“Blueprints” for Change: Global Alliance Partners at Dell World and Beyond

One of my favorite things about Dell World is the chance to showcase our Global Alliance partnerships – and this year didn’t disappoint. Right from the opening session, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Michael Dell onstage for a lively discussion of the new solutions and investments Microsoft and Dell are jointly making, our Global Alliance partners left their mark.

No matter where I stood on the expo floor, I could see one of our partners – Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix, Nexenta, Cloudera, SanDisk – demonstrating our joint solutions, making new contacts as more than 8,000 conference attendees streamed through. Their webcasts and breakout sessions explored a range of topics, including hybrid cloud, storage strategy, and how technology enables business.

And these partnerships reach far beyond Dell World. Our Global Alliance partners are an integral part of the new Dell Blueprints initiative, which combines hardware, software and services to address common customer challenges and enable innovation. These are true solutions, powered by standardized reference architectures that are validated and flexible, comprehensive and easy to deploy. I hear the word “solutions” thrown around quite a bit. I’m happy to report that Dell is making solutions real with Blueprints.

The strength of Blueprints lies in the unparalleled breadth of its offerings. Blueprints serve up solutions for organizations of all sizes, in virtualization, UC&C, VDI, hybrid cloud – with many more on the way.

It’s our partnerships that make that variety possible. Dell’s joint solutions – with Microsoft, VMware, SAP, Nutanix, Cloudera – enable us to offer each customer a Blueprint designed to do exactly what they need.

Michael Dell nailed it in his opening keynote:

“Changing the world is hard work, and you can’t do it alone. It takes partnerships – sometimes, very deep and long partnerships.”

I’m excited to watch our partnerships deepen as we work together to meet our customers’ growing needs.

I spoke with The Cube at Dell World about the changing landscape of enterprise technology: big data, cloud, the Internet of Things – and of course Blueprints.

I’ll be writing more about Blueprints in the coming months. Follow @DellAlliances on Twitter to be the first to know!

About the Author: Armughan Ahmad

Armughan Ahmad serves as Vice President of Enterprise Solutions & Alliances for Dell. He leads solutions, systems engineering and alliance teams globally that deliver innovative business apps/workloads, Cloud, BigData and Software Based Data Center solutions for large enterprise, public institutions, small & medium business customers and partners. Prior to joining Dell, Armughan served as Vice President at Hewlett-Packard, where he led the growth of HP’s Enterprise group, delivering converged and secured infrastructure solutions through partner channels. Previously, Armughan held executive management roles at 3Com, Enterasys-Cabletron and other technology firms ranging from $10M start-up’s to $100bn large corporations delivering hardware, software and services solutions for vertical industries globally. Armughan is a graduate of Sheridan College, where he studied computer science. He serves on numerous non-profits boards as a passionate promoter of third world economic trade and development initiatives.