The digital transformation has been the buzzword of the past five years, but as enterprises try to implement enormous technological initiatives around big data and the cloud, it takes a lot of dialogue to define specific digital innovation needs — especially data storage. While storage used to become highly fragmented — tier-one storage, midrange storage, object storage, etc. — conversations are shifting.

“The discussions that we’re having with customers more and more are centered around what you’re trying to do,” said Travis Vigil (pictured), senior vice president of product management at Dell EMC. “What business problem are you trying to solve? The conversation is shifting to a higher level, to the application or business problem level.”

Vigil spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the conversations businesses are having around cloud implementation and the ways Dell EMC is helping meet customer needs (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

A broad spectrum of customer needs in storage

For most businesses, storage needs to fit within an ecosystem, according to Vigil. Through storage, many organizations want to procure a particular business solution and to have information so that they can easily integrate the digital transformation into particular environments. And while many companies want to be able to do this transformation themselves, more and more are asking for a managed service when it comes to storage.

“We have a broad spectrum of customers and many customers that are on different places on that journey,” Vigil said. “Definitely the conversations … are all trending to, ‘I want you to do more so I can focus on my business and my applications.'”

The DevOps conversation with storage admins is probably one of the most popular conversations, according to Vigil. Storage admins are wanting more management for container storage interface plugins and to help them get more intelligence about their storage estate versus speeds and feeds. So one of the key conversations Dell EMC is having with customers is around capability.

One service Dell EMC is offering to address storage needs offers is CloudIQ, which is like a health tracker for one’s storage estate, according to Vigil. It gives statistics on capacity trending and performance trending, and it uses AI to predict capacity spikes or performance anomalies.

“It’s really an awesome tool for our customers, because customers that use that are able to resolve issues in their environment three times faster than customers that don’t,” Vigil stated. “The conversation is more about, ‘How do I use the storage array in my environment? What ecosystems am I supporting so it works with all the other stuff that I have to deal with?'”

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