We’re serious when we say ‘open, capable and affordable.’ On April 7, I had the pleasure of co-hosting, along with Eric Velfre, Praveen Asthana and Jan Uhrich, more than 70 EMEA press and industry analysts at a London event to announce our $1 billion investment in the delivery of solutions, services and cloud-based delivery options that continue enabling customers to achieve optimal efficiencies for their business. Read Lionel Menchaca’s post to learn more.
Having been at Dell for 13.5 years, I’ve seen first-hand the tremendous transformation taking place at Dell right now – and it’s exciting to see how we are delivering on our promise to bring the right services and solutions to our customers. This newest investment is certainly only the tip of the iceberg as we continue to move forward with our vision.
We had overwhelmingly positive feedback from event attendees following this announcement – but, equally important, we discussed some of the key drivers contributing to our transformation:
Our capabilities are growing: we’ve made a number of acquisitions over the past year allowing us to increase our capabilities and build on our foundational core strengths. As a result, we heard from representatives at KACE, SecureWorks and Compellent talk about the success of our company integrations:
- With the explosion of increased data volume, rapidly changing IT requirements and traditional data storage impediments, we’ve fulfilled two important objectives within our storage strategy through the Compellent acquisition – one is the availability of an enterprise scale storage platform, and the second is the addition of new, industry-leading IP to our portfolio.
- The consumerization of IT trend that is a rapidly growing force that can no longer be ignored. As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, requiring constant access to information anywhere and at anytime, IT departments are challenged to ensure their users are compliant, secure and manageable. With KACE technologies, we have extended our leadership in the desktop/laptop market by giving customers a platform to centrally manage all of their end-point devices – no matter what form factor or OS – in an easier and less expensive way.
- With SecureWorks, we’ve extended the BPO and ITO capabilities of Dell Services to include powerful managed security services. We are focused on developing and executing an “IT as a service” strategy and look to bring productized, cloud-based, value-add services – including security services – to the information security space.
We offer a breadth of choice to customers: during a partner panel with Citrix, VMware, Symantec, Commvault, Juniper, Intel and Microsoft, we discussed how we partner together to offer the broadest range of choices for our customers, designed to meet their unique needs.
We’re different from our competitors: what differentiates our model from the competition is our focus on making solutions that are not only open, capable and affordable, but repeatable. We do this by designing for the mid-market – this design point allows us to scale more efficiently so we can make our solutions accessible to a wider audience.
The industry is bought in: we’ve been working hard to communicate our strategic point of view to press, analysts, customers, partners and other stakeholders. Following this most recent milestone in delivering differentiated solutions to our customers worldwide, attendees had a lot to say, but Chris Ingle at IDC summarized the viewpoints nicely:
“Over the last 12 months Dell has worked to grow its services and software capabilities to complement, and extend, its existing strengths and transform its business. What we saw today is a major step in the journey to make this strategy a reality for CIOs. The investment in new solutions and services shows Dell’s intent to lead in next-generation IT architectures. The strong contributions from partners, particularly ISVs and the IT channel, indicate Dell’s willingness to solve customer problems in an open fashion. These are not the announcements of the old ‘box-shifting’ Dell, but of a much more mature and broader organization. ” – Chris Ingle, IDC
We’re steadfast in our belief that we’ve got the right solutions for customers – that are open, capable and affordable – and the industry is taking serious notice. I’m looking forward to the days ahead as we continue to grow and invest our business for the benefit of the customer.
Check out the videos below to see more take-aways from the event.
