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Welcome to the next generation of Future-Ready IT

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I am now a fantastic 90 days into my role as vice president of server solutions marketing at Dell, and wanted to share a behind-the-scenes look into what the server team is thinking about, working on, and reaching for. What’s been most striking to me so far is the focus here on thoughtful innovation – the type of engineering effort and results that are meaningful for customers, whether they’re furthering medical research, powering school districts and universities, or helping athletes perform at their peak.  

The server team at Dell pays attention to how our customers use our technology. We’ve had more than 8,000 customer interactions to inform our next-generation server portfolio since our PowerEdge 12th generation server launch in February 2012, a line of servers that garnered more than 50 industry awards for its superior management capabilities, leading performance, and innovation in design.

Accolades for these features and technologies are great, and those customer conversations play a significant role in helping us understand what thoughtful innovation should look like. To understand the changing landscape of IT even further, Dell and Intel have recently commissioned a global survey of IT decision-makers from Penn Schoen Berland (PSB)– the Future Ready IT survey – with representation from small, medium and large companies. A few highlights from this survey include:

  • As businesses continue to run more data-intensive applications such as real-time analytics, low-latency access to data becomes even more critical. In fact, the survey reports that 70 percent of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) have been negatively impacted by performance issues when running applications requiring fast access to data.
  • Dell’s updated systems management capabilities featured in its new PowerEdge servers address how 60 percent of IT managers cite they are prioritizing reductions in operational complexity and simplification of data center management.
  • Over 60 percent of ITDMs reported that their company relies on a mix of traditional and emerging business applications, signaling today’s data centers must support a diverse and broad set of workloads and applications.

The Next Generation Family of Dell PowerEdge Servers

All of which tells me we’re on the right track for our customers, and with our areas of investment for the next-generation PowerEdge servers. As a peek into the future, you can expect those new servers to include:

  • A focus on application performance with the industry’s first hybrid storage server using 1.8-inch SATA SSDs
  • Further simplification in server management and new levels of automation for fast deployment
  • The introduction of iDRAC QuickSync, the first Near Field Communication (NFC) systems management monitoring for server
  • Support for software-defined storage

Part of the excitement of being here is seeing how laser-focused we are in continuing the evolution of the PowerEdge portfolio to help customers deliver world-class IT. According to the Future Ready IT survey, 7 in 10 decision makers are now considering application-specific reference architectures when evaluating converged infrastructure. Even when you consider all the other pieces that go into a converged appliance, these respondents still defer to application performance as the most important factor in choosing such a machine.

When the PowerEdge VRTX launched last year it was the first integrated IT solution designed specifically for office environments, and today counts with customers in over 50 countries on six continents in verticals ranging from education to motorsports. The solution has also garnered over 20 industry awards and numerous positive reviews. We’ve received these types of accolades because Dell listens to its customers and builds solutions that address performance requirements, simplify management, and optimize workloads that scale and for every scale.

The PowerEdge VRTX, however, was only a single step in Dell’s converged infrastructure journey. Expect us to share more about our innovation in this space this year, with converged architecture that has impressed early access testers for the way it’s been built to address a specific customer segment – akin to VRTX – and for its agility and leading scale.

If you have any feedback on how we can help you achieve your IT goals, we hope you can join us at Dell World this fall. 

About the Author: Ravi Pendekanti

Ravi Pendekanti is Senior Vice President of Server Solutions Product Management at Dell, Inc. His organization is responsible for developing and bringing Dell’s flagship line of PowerEdge Servers and Converged Infrastructure systems to market, covering a broad spectrum of global customers from cloud service providers and small businesses to large enterprises and organizations, all running a wide range of workloads. Most recently, Ravi served as the Vice President of the Platform Business Group at Oracle where he looked after GTM activities including Product Marketing and Sales Enablement related to the platform business that included Engineered Systems (Exadata, Exalogic, OVCA and SuperCluster), Servers, Solaris and Networking. With over two decades of extensive global experience in the enterprise and SMB segment in both hardware (servers, storage and networking) and software, Ravi has also held leadership roles at Juniper Networks, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics. He holds a MS in Computer Science and BS in Electrical Engineering.