We’ve seen reports of major changes happening within some of the largest players in our industry recently. While it’s not unusual for organizations to make business changes from time to time, major upheaval and organizational restructuring – along with accompanying uncertainty – can take a serious toll on the business, both in terms of partner and customer confidence, and employee morale. I’ve worked in quite a few different companies, and navigated through some very challenging times, and I know that when the company loses its focus and becomes more intent on serving Wall Street than its customers and employees, it’s not uncommon for significant changes to take place. This is when companies lose their best, highest quality people rather quickly, which has an extreme effect on all aspects of the business, most notably on how customers can be served and supported.
Certainly Dell has undergone changes in the past year, and as we approach the one-year anniversary of our privatization, we’ve remained laser focused on our customers. As deliberate and specific moves have been made to change Dell from a PC company to an end-to-end IT company, we have consistently used our customers as the one driving force for how we evolve our business. In fact, our software portfolio is so well aligned to the needs of our customers that we can fulfill about 70-80 percent of most IT needs right now.
So, what really drives us? Helping our customers win with our solutions. This should be the key business driver for all IT providers, but, in reality, this doesn’t happen. I’ve traveled around the world recently, meeting with Dell Software customers and partners. I’ve heard stories of how our single focus on addressing their needs has helped them achieve efficiencies, innovate, and grow with changing needs, and I want to share a few examples:
- International Relief and Development (IRD), a leading global humanitarian organization, has successfully leveraged Dell SonicWALL NSA and TZ series firewalls to safely perform its work around the world. The company saved $1 million in operational costs through fast and reliable connection and data delivery. Three thousand users in 47 counties are protected by Dell SonicWALL, which has allowed relief activities to continue unabated since 2003. View the IRD video here.
- Denver Museum of Nature and Science is using the Dell KACE K1000 Systems Management Appliance to deliver the highest levels of endpoint security, while clearing major “Internet of Things” (IoT) obstacles caused by a rise in the number and types of devices connected to their network.
- Housing Authority of the Cherokee Nation (HACN) needed a reliable, efficient and easy-to-use backup and recovery solution to ensure delivery of critical services. With Dell AppAssure, HACN now can manage backup, replication and recovery from a single, easy-to-use interface. HACN can recover an entire virtual server in 10-15 minutes, has reduced IT workload by 30–50 percent, and cut storage costs with a 1:3 compression ratio. View the HACN video here.
- Locala Community Partnerships, a U.K. healthcare provider, wanted to serve more patients and improve clinician efficiency by giving staff real-time access to records from health centers, schools and homes. Locala engaged Dell Managed Services to design, deploy and manage a Dell UCC solution, with which staff now can access email, calendars and patient data from almost anywhere using their laptops or mobile devices, and Microsoft Office 365. Employees also can utilize Microsoft Lync for video conferences from their desktops. Patient records are protected with Dell SonicWALL firewall technology, and fast performance is facilitated by Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell PowerVault storage and Dell Networking switches.
In addition to these customer stories, recent award wins have shown us further evidence that Dell is putting together a software solution portfolio offering the most recent technology developments, enabling our customers to transform, inform, connect and protect their organizations in ways that uniquely fit their requirements. Dell’s Unified Communications Command Suite just received the TMCNet/Internet Telephony Unified Product of the Year award, and Dell AppAssure DR6000 was named a 2014 Backup Product of the Year by Storage Magazine. Additionally, Dell Software’s security and compliance solutions were recognized as finalists in 13 categories of the InfoSecurity Global Excellence Awards.
We’re passionate about providing our customers with innovative software solutions that address their business and IT needs, and we believe it should be industry standard to consider how every change – whether to business models, portfolios, channel, services, financing or support – will affect them. I’m proud of our hard work, and of the recognition our team has received in the last couple of months. By listening to our customers and staying focused on their needs, we know we’re staying on the right track.
If you have any interesting stories about the value you have seen from a strategy focusing squarely on customers, I would love to hear from you at dave_hansen@dell.com.