It’s the age of data economies, where businesses must manage a tsunami of complex data from countless sources if they hope to survive the digital transformation. It’s a transformation with unintended consequences, as the computing landscape gets clouded with hybrid environments. For Dell EMC, this multicloud world presents new markets, making collaborative work for this family of storage, cloud and converged computing services.

“Our job is to help them unlock all of that potential that’s stored in their data,” said Ed Yardumian (pictured, left), senior vice president of appliances engineering, data protection, at Dell EMC.

Yardumian and Kunal Ruvala (pictured, right), senior vice president of software engineering at Dell EMC, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the release of Dell’s PowerProtect software platform, how Dell is helping customers adapt to an ever-changing tech landscape, and what customers should be thinking about to be ready for the future (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Data protection is getting some good callouts, new brandings, and PowerProtect. Can you walk us through what’s new?

Ruvala: We’ve announced Dell EMC PowerProtect software and Dell EMC PowerProtect X400. It is our new next-generation data management software platform and the new next-generation multi-dimensional data management appliance. With PowerProtect, we believe it will help mid-sized and large enterprise organizations transform from what has been a traditional form of data protection to more of a data management space and data management solutions.

That’s what happens with PowerProtect. PowerProtect comes, as you have heard, in different form factors. You can deploy it as software, or it can come as an appliance. It gives you the ability to set up policies and manage the data where you can create the backups. You can restore the data you need. At the same time, we have other use cases to help with data management problems that customers are running into today.

Knight: The landscape is really changing. There are new threats. There are new requirements that companies need to abide by. Can you walk us through some of the specs of [PowerProtect]?

Ruvala: It is based on a modern architecture. It is software-defined. We do see there is a need for data protection to reside the closest to where the data is or where the application orders are. If you think of customers that have thought about data protection in the past, they run into challenges where they’ve had incidents or they’ve lost data. If you think about how to best protect some of this data and you give the powers to the customers that are closest to the data, there’s a good chance of success with data protection strategies. Having self-service driven architectures, as well as capabilities to help with centralized IT management, are key parts of what we do at PowerProtect.

Knight: How are you talking with customers? How are you holding your customers’ hands and walking them through decisions? It’s different for every organization, so how do you help a customer think through big challenges?

Ruvala: One of the key parts of this is having conversations with the customers to think about what their objectives are. What their standard objectives are for their environments. In solo cases, we’ve seen customers that have governance or compliance requirements because of the industries they play in. One customer, for example, is talking about backups being required for 50 years. There are customers that have long-term retention needs or situations where they want to have backups or data stored for different purposes.

Miniman: Let’s get underneath the covers here for a second. You brought up some of the platform pieces. What’s the update on the appliance piece as that fits into the PowerProtect family?

Yardumian: We have an appliance instantiation that both is a hybrid, so a combination of spinning media and flash, as well as an all-flash appliance. That was kind of one key tenant … having the performance options available at different cost points. Another requirement was scale-out. We have customers that need starting at a half a petabyte or even a petabyte, but we also have customers that want to start 64, 100 TBs. And that’s what our appliance allows — not only scale in place, so they can buy one, and then they can grow it in place, or they can actually add nodes and scale out as another way to deal with the data explosion.

Knight: What do you think we’re going to be talking about in 2020 or 2025? What are some of the things that organizations need to be thinking about to make sure they are preparing for the future?

Yardumian: I think integrating more of [AI and ML] technologies into the product, so they’re making decisions and being smart without the user intervention. They’re even understanding the quality of service and the quality of data and making those decisions. We integrated ML into the new appliance product to help.

One of the biggest challenges our customers face is managing the capacity and maintaining good data performance, and we integrated ML to decide where to put that data both for capacity and performance. I think we’re going to further see the integration of that technology on our end, as well as the customers’ ends.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE