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Dell unleashes innovation to ''Transform, Connect, Inform, and Protect'' businesses in digital era

Michael Dell at Dell World announced how Dell is planning to move forward with its new positioning of becoming an end-to-end enterprise solutions provider

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Anil Chopra

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This time’s Dell World was special in many ways. It was special because it was the first anniversary of Dell going private, and the energy and enthusiasm could be seen amongst all Dell employees, right from top leadership down. It was special because the company announced how it’s planning to move forward with its new positioning of becoming an end-to-end enterprise solutions provider—A move it made after having acquired around 40 companies in the enterprise space over the past decade or so.

The excitement was quite visible in Michael Dell’s voice as he opened Dell World with his keynote. He talked about using technology to exponentially amplify people’s ideas to change the world and make it a better place to live. He talked about using technology to build better businesses, cure cancer, unlock secrets of the galaxy, instrument the world, or digitally transform industries.

We stand at the edge of infinite possibility, where unprecedented computing resources will soon be everywhere and what was once the domain of only the world’s largest and wealthiest enterprises will soon be within reach of everyone,” said Michael.

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The transformation vision of Michael Dell clearly set the tone not only for the event, but also for the things to come from Dell as a company in the future. It’s a natural outcome of the heavy investments made by the company for its acquisitions.

Commenting on completing one full year of privatization, Michael said “Being private allows us to focus 100% of our energy on creating success for you—our customers and partners.” “We’re focusing on a future that is far beyond the next quarter or the year, and I don’t know of a company that is better aligned with its customers and partners than Dell,” he added.

Dell’s Four Customer Imperatives

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The conversations with customers, according to Michael Dell are really changing. Customers don’t just want to add a digital component to an existing business model. They want wholesale digital invention to take place to unleash their businesses into the digital era. Keeping this in mind, Dell has defined four customer imperatives and aligned all its solutions across them. These are 'Transform, Connect, Inform, and Protect'.

  1. The Transform Imperative

This is all about data center transformation, and Michael took the example of Dell’s own solution centers as proof of the pudding. These 15 solution centers located in 11 countries around the world allow customers to run their workloads on a cloud based model. Michael highlighted how their high velocity cloud can move 8 million packets a second, and a single server that can manage the bridge traffic of a medium sized city like Austin. These centers serve as a key learning point for customers on how compute resources can scale instantaneously as workload increases and how management SW can automatically provision a new VM to meet that demand.

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We’re moving beyond SDDC to Software based Data Centers,” added Michael. This one word difference brings a sea of change into the data center. It eliminates information silos and moves to a future where the only difference between compute, storage, and network is the software running on that box. This makes for easy upgrades and provides an enormous pool of computing resources at your command.

  1. The Connect Imperative

The other end of power efficient data centers is the world of connected devices, which is where the connect imperative comes in. It goes beyond PCs and smartphones and into IoT to enable digital transformation. Dell’s digital services come into play here, which leverage the SMAC stack to engage with customers, employees and partners to gain a competitive edge by converting physical touch points into digital ones. A key enabler of this is Dell’s Kace K1000 systems management appliance, which provides greater visibility across the entire network, by moving beyond PCs and smartphones and into agentless devices like sensors so that everything on the network can be managed from the same pane of glass.

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Dell also continues to remain bullish about its PC business and feels that the PC is definitely not dead. On the contrary, Dell believes that the PC is becomes increasingly strategic as a highly distributed, powerful, and local computing resource. It’s the hub of the IoT. “We’re in the PC business to stay,'' said Michael, and showed IDC’s US data for the most recent quarter. It revealed that unit shipments for the overall industry grew by 4.3%, and for Dell, they grew by 19.7%. “Without Dell, this 4.3% growth goes down to 0.2%!” Michael said proudly and thanked his customers and partners for their support.

  1. The Inform Imperative

The multi-fold growth in the number of nodes due to IoT is lots of data, which is where Dell brings in its third imperative of 'Inform'. It’s not just about generating huge amounts of data, but more about the outcomes from it. Dell announced its advanced analytics services to turn data into actionable insights, and social media services to build, measure and monetize social media programs.

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Another interesting technology is StatsOff, which is a powerful analytics engine for different industries, like healthcare where Dell already has a stronghold. In healthcare, StatsOff can turn data into insights like how to improve patient outcomes, prevent surgical infections, decrease re-admissions, predict the list of prostate cancer, and much more.

  1. The Protect Imperative

The last imperative for Dell is actually a concern for every customer--security. Dell claims that its approach to security is built on three foundational imperatives—protect the enterprise, comply with internal governance policies and regulations, and enable businesses to thrive. The line-up of solutions from Dell therefore helps enable all these imperatives. A key thing that Dell highlighted was the importance of bringing data analytics and security together. With Dell observing 80 billion events per day, it’s a big opportunity to bring the two together and be truly context aware—to know what’s out there, what’s coming, and what to do about it.

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Cloud Cuts Across all Imperatives

Dell’s cloud strategy runs through all four imperatives, so several initiatives were announced around it. These portray Dell as a comprehensive cloud solution provider, covering private cloud solutions, management of multiple cloud environments, and cloud services delivery. The company has formed strategic tie-ups with Microsoft, VMware, and RedHat and announced some compelling private cloud solutions around them.

For managing cloud environments, Dell announced its Cloud Manager, which supports more than 20 leading cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google, and many others.

A public beta of Dell’s Cloud Marketplace was also formally announced at the event, which is meant to make it easy for IT organizations to offer cloud services to their internal customers. With everything available from a single pane of glass, this appears to be a compelling proposition for organizations. It will enable them to choose the right cloud platform, model, and infrastructure at their own budget and within their own environment.

Overall, the new Dell story sounds very promising, of a company that has moved from being a products company into an end to end solutions provider.

The author was hosted in Austin by Dell