As a private company, we at Dell have an opportunity to drive business success in different ways, be more nimble and make faster decisions – and most importantly, drive innovation on behalf of our customers. Today, I’d like to share another example of how Dell’s privatization has served as a catalyst to evolving in the enterprise technology space and helping solve our customers’ problems.
Nearly eight years ago, Dell was the first major vendor to recognize that there was a segment of customers that had different technology requirements from those of mainstream enterprises. In 2007, a few entrepreneurial-minded engineers at Dell saw the writing on the wall and created a new business targeted at addressing these specific needs by creating Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS). This organization then, and now, delivers complex and tailored computing solutions that address the unique needs of hyperscale customers.
The hyperscale market is typically considered to include the Big Four – Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google – and can be expanded to the Big Three of China – Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu – as well as a few other very large web tech providers who all recognize that their on-premises infrastructure is a critical competitive differentiator.
Looking beyond this market, we now see another large, growing segment that includes companies that are just below hyperscale in size, e.g. research organizations, oil & gas, web tech, telecommunications service providers and hosting companies. Many of the IT leaders from the hyperscale space are being recruited and joining these companies. As a result, this growing market is increasingly expressing similar needs to the hyperscale customers in terms of how they buy for and build datacenters. The difference, however, is that these companies usually lack the in-house technical teams to build fully-custom solutions.
We have been looking at this segment of the market closely as there is a big opportunity to engage with these customers differently in order to help them achieve their business goals. And, just as we were ahead of the times eight years ago with the introduction of DCS, we want to be on the forefront of uniquely meeting these customers’ needs too.
Check back next week on Dell4Enterprise for more details.
