I’m back from a fantastic event in Brussels where we showcased our end-to-end technology capabilities and engaged in conversations with regional stakeholders.
Specifically, our annual Dell Solutions Summit, comprised of four events for IT professionals, channel partners, CXOs / IT executives, media and industry analysts, demonstrated how our offerings help customers transform and accelerate their organizations.
It was a packed agenda and I had the pleasure of participating in all of the events and engaging in a range of discussions, also joined by our founder and CEO Michael Dell.
What struck me from these conversations was a shared sense of renewed enthusiasm for the transformational capabilities of technology. It was in the event title itself: solutions. Our belief is that no business problem is too big or too small that it cannot be solved with technology.
"Dell's foray into research clearly designed to establish it as an IT innovator as well as a scale/efficiency player," Simon Robinson of 451 Research group said on Twitter.
We're seeing customers across a variety of sectors including government, commerce, finance, education and healthcare investing in technology to help address their most pressing IT needs, signalling this enthusiasm and a world that can be improved with technology.
Some of the other trends discussed, also aligned with the event themes, included:
- Mobility has completely transformed the way people interact with the world around them, in turn also transforming today's enterprise computing landscape. However, sometimes user expectations do not align with business or IT requirements. Our integrated, end-to-end portfolio addresses this by taking a holistic approach that covers all aspects of mobility, while removing complexity, risk and cost.
- No one needs reminding of the strategic importance of information security. “It’s always a good sign when the company leader of a multifaceted firm calls out security, so I was pleased to hear Michael Dell position security as one of four core pillars in Dell’s over-arching vision,” said attendee Duncan Brown. Threats are real and consequences are dire. Our approach to IT security ties together the often splintered aspects of IT security into one, integrated solution, capable of sharing insights across an organization.
- Forces like cloud computing, mobility, big data, internet of things and software-defined are compelling businesses to re-examine their approaches to creating, storing, moving and analyzing information. We're seeing a combination of traditional and new IT approaches from our customers, so we're focused on helping them understand how their technology choices can scale in line with future business growth and opportunity.
- IT organizations are focusing more on enabling on-demand access to applications and services, and delivering bottom-line results, and less on the procurement and management of systems. Along with this shift, IT executives are charting a path to private, public and hybrid cloud environments. “Dell is also being innovative in its enterprise cloud strategies. It is providing the reference architectures, proof of concepts and server technologies to its system integrators to do the cloud implementation for customers,” said ComputerWeekly’s Archana Venkatraman after attending this event. We believe that cloud represents both the natural evolution of the data center and the future of IT service delivery that can only be achieved through a balance of guidance, choice and simplicity.
- With our one anniversary as a private company fast approaching on October 29th, the focus on these core trends gave us a chance to demonstrate the transformational work that’s underway at Dell, the quality of our end-to-end solutions and the renewed energy and spirit across the company.
If you were unable to join us in Brussels, then I’d encourage you to hear more about the insights shared by following the conversations that happened over the duration of the event.