You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:
- A compelling vision – Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
- Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
- Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
- Cool products, including:
- Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
- He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
- Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
- A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
- Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
- Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
- Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
- Dell's own plan – Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
- Having fun – Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!
Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth.
You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.