The multicloud environment has brought several challenges for companies as they manage various applications and data across different platforms.

One challenge is the ability to create a scalable, high-performance platform to allow workloads to move. Another challenge is the ability to extract value from data in different repositories, according to Marc O’Regan (pictured), EMEA chief technology officer at Dell Technologies Inc.

“Where I’m seeing a lot of the requirement in this multicloud world … is the ability to be able to build a performant, scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud-native ecosystem — and that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there.” O’Regan said. “And the other is bringing the kind of performance that’s expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud-native spaces.”

O’Regan spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the SUSECON Digital event. They discussed the strategic partnership between Dell and SUSE to offer enterprises solutions for the cloud-native ecosystem, how the two companies work together to meet new demands in a multicloud environment, and how Dell drives its innovation process. (* Disclosure below.)

Partnerships help the innovation process

As for a scalable storage solution, Dell collaborates with SUSE on its enterprise storage solution Ceph. “Both ourselves and SUSE have brought a level of innovation into an arena, where you need cost, and you need low latency …” O’Regan said.

On the cloud-native side, Dell cooperates heavily with SUSE on its CaaS Platform, an enterprise-class container management solution that enables IT and DevOps professionals to deploy, manage and scale container-based applications and services. It includes Kubernetes to automate lifecycle management of modern applications.

“Here it’s really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we’re doing with Data Hub and SAP; it’s all part of the intelligent enterprise for SAP,” O’Regan said. “This is where SUSE and Dell Tech together really get into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories.”

For better extracting value from a large amount of data, it is interesting that the architect places computer engineering as close to data sources as possible, according to O’Regan. “And that means having to, in some way, get out of these monolithic stacks that we’ve been used … for a number of decades into a more horizontally scaled-out kind of architecture,” he explained. “That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond in a meaningful way that’s going to ultimately drive value to users.”

Building partnerships with SUSE and other companies is part of Dell’s innovation process. The idea is to blend new technologies with the traditional ones to find solutions for customer needs, such as evolving needs related to a multicloud environment, O’Regan pointed out.

“We’re looking at how we can get smarter … about migrating them from that extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in the past, but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world — that is a cloud-native world,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SUSECON Digital event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SUSECON Digital. Neither SUSE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE