LAS VEGAS – Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies during his keynote address at the DellTech World 2018 conference said digital transformation is no more the new normal, but it’s become the new mandate.
Dell Technologies, as a company, moving forward will be branding itself as Dell over DellEMC and will be pushing channel partners to address the modernization requirements of customers. Michael Dell said this push must move IT away from being a cost centre to a profit centre.
For this plan, he outlined a strategy around four transformation pillars. They are:
· Digital Transformation, the change of the business model to digital;
· IT Transformation is a part of the digital transformation change to become more agile;;
· Workforce, where it is an activity instead of a location and:
· Security, which can be a big accelerator for business or a road block.
“Digital transformation used to be something we only knew about but as the convergence of data, connectivity and computing power grows exponentially the secret of digital transformation is out and has burst on to the public consciousness,” he said.
Michael Dell also said that “nerds or the techies are now at the centre of the conversation” because IT transformation is a strategy and a business starter.
Data needs to be stored and protected to make new products and services better. Michael Dell went on to say by doing this the customer will attract more customers resulting in more data being created. “Then the cycle repeats itself.”
Technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks and soon 5G will add to the cycle. “The rocket fuel will be the data,” according to Michael Dell. He told the audience of more than 14,000 attendees including about 300 channel partner executives that the data will be more valuable than the apps and there will be “tones” of data being created from the Internet of Things (IoT).
Michael Dell said that a typical city will create more than 300 petabytes of data every single day by 2020.
“How is that possible? They are not being created by people. About 99 per cent of that data will come from things like electronics inside smart buildings and factories, but with IoT there will be exposure to security risks,” he said.
Vodafone Group Enterprises CEO Brian Humphries said digital transformation is changing not just companies but whole industries. The digital transformation strategy behind industries is to get the next leg of growth, while finding new customers along with reducing costs and increasing employee satisfaction. He agrees with Michael Dell that IT transformation with security and scalability needs to happen first for digital transformation to be successful.
“Digital transformation changes the way economies work and increases diversity and equality and can open new business models,” Humphries said.
One example of this is Aero Farms of Newark, N.J. Aero Farms is a Dell customer that produces vegetables inside warehouses. Aero Farms goal is to build these warehouse farms inside all cities so that people can have access to fresh, healthy food. Through data analytics, Aero Farms has been able to grow vegetables using 95 per cent less water and no pesticides. DellEMC gear helps Aero Farms collect data from the plants to analyze such aspects of farming as spectrum of light and texture.
Dell Technologies will be optimizing its new products with artificial intelligence on servers, storage, networking, virtualization and hyper convergence solutions.
“It’s been 20 years since IBM declared the post PC era. And, since then there have been four billion PCs sold. But they did get one thing right about handheld devices and embedded devices like smartphones and IoT,” Michael Dell said.
He added that new computer models are coming with centralized clouds and Dell is positioning itself at the centre of the multi-cloud world. “Cloud is not a place but a way of doing IT. Everything will be software-defined and infrastructure is the code. It’s not a question about private and public clouds but instead let’s have the right answer for every workload.”
