Note from Lionel: This blog is one of a 12-part series, “12 blogs for the Dell PowerEdge 12th Generation.” For more in the series, please check here, or click on the 12 blogs tag here.
Part II – The Solutions You Need
Forrest Norrod, VP/GM of Server Solutions, speaking with partners at the Enterprise Spring Launch
Last week we announced the arrival of the Dell PowerEdge 12th Generation of servers. Following that, to kick off a three-part blog series on the 12 things you need to know about the PowerEdge 12th generation servers, I spoke to you about the four most important aspects of our 12th Generation Systems Management portfolio. Today, in Part II of the series, I would like to spend some time talking about our philosophy behind the entire 12th generation, as they encompass far more than just technology. They are part of a holistic solution designed to fundamentally change the way our customers interact with their IT. What makes the 12th Generation of Dell PowerEdge server and solutions launch stand apart from our competitors are the 4 pillars they were built upon:
- Powerful alliances
- Comprehensive solution services
- Solutions engineering
- Intelligent infrastructure
We are spending a lot more time, whether it’s in the product divisions or in our sales force, speaking to the true end users of this technology. And we are becoming more focused about our strategy behind how we are going to help customers achieve their business goals.
1. Dell has built powerful alliances.
First and foremost is our alliance with our customers, whose needs help guide our solution content, design and test. In fact, right now our customers are busy testing workload solutions on our latest PowerEdge servers. We like to say that our 12th generation of PowerEdge is designed by our customers, and engineered by Dell.
We also have longstanding relationships with best-of-breed industry partners, like Microsoft SAP, VMware, and Citrix, which allow Dell to leverage a collaborative planning process to produce workload solutions that address our customers’ needs. We deploy and use many of these same solutions internally, building best practices and expertise in the design and implementation, and we offer these to our customers to help them as they evolve their own IT infrastructure to better meet their business goals.
As a forward-thinking organization, we cultivate deep relationships with revolutionary technology leaders, such as Cloudera Hadoop, Joyent, or the OpenStack community. In driving these relationships, we’re taking the mystery and complexity out of these very revolutionary solutions, and making them more accessible to our customers.
2. We have comprehensive solutions services.
We’ve strategically built our services team both organically and through acquisition. As a result, you’ll find service offerings and practices designed to meet specific customer objectives. Dell Services now consists of more than 40,000 associates, collectively providing a portfolio that covers from consultative design to life-cycle management.
In addition, Dell Solution Centers were launched recently as part of Dell’s $1B solutions investment. With teams focused on customer engagement, solution build across core domains and verticals, ISV certification and sales enablement, Dell Solution Centers bring Dell’s solution capabilities to life for our customers.
We have 10 solution centers operating around the world, with two more opening in the first half of the year. Each Solution Center combines teams of solution experts, data centers for hands-on experience and dedicated labs and meeting rooms to ensure that we deliver a first-class experience to our customers, whether they visit in person or work with us remotely. Customer Engagements include technical briefings, architecture design sessions and proofs-of-concept.
3. Solutions engineering with the customer always in mind.
Our software and hardware engineers have worked to pre-engineer and test solutions to provide tools that simplify and speed planning and deployment. Rather than focusing on speeds and feeds, we took time to engage with customers in over 7,700 interviews in order to discover their true pain points. One of those key areas was around streamlining operations. We are focused on delivering end-to-end solutions such as our recently announced 10Gb capabilities across our servers, storage and networking to provide optimal solution performance. We also enhanced our 2nd generation of embedded intelligent management to help further streamline operations for our customers, allowing them to spend less time maintaining their infrastructure and more time driving greater business results. Lastly, we announced new all-in-one solution appliances like our QuickStart Data Warehouse Appliance and our Dell Apache Hadoop Solution which are designed to simplify and speed up “time to solution” for our customers.
4. Innovative hardware – designed by our customers, engineered by Dell.
And finally, we come to the hardware. Designed in response to our customers’ needs, Dell PowerEdge 12th Generation servers bring impressive capabilities to power solutions for our customers. You will hear more about out 12th Generation of PowerEdge in the next few days.
Whether the discussion is at the business value level, or deep into the technology, we’re ready. Workload solutions are the driving force behind what we deliver, directed by customer needs, and fully supported with broad services, deep engineering support, and best-in-class intelligent infrastructure that provides an easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy to manage solution environment.
Our goals are simple: help our customers achieve faster time to application, better performance of their applications, streamline their operations and provide the best platforms to support it all.