As the digital transformation grows, customers are demanding more ease of use within information technology — expecting it to be fast and simple just like the apps that people use every day. This makes IT companies wrestle with how to make products and services that do help their customers experience ease of use while still having that complex IT services and systems underneath.

Sean Wedige (pictured, left), chief technology officer of enterprise solutions at Rackspace Inc., and Scott Delandy (pictured, right), technical director of Dell EMC, recently spoke about this give-and-take as their two businesses feed off of this communication and development.

“IT is becoming consumerized,” Delandy said. “From a user perspective, they just expect things to work. They expect everything to be like a mobile device, and it’s just that simple. And if I need an app, I download the app, and it gets on there, and if I need to replace it, everything … just all magically happens.”

Wedige and Delandy spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the difficulties of customer ease of use and ways Dell EMC is innovating through new products and services. (* Disclosure below.)

Making customers happy through ease of use

As customers begin to envision easier end-user experiences for IT services and products, Dell EMC has risen to the challenge by providing services like PowerMax, an all-flash enterprise data storage service. As a customer of Dell EMC, Rackspace has already seen PowerMax and the innovations within it to be beneficial for its company needs.

“We’ve always relied on [Dell EMC] for availability for high performance to be able to support our customers,” Wedige said. “So [with PowerMax], they’ve created additional capabilities … like easier migration tools, things like incredible performance that allows us to not have to micromanage workload. And so it’s an extremely powerful platform that we’re looking to put to work for our hundred thousand-plus customers.”

PowerMax provides the opportunity for provisioning storage based on service levels so that now customers have a whole range of options that Dell EMC can provide through the service providers. “What’s cool about the technology is, years ago in order to do that, you had to really be able to understand the underlying technology so that you could go ahead and you could tune the knobs and the buttons and the levers,” Delandy said. However, the new system is about automation machine learning, and predictive analytics, which means Dell EMC’s customers can easily navigate without the deeper knowledge it used to take to operate such complex needs.

This helps Dell’s customers like Rackspace be more efficient and effective as it then provides its own services to its customers. It also allows the company to not have to micromanage workloads, which is critical when dealing with a hundred thousand-plus customers, because it has to make sure there’s no contention between customers.

“Every one of those customers are relying on us, and they may have different workload cycles. …We have certain customers for whom their busiest seasons are the weekends, the holidays, and they will have different cycles than customers that are traditional eCommerce or digital marketing companies,” Wedige explained. “So this allows us not to have to worry about tuning individually. … So, absolutely, a huge step forward.”

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 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE