Multicloud was all the buzz at this year’s Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas, as the computing behemoth stakes its flag in multicloud microservices. Aiding customers along the path to operationalizing the emerging realm of hybrid cloud, Dell Tech considers the unique business cases, partners and defined application workloads, according to Jason Mundy (pictured), senior director of marketing, Dell Technologies Consulting, at Dell Technologies Inc.

Mundy spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) 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 Dell’s relationship with VMware Inc., customer excitement regarding cloud technology, and the consulting practices Dell offers to those seeking better data utilization (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Martin: What services and recommendations do you offer customers? How do they manage successfully in this multicloud world?

Mundy: We talk about [information technology] being about people, processes and technology. The technology is the easy part, especially when it comes to services. And with Dell Technologies Cloud, we just made that technology component so much easier for our customers to be able to consume that infrastructure and get up and running.

To get a true cloud operating model, there are several considerations. First, we need to have a strategy and roadmap to get there. Many customers already have that. Many customers are somewhat along the way, but they still need our help. They need someone to guide them, so we work with many customers to help them develop the strategy.

One of the most important things is building out a business case. Looking at what the benefits are to the business and the costs associated with it; it’s a significant investment and they’re going to their executive teams or boards of directors to look for funding. We help many customers do that. A couple of other factors are applications and the workloads. Then, the actual operating model itself, where the people and the process are the hardest part, especially the people… We do a lot of work to really help our customers. We’ll meet them anywhere along the way.

Furrier: What does it mean to the customer when you say ‘cloud operating model’? Do their eyes pop out of their heads? Are they excited? How do they react to that?

Mundy: Customers will have their traditional IT organizations. Built around technology silos, they’re more focused on the technology and project basis. Executing IT projects behind the scenes to try and meet the needs of the business. A lot of our customers are using more VMware, so they’re starting to get a flavor for what a cloud operating model is, but what it really means is to shift the thinking of IT to be more of a product-focused and service-oriented organization. That is, acting like a product management team where you are providing your product to the business, which is IT as a service.

So, you have different kinds of roles. It’s less about the technology. That is still important, but you need to have roles like relationship managers to work with the business. You need to have portfolio managers. You need to have folks who are managing capacity and developing those services.

Furrier: Of all your integration strategies, which do you think will be the most popular with customers?

Mundy: There is certainly the need to integrate additional technologies in the customer’s environment. They’re going to have [configuration management databases], and there are other technologies beyond Dell that we will help them integrate with if they need that.

Then, we’ll work with our strategically aligned businesses with RSA, Secureworks, parting with VMware to integrate those other technologies. I think it’s the hierarchy of the level of value of work — the value we can provide back to the customer, so we sort of eliminate some of the baseline work.

Martin: What consulting practices do you deliver to help customers really look at data as an asset that can drive business incomes?

Mundy: We have some strong capabilities in the data analytics space. Many of our customers understand this. They understand data capital. They understand the value they have, and they want to be able to unlock it all. They want to be able to monetize it. We can help them understand what data they have. How to make sense of it and how to organize it.

Let’s build an analytics platform where they can start to look at use cases and build out a strategy to take advantage of those uses cases, and then start to capitalize on them. We can help them with some of the data engineering. We can help them with some of the data science. We can help them build and implement the actual analytics platforms to take advantage of it.

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