There have been many blogs and articles written about Dell’s direct model and intense customer focus. It’s something that we believe in deeply and is ingrained in our daily activities. This focus, guided by a pragmatic approach, enables Dell to develop customer-inspired designs which often result in industry first but also 'practical innovations'. Our unique approach to practical innovation is centered on the premise that new features or capabilities must deliver real-world value, and cannot require significant compromises in areas such as reliability or interoperability in order to deploy or execute. While this approach may not always capture your imagination in the same way that the introduction of a bleeding edge technology does, it’s the one that delivers the most value.
The number of industry-leading innovations that Dell has delivered in recent years is long and distinguished, but most of all, it is practical and customer-focused. Our introduction of common server images aided in accelerating customer testing and validation timelines to speed time to value, and cross-platform component design and location specifications speed deployment and maintenance activities. Portfolio-wide Energy Star and Fresh Air certifications brought new standards of server power efficiency to datacenters at a time when energy costs were becoming critical in constrained budget environments. Technologies such as Dell’s unique Failsafe Virtualization, which introduced a redundant, failover-capable media for hosting embedded hypervisors (such as VMware’s ESXi) in order to ensure maximum uptime in virtual environments, and the PowerEdge Select Network Adapter, allowed for the choice of the integrated networking technology that best matched our customers’ specific application workloads and network infrastructure choices.. All of these innovations met specific customer needs, enhanced our customer’s usage experience, and can be adopted without requiring any additional networking or management infrastructure.
We continue to deliver significant innovations that directly improve efficiency and productivity for our customers, no more so than in the area of systems management. Our launch of embedded management and lifecycle control technology with our 11th generation of PowerEdge servers brought capabilities to systems management never before imagined – the ability to deploy, update and maintain servers throughout their lifecycle with no requirement for additional software agents, even in ‘bare-metal’ scenarios. We have extended this even further in our PowerEdge 12th Generation platforms, adding monitoring capabilities to our iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller to create the first truly ‘agent-free’ infrastructure. This means that regardless of operating system version or system state, Dell servers can be contacted, connected and fully managed without additional software, as individual platforms or collectively through a Dell console such as the new OpenManage Essentials. And thanks to our longstanding commitment to provide enhancement without forcing extra hardware or software purchases, we partner with industry leaders such as Microsoft and VMware so that you can leverage this agent-free management architecture through the 3rd party consoles that you use most often.
We are very proud of the innovative capabilities that we have delivered to IT users as well as the end users of IT solutions over the years, but most of all, we are proud of the relationships that we have forged with our customers. Without them, we would not be able to identify the new capabilities and technologies needed to make their days more efficient and productive. We are truly inspired by the ways our customers put Dell PowerEdge servers to use, from companies shortening the response time for business applications to research institutions searching for new cures, our customers continue to push the envelope of what they need and what we must provide.
We know that we must continue to deliver new capabilities, new technologies, and new innovations. Our commitment is that Dell will continue to deliver – for you.
