Dell Technologies: Connecting with Vmware

Dell Technologies provides a portfolio stacked full of products and services to help IT professionals overcome the challenges they are facing. 

Challenges

Much of the new Dell's offering centers on on-premises infrastructure – the servers and storage that equip the data centers of the largest companies and governments on the planet. However, Dell realizes that its enterprise customer base is largely in a state of transformation – the digital transformation that promises to turn such behemoths into customer-focused, software-empowered organizations. Dell's challenge, however, is connecting the dots: how this storage device or that server might facilitate a customer-focused transformation among its largest customers? The 'digital transformation' terminology splashes the marketing of everything from Dell Finance to the company's impressive partner program and even leads the messaging on the Dell Technologies home page. But in spite of all the marketing dollars, the end result remains a disconnect between the transformation-centric marketing messages and the hardware-centric, bits-and-bytes value propositions of the gear on offer.

In 2019, Dell Technologies commissioned a study of 4,600 global business leaders and their progress on the digital transformation journey. The Digital Transformation Index II found that 78% of respondents believe that transformation should be more widespread throughout their organization and over half are worried about meeting customer demands over the next five years. The digital landscape has seen an increasing focus on privacy as well as regulations surrounding it such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is made more evident in the lack of consumer trust in companies and a demand for transparency and accountability following headlines of opaque usages of personal data. 

Initiatives

Dell Technologies provides a portfolio stacked full of products and services to help IT professionals overcome the challenges they are facing. From end-users to applications to security, cloud, infrastructure, services, and consumption—Dell Technologies can future proof your digital future and preserve your business goals. This is now possible because the Dell Tech umbrella includes Dell EMC, VMware, RSA, Pivotal, Virtustream, Secureworks, and so much more. Dell Technologies continues to work hard to develop unique solutions that fit your needs. Focusing on scalability, flexibility, speed, and lowering costs means that IT professionals can become more proactive at their jobs. Implementing new technologies without the worry of increasing downtime is the key to a successful digital transformation. Together, Dell Technologies and connection can work with you to develop a solution that meets your needs. The company's experts will work with you to correctly size, price, and deploy your solution from start to finish. 

Result

There is one bright light in the extensive Dell Technologies product line that promises to connect the vendor's infrastructure story to its customers' transformation efforts and it is Pivotal. Pivotal is the company that largely drives cloud foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service that is cloud-native, container-centric, and DevOps-friendly – while the rest of the Dell Technologies story is data center focused, hardware and virtual machine-centric, and places the cloud into the hybrid IT context as VMware extends into public clouds. On top of Pivotal's open-source offering, furthermore, Pivotal offers support and services that help bring its customers into the rapid delivery, innovative, DevOps world – essential for the success of any digital transformation initiative. In spite of the relative immaturity of available container technology, Pivotal customers are showing real success leveraging it in their digital transformation initiatives. "Pivotal, and the culture behind it – it would be great if it infused everything," says Thomas Fredell, Chief Product Officer at Merrill Corporation, a Pivotal customer. "If you get that right, everything else will fall into place." If they are able to spread the modern, transformative elements of Pivotal's approach to the market across all its product lines, then it may very well nail the digital transformation story. Only time will tell. Instead of tying compute and storage together, either via specific cloud instance types or via hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) offerings, DriveScale disaggregates compute and storage resources, automatically recomposing them for modern workloads via an all-software, policy-driven approach. This automated mix and match approach to infrastructure both provides greater flexibility to dynamic and varied workloads as well as supporting Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI), an essential building block to implementing an IT strategy that supports the dynamic needs of customers. SDI is thus an essential building block for digital transformation.