Today we announced the Dell Technologies IoT Solution | Surveillance here at VMworld. This solution represents our ability to pull together technology capabilities and expertise from across the organization to deliver amazing solutions for our customers. We define ‘solution’ as two or more products or services from different Dell Technologies companies integrated with additional IP or engineering investments.
This solution lays the foundation for our computer vision strategy which integrates traditional video with IoT and other technologies to ‘see’ more than ever before. Finally, this solution creates new linkages between three important customer organizations. It enables operational technology (OT) from the world of facilities and security organizations and the resiliency of the IT world to coexist in a single solution. It is a pre-integrated, lab-validated engineered solution that is flexible both in technology adoption and pricing, allowing for customization.
This solution required us to work together across organizational boundaries, geographic boundaries, and to bridge the hardware / software divide. Mike comes from VMware, based in the Bay Area, and led the engineering team that delivered this solution. Mike drew heavily on his experience engineering working with Dell VXRail, a fully integrated, preconfigured, and pre-tested VMware hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. From this experience, Mike learned that customers want solutions that deliver flexibility, ease of deployment, low cost of ownership and are simple to manage.
Ken Mills is from the Dell organization and lives across the country in Charlotte, NC. Ken has been a thought leader in Surveillance for years and is now the General Manager of this business, leading sales, marketing and solution engineering in this space. Ken has a history of driving start-up products within large organizations and as Geoffrey Moore says, has been in the belly of the whale – and survived. Ken brings the voice of the customer, a deep knowledge of the surveillance space, and a reminder that when we sometimes get caught up in the beauty of the technology, we need to remember the fundamental customer challenges we are working to solve. In the surveillance space, our customers care about protecting what matters and keeping the world safe.
In order to do this, our customers need to know they can rely on the technology they are using and that is has been validated to work. It is not just about having enough hard drive space to store the video, it is also about the performance and reliability of the system to allow our customers to find and analyze their video as quickly and reliably as possible. Surveillance is moving to the datacenter and Dell Technologies is ensuring our customers have the best solutions from the edge to the core to the cloud.
This experience of developing and launching a Dell Technologies solution has deepened some internal relationships – the connective tissue in a large organization. It’s given us some new muscles to build solutions in other market spaces. And it’s given our customers more technology choices to meet the challenges and opportunities in their own industries. Stay tuned for what’s next from Dell Technologies!
This post is co-authored by Mike McDonough.
