming out party sort of speak at Dell. He has spent the last 30 years building architectures and large-scale information systems at the highest level of security defined by the United States government. He has supported the intelligence community, designing secure clouds and infrastructure, and now he's on our team. And Herb, like me, is a truck guy. And to be honest, when I saw Herb yesterday, I got a little truck envy. He drives a big truck. And by definition, I drive an F250. Herb drives a really, really big truck. Here he comes now. Welcome, Herb. Thanks for joining me today.

Absolutely.

You got to tell the audience what in the hell is in that truck.

So that truck is our 5G-connected Zero Trust protected mobile operations center. And it...

That's a mouthful.

Well, it represents our commitment to have Zero Trust in any environment that we need from a data center down to that tactical edge deployment.

I just mentioned making fun of Zero Trust. But when we talk about Zero Trust architecturally inside our engineering meetings, what do we mean by that?

So what we mean is that previous security paradigms had us protecting the edge of our environment, our perimeter, but not really inside. And what we found is that the only way that we could actually protect our data was to not trust that every user that was inside or every application that was inside or device that was connected should be accessing that data. So we verify very, very often as we go through the use cases within that enterprise.

And if we think about Zero Trust, that definition, what are we, Dell, doing about that?

Well, so what you've heard over the last day is that we're embedding Zero Trust into several of our applications and products and services like -- and solutions like NativeEdge. But to actually get to an end-to-end Zero Trust capability, that's a complex task for most of our customers. There are a lot of products to integrate. There's a lot to take care of. And so it takes a new architectural approach, and we have to find a way to get people to that full Zero Trust journey. So today, I'm happy and excited to announce Project Fort Zero, which is a Dell industry initiative with more than 30 partners that we're using to accelerate the path to advance Zero Trust, and we're doing that by absorbing the integration burden into Dell. Within the year, we're going to have a full end-to-end Zero Trust solution, and it's going to be validated by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Awesome. You and I regularly meet on this. How far along are we with Project Fort Zero?

So this journey started about a year ago. We took senior executives into the DOD CIO. He had his staff there, and he spoke about his highest priorities, Zero Trust being the highest priority. So once we understood that, we committed to help them accelerate their adoption of Zero Trust. We started at a Center of Excellence in Maryland. It's called DreamPort. DreamPort is the U.S. Cyber Command's integration facility that is open to industry to come in and innovate. So once we established ourselves there, we also then had to establish an ecosystem of partners, of technology partners. We have over 30 partners that are involved with us to build this end-to-end Zero Trust system. So we're going to go through the 45 capabilities that the Department of Defense requires of us. We're going to meet the 152 activities that we have to perform in order to be considered Zero Trust, and then we're going to go out and defeat the adversaries that are attacking our systems.