Running a business in the era of digital transformation is more complex than ever before, evolving far beyond the straightforward transaction of product sellers and buyers. Today, business operations involve the scaling of software development, its engineers, and the operations underlying this now-critical aspect of modern economies. Dell Technologies Inc. looks to help customers cut through the hype of new tech trends in order to simplify operations rather than add complexities to an already-complicated business landscape.

“People are trying to achieve so much with technology today that you have to drain away the complexity of that and bring a higher-order platform and a higher-order operating environment to allow people to really realize their goals,” said Matt Baker, senior vice president of Dell EMC strategy and planning at Dell Technologies Inc.

Baker spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed market strategy, industry competition, and how Dell works to meet the demands of customers’ information technology needs (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Furrier: In your job, you’ve got to cut through the hype. At the end of the day, the value activities in a company are pretty simple. They have operations. They sell a product, good or service. They give it to a customer. They collect cash. This is a developer, operational, and a workload kind of challenge to do something. Operationally, it’s a big advantage.

Baker: I think that’s what our customers are struggling with. There are very good reasons to choose different operating environments. You might want to preposition content, like you guys do. I’m sure somewhere behind theCUBE  is a content delivery network for distributing content. That service benefits from geographic distribution. But you shouldn’t have to create a diverse operating environment in order to operate a geographically diverse environment.

What we’re creating is this singular operational hub for your entire IT environment. You can run workloads in Microsoft Azure. You can run workloads in Amazon Web Services. You can run workloads in the 4,000 VMware Cloud Provider partners that [VMware CEO] Pat Gelsinger mentioned during the keynote. And you could do all of that through a single operational framework that allows you to orchestrate and manage the entirety of your operations, which allows you to choose the best horse for the given course.

Vellante: Historically, the IT business has been a winner-take-most industry. The leader gets most of the profit, the second does OK, and the third barely breaks even. There is no fourth, fifth and sixth. It is sort of a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market, isn’t it?

Baker: I think to some degree, but it depends on how you define markets. We all tend to participate and find opportunities to move and cross into new market areas. Market extension is a basic strategy. There’s plenty of room in this $3+ trillion IT market for us all to participate. The job of us strategists and business leaders is finding the best opportunities and how to get after them.

Furrier: Operational consistency is a huge message here this year. I want you to take a minute to explain — why that strategy, and what’s the impact for customers?

Baker: Achieving scale in IT operations allows you to achieve scale and accelerate your digital transformation as a customer. So if you’re able to create a highly scalable IT environment, there is no lack of demand for IT-fueled innovation in any business anywhere today. That’s why we’re so bullish on the future that we’re in the middle of this massive investment cycle of digitizing and codifying business process into application and growing the footprint and surface area of all businesses. You’re able to create this consistent operating level, automate that layer, and then focus on the business value.

If you look through our studies around digital transformation and what our customers are doing, it shows that to some degree they face transformation stall — wondering how to get everyone aligned. Increasingly, we’re like, you all need to come together as an organization and focus up, and helping our IT people free up and scale themselves to get closer to the business and really be a part of that strategic discussion for the company. Achieve scale works everywhere; achieve scale in IT operations frees up time and investment dollars to help the business.

Furrier: Give a quick plug for your video blog, Baker’s Half Dozen. What’s it about and what’s the focus?

Baker: It’s a six-minute spot that I go through six-and-a-half things. I just take people through a basic rundown of what’s going on in the marketplace. I try to make it simple, funny, and just sort of poke fun at myself.

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