Meet New Dell Technologies IoT GM Ray O’Farrell

By Laura Pevehouse, Chief Blogger / Editor-in-Chief

At Dell Technologies we have a vision for how the new world of IoT comes together – how our businesses can help drive human progress by transforming IoT into IQT or the IQ of Things.

To enable this vision, we unveiled a new IoT division that will help our customers navigate across all the Dell Technologies’ brands. This new IoT division will be led by VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell, and I caught up with him just before today’s event to ask what it means for him and his teams at Dell and VMware.

Congratulations on your new role. How has your work as VMware’s CTO prepared you for it?

While I am currently the VMware CTO, most of my time at VMware was spent running product development teams and this has required me to partner closely with customers and leverage a broad ecosystem as we take products to market. As CTO, one of my main focus areas is on long-term technology research, innovation and market trends. I have also been responsible for ensuring VMware’s successful partnerships across the industry with a focus on the Dell Technologies family of businesses. I plan to leverage these experiences as I take on this additional responsibility of general manager for Dell Technologies’ IoT division.

Can you tell us more about your new responsibilities?

Our new IoT division will leverage the strength across all of Dell Technologies family of businesses to ensure we deliver the right solution – in combination with our vast partner ecosystem. To prepare for that, I have been working with a small team across Dell Technologies and have been interviewing customers, partners and IoT experts to help build this division.

We’ll continue to do research that will help us prepare for building future IoT products and solutions, while also aligning current offerings across the Dell Technologies businesses to deliver unified solutions to our customers and ecosystem.

What are you most excited about as you look forward?

I am excited about the fourth industrial revolution that we are embarking into. As Jeremy Burton has noted, it’s a revolution that will impact every company in every industry. I’m equally excited to be leading this new Dell Technologies division. Given our rich history in the edge computing market, we have an outstanding opportunity to meet customer needs and help them deploy integrated IoT systems with greater ease.

What are the leadership traits the IoT market requires?

The most important trait is listening – it is vitally important to understand the business need and impact your customer is trying achieve by leveraging IoT. The second most important trait is spending time with our partners, many IoT solutions are vertical within a given industry requiring you to partner deeply with the experts in that specific field.

Get to know another side of O’Farrell by watching the latest edition of our Meet the Leaders video series:

About the Author: Dell Technologies