“Dell is innovating on platforms, standards and products”

The direct business model today is synonymous with Dell. But, technology innovation from Dell? Not much, you would think. However, the fact is that Dell has around 3500 engineers engaged in R&D and about 300 at the company’s center in India.

Speaking to Priya Padmanabhan about the company's plans, Kevin Kettler, CTO, Dell Inc, said that though Dell is not very well known for its R&D, it was making contributions around evolving standards, product level and platform level innovations.

Dell recently expanded its relationship with AMD for a new server and desktop line of products? What is your strategy around AMD?

We’ve actually been working with AMD for seven years. We usually do long range planning and discussions on technologies required by customers. Based on this, we translate the requirements into a set of products with features and functions, which is what silicon companies work on.

As AMD began to hone its technology capabilities around Opteron, we began to explore in a broader sense what we need to look. With partners, we consider not just the technology itself but also the technology’s sustainability.

AMD has moved into several of the product families. Their chips are very attractive for a lot of products that are of leadership quality. We also spend time finding out how the technology is going to map out beyond the product itself. Besides, we have also looked at the volume of products AMD could produce for Dell to make sure infrastructure and quality requirements are in place. All these are needed for a high volume supplier to Dell.

Dell has been seeing declining revenues in the last few quarters. What are you doing to in terms of technology and products to rev up your top-line?

We made an announcement recently about revamping our product line-ups. Our Server line is in its ninth generation. We have revamped industrial design with cutting edge innovation, and performance and feature attributes. We recently announced the addition of AMD chips. We will play a big role in a year and a half. We have made some investments around customer experience. The impact of all this may not be evident now but you will see the results soon.

As a company, Dell is known more for its marketing-savvy rather than for its technology. What kind of innovation are you bringing on?

When you talk about innovation in technology, there are different stages. In the early part of our architecture, we seek out partners doing Silicon and operating systems. Dell then delivers at the platform level. We have made significant investment around system-level architecture and platform architectures. We have products at the architectural level for the 2012 time frame.

We don’t do silicon or operating systems but work with partners to develop a product roadmap around how technologies will map into our products. Then we work with Silicon and operating systems providers to drive those requirements. Ideally, their roadmaps begin to exactly map onto our roadmaps. Then we are able to deliver products based on the technologies they have.

The second phase of innovation is where our teams around the world work on development, platforms and solutions development across product families. On the product side, we work with Silicon providers on platforms and we intersect with the System integrator to have a board ready to accept that silicon, software or OS. This is to drive the technology leadership in the market in conjunction with our product. When we decide what needs to happen architecturally, partners help us with the building blocks. We then bring the platform level developments like mechanical design, serviceability, thermals, Electro magnetic interference (EMI) and acoustics, industrial design of the platform, how it is packaged, how it looks and feels and put in a box.

The features and functions we use to integrate would be unique to our individual products. That gets driven at the product level.

How is Dell leveraging on the India development center for R&D?

The team in India plays a strong role in helping in productizing some of these features we have developed.

We are enhancing the team in India that looks at base product development. We have put in place extensive testing capabilities in Bangalore. The team in India also does testing on virtual machines.

Can you give a few instances of the innovations you have engineered in the recent past?

In the last several years Dell has been involved in the standards area for the Display Port.

The electronics involved in the desktops and notebooks and flat panels are different. Though they have the same graphics engine and the same piece of glass, in between the interfaces are different. We realized that the interfaces were running out of steam and nearing the end of the technology lifecycle and they needed to go to high-density panels/displays and a new interface. We had a choice of implementing three standards separately, but then we decided on a single high quality interface. We came up with the concept, and worked in the labs and also asked companies including competitor to join Dell to drive this as a display interface standard across the three display types. Now, we have developed a specification and moved it to an organization called VESA that will drive this as an industry specification. For me, it is exciting because we conceptualized the technology, did the base level work around that, formed the industry group and influenced the supply base to deliver it. This will be ready by 2007 delivery.

At the product level, we have worked around the disc drive format that directly addresses customer issues in the area of RAID storage arrays. If you looked at the industry a few years back, a lot of companies were developing RAID controllers. Each of them had developed a format for how data was laid out on the RAID array. Customers did not buy the RAID controller because of the way data was laid out or formatted. What was happened was that customers would buy a different RAID controller and hook up a different RAID disc array thinking it would work. What happens is that usually the RAID controller would not recognize the data on the disc and would tell the user to reformat the disc since it appears blank. When this happens it is a serious issue. This was happening across the industry.

One of our engineers came up with a new way to look at formatting and he wrote a specification to redefine how to format data for a RAID controller disc. Then we formed a group involving controller vendors and OEMs and now it is a ratified standard.

We have developed capabilities around thermal management, audio controller systems and electro-magnetic interference (EMI) and heat sink technologies. We have leadership in the heat dissipation space and have generated patents in that area and also around software techniques to managing these issues. We also innovate around industrial design, system management and software management.

Why did Dell decide to support the Blu-Ray standard over HD-DVD?

Dell has been working for the last five years in this area before it was called Blu-Ray. Companies that were doing that then were Toshiba, Sony and others that are now developing drives on Blu-Ray. Dell doesn’t develop the laser technology involved in Blu-Ray but looks closely and that was an early indicator on the differences between the technologies. I would like to think of HD-DVD as an evolutionary technology that is based on DVD processing techniques. The density of bytes you can store on an HD-DVD disc is much lower than what you can store on the new technology-Blu-ray. So fundamentally one is much higher capacity; that extra Giga bytes is a significant difference especially if you look at high-definition encoding of content.

Blu-Ray also gives a unique customer experience not just in content but also in quality of content and adds a new layer of interactivity on the disc. Software technology will potentially do things like more interactivity. Blue-ray allows this interactivity layer and while the movie is playing without disrupting the playback of movie one can switch audio and one need not stop a movie to jump frames. It can also tie back with live chats and Internet feeds. All this can create new usage models.

What is your strategy around virtualization?

The industry is shifting from single to multi-core processors. We want to take this to the I/O sub-system. One option is to partition a multi-core system—and dedicate a processor core to a specific guest OS. AMD and Intel are accelerating on the code acceleration.

Perhaps the biggest change will be in the lower cost of implementing a virtualized system. What will be interesting in the coming years is to watch how software licensing will need to change and how virtualization will lead to new ways to package and distribute software.

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