In an exclusive interview with Express Computer, John Roese, Global CTO, Dell Technologies speaks about how Dell Technologies has made cloud and digital transformation two of its four key focuses since the company’s inception
How are enterprises today using Dell services, and if customers think about differentiation and innovation, how is Dell helping to drive that?
Dell offers capabilities in managed services to create hosted platform level capabilities for significant customer initiatives. Dell’s project Apex will allow as a service utility commercial models for Dell infrastructure and VMware project Dimension that allows for managed SDDC environments. Dell also has a strong portfolio of consulting services for standing up modern infrastructure platforms and our client solutions team has capabilities for field repair and installation.
Small incremental versus big bang approach to cloud adoption migration, which one works better?
From the work we have done with our large customer base and from the industry at large, we have found that neither approach is better in and of itself. Those that have the greatest success are the companies that align their adoption plans with the realities of their current business and expectations of future needs. For some organisations, they are ready to transition from a legacy IT model to a fully cloud one today. For others, a paced approach will give them the best results through improvements in key areas while not disrupting existing IT services. It is important for customers to understand what they want to achieve and weigh the pros and cons, examining variables such as flexibility, efficiency, economics and performance. No matter what, Dell does believe enterprises will evolve their IT strategies into a multi-cloud future, with on-prem and multiple off-prem cloud partners. Dell will be with them to enable their transformation journey, no matter which pace fits them the best.
The biggest challenge for digital transformation and adopting cloud computing is people and culture. The fear of change and resistance to the unknown is what prevents organisations to digitally transform. How is Dell helping its customers and partners on this lines?
Dell Technologies has made cloud and digital transformation two of our four key focuses since Dell Technologies came into being. We see many of our customers faced with internal challenges to meeting their goals. It is not simply fear but lack of skills and experience, confidence in being sure you can deploy workloads and systems that will work and meet the demands of the business. To address this, Dell Technologies has focused our development and services teams on the creation of offers that help companies achieve these transformation goals. Dell delivers foundation technologies in virtualisation, Kubernetes, security, storage and compute that simplify infrastructure development and can be trusted to work and importantly will be supported by Dell. Many of our customers need more support or are looking to move faster, so we have developed ‘Ready Solutions’ for use cases in analytics, AI and cloud that help customers get up and running with little effort. Further, we have services that help customer transform applications and develop new ones. We help our customers get through their early roadblocks and as they gain internal competencies, their transformations will accelerate. We are ready to be their partner no matter where they are in their evolution.
What is the one big business focus area that tech and cloud will enable or drive enterprises in 2021?
We believe 5G, Edge and autonomous will be a central focus for enterprises in 2021. These combined with cloud, AI ML/DL, security and new semiconductor capabilities will present progress in these areas.
