Q&A: Dell responds to evolving IT demands with end-to-end services
For technology companies looking to verticalize around microservices, disparate customers have a bevy of industry-specific demands. Yet these customers may have more in common than expected.
“If you can align scale with action in the portfolio that it’s so well-aligned to the trends in the industry, you’re representing an opportunity for a customer to select a partner like Dell Technologies,” said Marius Haas (pictured), president and chief commercial officer at Dell Technologies Inc.
Haas 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 integration and end-to-end connection (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)
[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]
Furrier: Talk about the challenges and why you guys are going end-to-end with services and the benefit of customers.
Haas: There is no doubt that the customers are getting smarter every day and understanding what workloads, what applications, what data sets ought to reside in which ecosystems to … better align to their overall economic needs and … their flexibility and agility to be able to move those workloads and that data seamlessly to best address their particular needs.
The beauty of what we’ve been able to do is integrate the VMware architecture into the public cloud ecosystems. And we’ve got many others that are ready, knocking on the door that want to be part of it. So now what a customer can have is that true agility, that true flexibility of moving applications and data seamlessly, but all controlled through one mechanism. Because at the end of the day, what’s going to happen is they’re going to have their data reside on multiple different sources, but they want to be able to see it; they want to be able to access it; they want to be able to analyze it. And once you’re able to analyze it, regardless of where it resides, and then draw the conclusions from it, that’s what enables them to then create a predictive model at almost a cost of zero.
Furrier: One of the changes that we’re seeing in IT is the conversation shifted from not just cost reduction but revenue generating. This is not the old school, best in breed, I’ve got great storage, low cost per storage. This is about ‘I don’t want to deal with infrastructure anymore.’ You guys handle that. How will you guys go into market under the new reality, and how are you going to market with this new shift in the customer’s mindset?
Haas: Well, I think the mindset now is change or die. ‘If I don’t drive the digital transformation within my company, someone else will do it, and more than likely, it will be a competitor.’ So, you see it happen on the Uber front, Airbnb front, you can go down the list. Every single one of these industries are figuring out, ‘I better drive this aggressively, and make sure that I take advantage of what’s happening in the technology landscape in order to progress and grow my business to be more relevant and more differentiated.’ So, instead of IT being a ‘let me lower my cost structure model,’ IT is now the enabler of changing the business model, the enabler of us scaling at a much faster rate to take advantage of the opportunities that are there.
Vellante: What’s different about the commercial customers, and what’s going on in that base in terms of their transformation, their trends, and how is that different from the big whales?
Haas: Well, [regarding] commercial customers, at least in my patch, I’ve got the biggest of the biggest public sector accounts. So, I’ve got them of all different sizes and shapes and different stages of the journey. And that’s what we’re finding everywhere. If you’re a big account, small account, medium account, everyone is on this digital transformation journey, and there’s an intersection that we can play a very big part of and then enabling them.
The creative playbook is ‘how do I go through this journey effectively?’ But what we’re finding is when we took the overall architecture, kind of R&D tenets, if you will, around making sure that we have a scaled-out architecture model, it does enable to have our customers adopt things and then be able to scale it out as their business grows. So you can jump into having leading-edge capabilities in technology to help you drive your company today, but know that we’re there with you all the way to then scale at whatever rate you want to scale at.
Furrier: What’s the main message that you guys say to those customers?
Haas: For the last couple of years, we’ve been talking about the transformations that are happening. At the highest level, it’s this digital transformation journey that people are on, the workforce transformation they’re doing, the overall IT transformation that enables that, and then, of course, how do you secure the whole environment?
On top of that, they’re having the conversation about, ‘OK, let’s go build the blueprint as to what that looks like for me as a customer, and then show me how you’re going to deliver to me the platforms that enable me to grow and make sure that I’m making the right bets long term.’
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: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither the sponsors of select segments of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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