“We are the essential infrastructure company.” Spoken by our CEO Michael Dell at the recent Dell Technologies World, this quote neatly sums up all that Dell EMC stands for. To me, as well as to our many customers and partners who traveled to Las Vegas to immerse themselves in all things Dell Technologies, it was amazing to behold what a robust, well-oiled machine this company known to all as having started in a humble student dorm has become within a year of the highly inspiring, much-publicized integration of Dell and EMC.
A strategy built for success
The simple truth is that most mergers fail. The casualty rate for company combinations often ranks as high as 70 to 90 percent. Fortunately, this is clearly not the case with ours. Based on the vision that drove Michael Dell to embark on the biggest combination in IT history, Dell Technologies has emerged to become a technological powerhouse with the broadest offering in the market. From servers to storage to virtualization and beyond, we offer it all, and our product lines have been consciously designed to fit closely together, so as to share the same long-term strategy found within our proven mantra of ‘edge-core-cloud’.
This unity of vision and product focus also extends to our strategically aligned businesses: VMware, Pivotal, RSA, Virtustream and Secureworks. Anyone fortunate enough to witness VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s keynote in Las Vegas could not help but be impressed by his ability to capture the overarching story of how our companies complement one another, reinforcing his own ‘any device, any app, any cloud’ philosophy. The joint strategy at the heart of our four pillars of transformation (Digital, IT, Workforce, Security) model was clear throughout the event, as was the message that software-defined data centers (SDDC) are the future of any successful infrastructure strategy. Clearly, the pieces are coming together to form a more unified whole.
Latency is lethal
Of course, a conference like Dell Technologies World would not be complete without a number of major announcements, and this year’s edition was no exception. I have always had a weak spot for our high-end enterprise systems, and I was thrilled to discover the PowerMax, our new flagship enterprise storage product. By building Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning into the core of the NVME-enabled Dell EMC PowerMax enterprise-class All-Flash storage array, we are once again proving the point that intelligence must be included within storage systems themselves, not merely in the applications that run on top of them. The reason we constantly strive to make our storage arrays faster is simple: many of the new workloads we are confronted with – driven as they are by IoT, analytics, Machine Learning, etc. – insist on real-time access. Latency is the kiss of death to workloads such as these.
Accelerating to 5G
Something else that struck me during my stay in Las Vegas was the huge amount of attention given to telecom, another favorite spot of mine. Not only were Vodafone and Swisscom featured on the Dell Technologies World main stage, but Michael Dell himself spoke at length about the enormous impact 5G will have in accelerating developments in tomorrow’s IT. After all, you cannot introduce connected cars or driverless vehicles if you can’t rely on the bandwidth 5G promises. Data is the fuel that powers our rocket ship, and it’s obvious that it is also the new gold for telecom companies. As Mr. Dell said, 5G was not simply created to enable faster phone conversations. At its core, this next step in telco innovation serves to accelerate the exchange of data between those devices that are so crucial in collecting and analyzing data.
As both a Swiss citizen and Swisscom partner, I was extremely pleased to see our major telecom player receive the recognition of Titan Black Partner. Globally, there are only ten such Partners within the Dell EMC ecosystem, and Swisscom is the only Cloud Services Provider among them. I will elaborate on our partnership with Swisscom in one of my upcoming blogs.
Dell Technologies World is always the highlight of the year to anyone with a passion for data and information technologies. At this most recent edition it became clear once again that there is no end to the innovations to be found in the infrastructure space. For me, the greatest joy comes from seeing how customers are taking the technical advances we offer and turning them into groundbreaking applications that deliver on technology’s promise for helping to create a better world. That is the essence of Dell Technologies: we deliver a platform of possibility that allows our customers to realize a future made better through a combination of technology, vision, and good old fashion hard work. By innovating today, we influence tomorrow.
