Since joining Dell as the VP of Engineering for the Systems and Information Management (SIM) group, I’ve had the opportunity to strategize with both product and technology leaders across the organization as well as engage directly with customers around the globe who turn to Dell for help in navigating major IT infrastructure transformations that will set their business up for future growth.
One commonality I’ve found is that no two transitions are alike, which is why we’ve been evolving our systems and information management tools and product roadmap to help customers streamline and accelerate the process.
In 2016 and beyond, we’ll continue to build cloud-centric SIM solutions focused on helping customers ease the deployment and management of public, private and hybrid clouds. Spanning key areas such as systems and application performance management, end device management, data protection and recovery, database management, and windows management, our focus will be on empowering organizations of all sizes to better manage workloads while reaping the benefits of all the cloud has to offer.
It’s clear that as more customers deploy some level of cloud infrastructure across their business – be it private, public or hybrid – the location and makeup of their IT infrastructures will become less and less relevant. What becomes most important, however, is how organizations optimize data access and management once they get to the cloud.
Data is the lifeblood of any business and finding simple yet effective ways to better manage and gain insights into that data is crucial. In particular, we’re focused on helping customers better assess the true value of their data by understanding how critical applications access, harvest and use valuable metadata – or data about their data. Regardless of whether it’s protecting your data, managing systems and platforms, or ensuring the highest level of application performance across the infrastructure, our goal is to solve the toughest metadata management problems.
We’ll accomplish this in ways that enable customers to harness and harvest the explosion of data across an ever-changing ecosystem. This is sometimes called the “SMAC stack,” as technologies must focus on social, mobile, analytics and cloud in the new world of IT.
SMAC technologies also will play a major role in guiding Dell SIM’s product engineering efforts. Social is about engaging with customers and fostering a user community, so you’ll see a significant effort devoted to developing the most intuitive user interfaces across our suite of software, expanding our efforts to deliver more freeware, and establishing more online user forums. For mobile, we’ll do our part to share in Dell’s company-wide commitment to “mobile first” customer initiatives.
Analytics have been, and always will be, an integral part of everything we do to accelerate IT transformations. As IT focus shifts towards the data economy, we’ll be ready with holistic offerings that bring deep insights into every element that customers use our software to manage.
A great example of our cloud commitment took place at Dell World when we introduced the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft. Both Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared the stage to reinforce how we’re partnering to help customers unlock the promise of hybrid cloud. SIM’s portfolio already has a strong presence in the on-prem environment, in cloud migrations, and in SaaS offerings. Hybrid cloud will become our primary management target as well as our technology delivery vehicle.
We’re committed to helping our customers accelerate IT transformations and deliver more values from the technology. The intensity will be even more amplified as we roll out more SMAC ready products.