Data Capital: What’s That?

Digital Transformation is creating massive opportunities for technology sellers but customer success is dependent on the data

Your customers, their competitors, even the media all know that digital transformation is here, but how does the modern company succeed with it? The hype behind this term, the underlying buzzwords (AI, Big Data, IoT, and Digital Experiences just to name a few) are looked at as the way to lock in long-term success as we move into the 4th industrial age. Yet without a corresponding focus on data, their implementations will be limited or potentially fail.

Why? Simply put data powers digital transformation. We call this data capital which is the value created from leveraging data to drive services or derive insights. The most advanced use cases are heavily reliant on having substantial amounts of data to make sense of. Take building an autonomous vehicle, these companies will need fleets driving hour upon hours and millions of miles before they achieve their goal. Think about the size of the undertaking, but also realize that just a single vehicle in this fleet can generate up to 100TB of data in a single day of driving. If the auto manufacturer hasn’t invested in a data platform that can support the kind of volume we’re talking about they will be limited in their ability to analyze that data.

Organizations are struggling under the weight of their data

Most of the companies you work with have a sizeable data footprint already, and if it hasn’t been consolidated into a unified data lake then that data will have limited applicability and value across their business.

This is your first opportunity: Have a conversation with your customers about how they can leverage Dell EMC Isilon and ECS to consolidate their workloads onto a massively scalable data platform to save money and enable this data to be put to use.

Keeping up with data growth

Unlike traditional companies, those who have gone digital begin to thrive on valuable data and therefore require more and more of it. Over time as more data is accumulated, it can provide more accurate predictions, access to broad digital services, and be used to automate core functions. That all sounds good, but the corresponding costs of maintaining large data sets with aging infrastructure can weaken the position of the company.

Your second opportunity: Help organizations deal with massive data growth by eliminating much of the operational costs and move organizations to the Isilon platform that can be managed by policies.

Extracting value from data

Assuming an organization has gotten this far they now need to figure out how to use the data. As digital transformation has expanded out of technology-driven companies this means assembling a new skill set for most organizations. If they struggle to get the infrastructure in place they won’t even make it to the point of developing complex business logic or enabling their business with an IoT device.

Your third opportunity: Enable your customers to build on top of Dell EMC Unstructured Data Solutions that work with the leading data analytics solutions, support real-time streaming analytics, simplify workflows, and run cloud-native apps.

Help your customers get the most from their Data Capital

Seize the opportunity to be a trusted advisor and help organizations make their digital transformation quickly and safely. As our own sellers have seen, focus on telling the Data Capital story with customers and break out from the bottom commodity storage conversation and focus on delivering value to the organization.

To find out more about how Data Capital can help you win more deals and support your customers in their journey:

About the Author: Varun Chhabra

Varun Chhabra is Senior Vice President of Infrastructure (ISG) and Telecom Marketing at Dell. He has been with Dell since 2015. Prior to joining Dell, Varun worked at Microsoft, where he held a variety of product marketing roles supporting the Intelligent Cloud (Microsoft Azure and Windows Server) business, as well as at Oracle, where he was a software developer. Varun has an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.