Customer-centric is a buzzword that businesses like to throw around. It sounds cool, but in many cases, it is meaningless jargon. True customer-focus is a two-way street that means not only innovating new features, but also evolving products based on how they are used in real-life scenarios.

“Working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell is successful,” said Matthew Paul (pictured, left), senior director of product management, PowerFlex, at Dell EMC.

“Some of the things we just came out with, they’ve helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of,” added Martin Glynn (pictured, right), senior director of product management for PowerMax at Dell EMC.

Paul and Glynn spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. They discussed how the PowerFlex and PowerMax lines are evolving to help clients overcome the pressures of operating in the ever-changing environment of 2020. (* Disclosure below.)

Power portfolio critical part of Dell strategy

Software-defined storage, aka the Power portfolio, is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy, according to Glynn. Leading the pack for the past 30 years has been PowerMax, which Glynn described as the company’s “flagship storage array product” and “a leader in mission-critical data centers.”

As the market demands have changed, PowerMax has grown to meet them. New workloads and new use cases revolve around delivering new services for end users. Cloud Mobility for Dell EMC PowerMax, announced earlier this month, is helping businesses deal with the uncertainties of the current economic climate by allowing users to take information directly from mission-critical infrastructure and push it up to an object store.

“It’s enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things,” Glynn said. “Ultimately, that’s going to help them work through this new normal we’re all participating in.”

PowerFlex lives up to its name with deployment flexibility

Helping organizations to maneuver and navigate today’s challenging landscape is a big priority for Dell Technologies, according to Paul. PowerFlex joined the Power family when Dell renamed the VxFlex hyperconverged-infrastructure portfolio in response to use patterns.

“It reflects customer adoption of this technology and our investment as Dell Technologies in software-defined storage to signify to the market that we’re here to stay,” Paul told theCUBE in an interview on the rebranding.

Deployment flexibility, performance and scalability are some of the key differentiators for PowerFlex, according to Paul. “You can deploy it in an HCI mode, where you have the compute and networking together, or you can go deploy it in a disaggregated mode where you have compute and storage separate,” he said.

If compute and storage are separate, they can be scaled independently. This use case works well well for key database workloads with high compute but lower storage requirements, according to Paul.

Another area where PowerFlex is seeing increased adoption is the idea of re-platforming or re-aligning the data center.

“The way that we designed our layout is really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software-defined infrastructure,” Paul said. “Think about deploying PowerFlex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment, in a physical environment, [and] in a container environment. Being able to have your traditional applications, like SQL or Oracle, right along with really cool new applications, like the Elastic Stack or MongoDB.”

Dell EMC is keeping its finger on the pulse, making sure it is paying attention to how its products are used in the real world and how best to innovate to fill the market’s needs and wants, according to Paul.

“[We want] to make sure that we set our customers up to be successful as possible,” he said.

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 Digital Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE