Jeff Clarke
Analyst · TD Cowen.
Sure, let's see if I can unpack that question into a few answers. So we look at the demand that we referred to, which was beyond normal seasonality. We had year-over-year demand growth in the unstructured space, ECS, as well as PowerScale. They grew quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year on a demand basis. Those are generally good indicators, as I mentioned earlier, around AI file and object, which are the data classes that generally feed the AI engines. So when I think about AI and the now new products that I mentioned earlier with better read and write performance, better coherency performance in these complex workloads, better density, the 710 era, that’s F710 to be specific, and F210 on PowerScale, and the object scale XF960, those are the types of products that go into these AI workloads. Our progress in traditional storage was good too. We were ahead of our normal seasonality, what we’ve expected from Q3 to Q4 across our traditional storage business. Although we commented this in our talking points, it was down year-over-year, but better than we expected across mid-range, across our data protection products and our high-end storage products. And then if I think long-term going forward, as we look at the opportunity, and again, we referenced the $152 billion in our web deck, but we've done some analysis that's available out in the public domain, but we're looking at an opportunity where every dollar that is for a AI server, GPU server, there's $2 to a growing $3 of professional services around that, networking around that, storage around that. I won't parse it down specifically, but what was really important is there's a drag that the opportunity in the marketplace continues to grow, not only around the computational asset itself, but the network fabric that it's needed, the storage subsystem to feed it, and then ultimately the professional services to help customers deploy it, but more importantly, figure out where their data is, how to prepare the data. And then ultimately, one of our additional value propositions across that whole spectrum is a financing arm, from the ability to provide the infrastructure of all types, the ability to provide services around that, and then the financing around it, we believe is very much part of our differentiation in the marketplace, particularly as this scales to the enterprise.