Better Together is more than just a slogan for how the Dell Technologies businesses work together; it also describes the relationships we strive for with our customers and partners. These relationships were on full display this month as 13,500 of us came together at Dell EMC World 2017.
The opening keynotes drove home that Digital Transformation and IT Transformation were imperatives for all customers. IT organizations are being challenged to reduce data center costs while at the same time, driving business innovation. Increasingly, that means that IT will become the business rather than simply running the business. Digital Transformation represents tremendous challenges and opportunities for our customers, and it was clear that customers were far more open to transformation this year than in past years. Dell EMC continues to demonstrate leadership in helping our customers down the path of business transformation, and our customer success stories demonstrate the real reason that Dell EMC is at the top of customer lists when they think of business transformation.
Two notable customers that were recognized with IT Transformation REALIZED awards during Dell EMC World represent what is achievable when customers commit to implementing their transformation plans.
Molina Healthcare deployed a new dedicated converged infrastructure built on Vblock 740 and VMAX All Flash storage. Dell EMC Services helped the organization consolidate its core call center and claims processing applications onto a single platform, and planned and executed the migration. Molina also realized a 60 percent reduction in data center floor space and energy required to support the application environments, a 99.999 percent uptime on mission-critical telco environments and a 300 percent increase in total phone capacity.
Express Scripts is deploying its cloud on Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud built on VxBlock, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware vRealize Suite with vCloud Air. Express Scripts is also leveraging Pivotal Labs to transform how they develop and deploy applications and has modeled its own labs after those at Pivotal. Dell EMC Services also helped Express Scripts build a roadmap for IT Transformation, create new IT operating model roles and processes for service lifecycle management, and implement financial management for IT service costing.
The parallels between these two examples are clear. Technology plays a key enabling role, but transformation is about far more than technology. Significant organizational and process changes must be undertaken. Change is hard, and I think organizational change is best thought of as a shared journey between the customer (who are experts in their business) and Dell EMC professional services (who are experts in guiding customers along a path blazed by earlier pioneers). The conclusion: Transformation is definitely Better Together.
Much of the news reporting on Dell EMC World was deservedly focused on impressive product announcements:
- Introducing a series of single processor hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances that pushes the cost of acquiring HCI appliances to as low as $25,000.
- The 14th Generation of our PowerEdge Servers configured with NVMe storage that will soon become a key component of our Vscale Architecture.
- On the storage front, we previewed Project Nautilus, an effort to optimize storing and analyzing high volumes of streaming data; and added faster VMAX storage arrays and higher capacity Unity arrays, along with updates to our XtremeIO X2, ScaleIO and Isilon storage offerings.
- Last but not least, we unveiled a new family of data protection appliances that is 10 times faster than previous offerings.
While the technology announcements were amazing, to me the real magic (David Blaine performance notwithstanding) is giving IT organizations back the time they need to focus on adding value to the business. Which brings me back to Better Together.
I look back on the hundreds of individual customer and partner meetings at Dell EMC World as part of our ongoing commitment to better transform the way IT infrastructure is acquired, deployed and operated over the infrastructure lifecycle. Every customer meeting is a learning opportunity. The same is true for our many meetings with partners such as Red Hat, Cisco, Brocade, Hortonworks and SAP.
That, my friends, is what business transformation REALIZED sounds like.