Company Updates

Meet New Dell Technologies IoT GM Ray O’Farrell

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At Dell Technologies we have a vision for how the new world of IoT comes together – how our businesses can help drive human progress by transforming IoT into IQT or the IQ of Things.

To enable this vision, we unveiled a new IoT division that will help our customers navigate across all the Dell Technologies’ brands. This new IoT division will be led by VMware CTO Ray O’Farrell, and I caught up with him just before today’s event to ask what it means for him and his teams at Dell and VMware.

Ray O'Farrell, Dell IoT

Congratulations on your new role. How has your work as VMware’s CTO prepared you for it?

While I am currently the VMware CTO, most of my time at VMware was spent running product development teams and this has required me to partner closely with customers and leverage a broad ecosystem as we take products to market. As CTO, one of my main focus areas is on long-term technology research, innovation and market trends. I have also been responsible for ensuring VMware’s successful partnerships across the industry with a focus on the Dell Technologies family of businesses. I plan to leverage these these experiences as I take on this additional responsibility of general manager for Dell Technologies’ IoT division.

Can you tell us more about your new responsibilities?

Our new IoT division will leverage the strength across all of Dell Technologies family of businesses to ensure we deliver the right solution – in combination with our vast partner ecosystem. To prepare for that, I have been working with a small team across Dell Technologies and have been interviewing customers, partners and IoT experts to help build this division.

We’ll continue to do research that will help us prepare for building future IoT products and solutions, while also aligning current offerings across the Dell Technologies businesses to deliver unified solutions to our customers and ecosystem.

What are you most excited about as you look forward?

I am excited about the fourth industrial revolution that we are embarking into. As Jeremy Burton has noted, it’s a revolution that will impact every company in every industry. I’m equally excited to be leading this new Dell Technologies division. Given our rich history in the edge computing market, we have an outstanding opportunity to meet customer needs and help them deploy integrated IoT systems with greater ease.

What are the leadership traits the IoT market requires?

The most important trait is listening – it is vitally important to understand the business need and impact your customer is trying achieve by leveraging IoT. The second most important trait is spending time with our partners, many IoT solutions are vertical within a given industry requiring you to partner deeply with the experts in that specific field.

Get to know another side of O’Farrell by watching the latest edition of our Meet the Leaders video series:

About the Author: Laura Pevehouse

Laura Pevehouse was profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine and named an AdWeek’s TweetFreak Five to Follow. She has been part of the Dell organization for more than 15 years in various corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, marketing, branding, social media and online communication roles. From 2014-2018, Laura was Chief Blogger/Editor-in-Chief for Direct2DellEMC and Direct2Dell, Dell’s official corporate blog that she help launch in 2007. She is now a member of the Dell Technologies Chairman Communications team. Earlier in her Dell career she focused on Global Commercial Channels and US Small and Medium Business public relations as part of the Global Communications team. Prior to that, she was responsible for global strategy in social media and community management, as well as marcom landing pages, as a member of Dell’s Global SMB Marketing, Brand and Creative team. When she was part of Dell’s Global Online group, Laura provided internal consulting that integrated online and social media opportunities with a focus on Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. She managed the home page of Dell.com, one of the top 500 global web sites in Alexa traffic rank, and first brought web feeds and podcasts to the ecommerce site. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in the virtual world Second Life. Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.
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