While digital transformation is driving growth efforts at businesses in a range of industries, the technology driving the information technology trend continues to evolve. IT support partners like Dell EMC are working symbiotically with key customers to put the results of real-world data toward digital tech innovation to make products better for the market at large.

“We want a two-way business partnership. We want to be able to take your product, leverage it in our data centers, learn from it, provide feedback, and ask for enhancements — things that we think would make it better not only for us, but for other customers,” said Mike Bollman (pictured, left), director of server and storage architecture at Enterprise Products Partners LP.

For the last two years, Bollman and his team have been working closely with Scott Delandy (pictured, right), technical director at Dell EMC, to make Enterprise Products a leader in oil and gas — and help Dell optimize its solutions for the market.

Bollman and Delandy spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the collaborative partnership between Dell EMC and Enterprise Products and how their work is benefiting digital transformation overall. (* Disclosure below.)

‘Build the relationships’

Working closely with Dell versus as a siloed buyer and seller proved hugely beneficial to Enterprise Products, as the company was able to make adjustments to Dell’s solutions that helped both teams better identify their utility. Bollman’s team works primarily with PowerMax, a solution that serves the business well.

“It is unbelievably fast, in all honesty. … We ran into a point where we just didn’t have any more hardware to throw at it. The box just kept going … measuring 700,000 [input/output operations per second]; it’s not breaking a sweat,” he said.

The collaboration also enabled Dell EMC to realize value in the feedback given by Enterprise Products, which Dell ultimately leveraged toward a better end product. “The technology that we literally announced earlier this morning, there are pieces of code that were specifically written into that system based on some of the comments that Mike had provided a year plus ago when we were in the initial phases of development,” Delandy said.

As Dell EMC continues to develop its strategy for the ever-evolving cloud space, building balanced collaborative relationships with customers is proving key to solving for the issues they may face in the future. “There are lots of industries that we work with, and they all have sort of unique challenges. … Build the relationships … so if there are things that we can do to help that, we can have that conversation,” Delandy concluded.

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