The Services Revolution: Powering Potential with Dell Technologies

Courtney

Hello and welcome to the Dell Technologies Forum podcast series, where we turn transformative ideas into innovation faster. In this series, we bring together Dell specialists and global experts to delve into collaborative ventures with customers across pivotal areas of technology evolution. I'm your host, Courtney Hughes, director of global brand campaigns at Dell Technologies. In today's episode, we're diving into the heart of service innovation, exploring how technology services are not just supporting, but actively driving the adoption of cutting edge solutions.

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Courtney

We'll uncover the stories behind the services that are enabling organizations to leap forward into the future, transforming challenges into opportunities and ideas into tangible outcomes. From the intricacies of gen AI to the broader spectrum of digital transformation. We're peeling back the layers of what it means to be at the forefront of the technology service revolution. Joining me in this insightful conversation is Doug Schmitt, President of Dell Technology Services.

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Courtney

Doug is at the helm of an organization that's not just responding to the technological shifts, but is a step ahead, anticipating the needs and crafting the solutions that will define the next era of innovation. Doug, thank you so much for joining me.

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Doug

Well, thank you for having me, Courtney.

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Courtney

It's truly an absolute pleasure and I'm super excited to dive into this. I think this is going to be very insightful for everyone listening. So you know that this podcast is about accelerating customer ideas into innovation faster. So can you give me an overview of the role that Dell Technology Services plays in this?

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Doug

Well, yeah, and look, it's as you can imagine, it's an important role. we get to have a team of 60,000 Dell and partner professionals really help our customers on their end to end journey for I.T. And what that's about, whether it's desktop, notebook workstations all the way up to, obviously, server storage, data centers we're really about bringing out the best of what our customers need for their technology outcome.

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Doug

And we help our customers, whether they're Fortune 500 all the way down to our consumer and our small and medium business customers. It's an install base of over 250 million. And the root goal of all of this is about maximizing their agility, helping our customers simplify their I.T. And again delivering that outcome that they are looking for from their technology solution.

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Doug

It's a team I'm privileged to lead. And it's well positioned to help our customers drive more innovation so they can stay ahead, in today's environment.

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Courtney

Absolutely. So can you share any customer case studies where Services has enabled customers to innovate faster?

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Doug

Well, yeah, I think two examples I would bring up would actually be around AI that we see obviously that's something on a lot of our customers mind right now. One would be around a global communications provider. And this is where our customer had AI projects really everywhere. They had them in the labs, multiple cloud, on-prem.

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Doug

And their challenge was, cost and then broader Gen-AI access to the organization. So really speeding it up. How do they, leverage the live results faster. And what Dell really helped with in this was the infrastructure, putting and together obviously a solution around the infrastructure. We provided the proof of concept to consolidate this on-prem for them and then deployed a scalable Gen-AI platform.

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Doug

And as well as the tools and the results that the customer saw around this was accelerated R&D initiatives, as you can imagine, very important for them around product development, better control and scalability of the Gen-AI for the future because they had it on a on-prem solution, and then they're able to expand the use cases now beyond just that proof of concept around the lab.

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Doug

And so that was that's just one area again of these taking the Dell solution and helping our customers speed up in this case; development, but then leveraging it for additional capabilities that they need. And then another one is there's the City of Amarillo. And I really like this case example.

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Courtney

I do too.

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Doug

Because this is around Rich Gagnon who's the CIO of the city of Amarillo, really reaching out and really trying to improve for his constituents, his citizens. How do they better access the capabilities and the opportunities that government offers them? And their challenge was providing that information to really a diverse group. English in Amarillo is not the primary language for 24% of the population.

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Doug

And so Rich realized that. And what we did for them is right now is professional service is actually architecting a solution. And we're leveraging large language model and a Gen-AI application and deploying that basically around a, digital human on screen that can help his citizens and constituents access all the great benefits that the city offers, in a first language.

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Doug

And the early results that we're seeing is, it's helping not only their constituents, but things like remote support and health clinics speeding all of that up for them. So I like that example because, it's something that we could all, learn from and then also benefit from.

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Courtney

Absolutely. And I want to continue to talk just a little bit more about, Gen-AI since you touched on it with your two case studies. What is Dell Technology Services doing now? Right. And how do you see it growing in the future? And what will this mean to you and your organization?

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Doug

Well, yeah, that's a that's a it's a great question. And there's obviously a lot to this. Look, there is a great deal that we're doing both internally around services to improve the capabilities for us to deliver to our customers. And then there's what we're doing to help our customers on their journey. Right. And it is you've stated, look, this is a huge opportunity, and we're helping our customers both around their structured data, which would be AI around process and then the unstructured data around their Gen-AI.

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Doug

And it's really about accelerating and delivering automation for their work and really re-energizing their digital transformation on their key initiatives. And look, we've been through a lot of these technology transitions over the years, but this one is being led by services as well. Meaning in the case of our customers, need help identifying use cases. They need help actually implementing the solution around the large language models.

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Doug

They need assistance in obtaining the data and then also running all of this. So we're here every step of the way. So that's really where we're headed with the AI and what the capabilities are around it.

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Courtney

Right. And so if I'm not mistaken I think and you could probably agree that the majority of your customers are in like the early stages of Gen-AI adoption, right?

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Doug

Yeah. That's correct. And that is a very good point. So I'm not going to be talking about the internal that we're doing right now for services to help improve the experience for our customers directly. So think about our tech support. But the professional service side where we actually help our customers around that. We actually have three imperatives that can help our customers.

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Doug

The first is around helping our customers on their journey. Just developing the AI strategy and then specifically prioritizing use cases. And that's very important because the use case needs to be something that you can implement. You can get the benefit and you know the outcome okay. So that's the first one helping them with, strategy and use cases.

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Doug

The second one is around that data. I keep talking about the data preparation and the solution, architecture and the infrastructure. You have to have the right solution architecturally. You have to have the infrastructure in place, and then you have to make sure that the data is ready for that we'll help them with that. So that's the second one.

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Doug

And the third one is the skill set to operate all this. Look we're still building that internally. We're moving very fast to do that through investments. But we're also then at the same time helping our customers if they need that skill set as well. We have that in our professional services team. And that means building out the large language models.

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Doug

The inference and actually developing and running that. So yeah, what we like about this is we let our customers choose where they want us to help them. We'd love to do all three, but they can also choose any one of those on the standalone as well. It's all about helping them in their journey wherever they're at.

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Courtney

Yeah, I mean, we're in a very differentiated position to offering end-to-end solutions.

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Doug

That's correct. And this is going to change this data and what our customers are leveraging. It is going to change the business model that they're running, quite frankly, as well as even I, because I see this insight internally for services. The model that we deliver is changing. And it's also improving the experience that our customers are able to deliver to their end user.

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Doug

And so this is this is huge. You're going to see huge gains in efficiency and effectiveness at the same time. And you know, an example of this would be really you could see this even in the health-care with the remote surgery. Yeah. You're going to see and are seeing hospitals operating rooms packed with doctors able, you know, you got to get away from that, so to speak.

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Doug

And you're going to see robotic surgery, with one doctor, best doctor where you can find for that particular procedure leveraging robotics. And, using gen analytics to, to leverage the results that they see not only on things like X-rays, test results, but to improve the overall surgery. This is just one example. Obviously, in health-care, you could pick anything around education services.

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Doug

I talked about the city of Amarillo, the government side, but exciting stuff for how it's going to reshape and rebuild models.

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Courtney

What are the biggest challenges that organizations are facing now relating to Gen-AI, and how are you helping customers address them?

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Doug

Yeah, I think clearly we talked about the expertise, but one of the things there's two ways we really look at this when we go talk to our customers, we say, look, we have deep as a company, end to end as a company. We have deep expertise in advanced technologies with AI and ML. We've been on this journey for a long time in the structured data space.

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Doug

We've been on this journey for 7 to 8 years. Second one is it we're using our AI portfolio and it's the broadest in the industry. When you look at what the, Jeff or Sam Bird, Arthur Lewis, the what they're building into the products on the product, the solution in our AI factory, we have the broadest portfolio in the industry, especially when you add Services to that.

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Doug

So we have a deep expertise, and we're using this in our AI portfolio and building it into our product. So a lot of great stuff happening around that.

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Courtney

Yeah I mean we do have the industry's broadest AI portfolio. So can you talk to me some about our full suite of end-to-end Gen-AI services?

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Doug

Yeah. So look I think what you'll see around that portfolio, which is very broad. Now this is going back to the external. What we're delivering to our customers. One of the things that we see is that I talked about that strategy and the data. Number one two is the platform and deploy and test and operate all of that.

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Doug

And the third one was obviously around kind of the the skill set. Right, if they ever need those. But beyond that, just real specifically we will and offer today a free half day Gen-AI accelerator workshop where we're actually helping our customers see what's available around Gen-AI and how we can help them, not only with the great products and portfolio that we have, but with the services as well, we'll help with data preparation services.

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Doug

I am constantly working with customers and the team is as well. Obviously to help our customers find the data and get that ready, and that takes a lot of work. We help with the model tuning, we'll help with workforce personal services as well as implementation of services for Microsoft Copilot solutions, for example. And then I talked about the Gen-AI digital assistant assistants that we've been helping with.

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Doug

It's like with the City of Amarillo. So those are just a few of the services inside that portfolio that are real specific around the three. Yeah, but it's a very broad portfolio.

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Courtney

Doug I want to thank you so, so much for an enlightening conversation. Thank you.

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Doug

Well, thank you for having me. And Courtney.

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Courtney

To our listeners, thank you for joining us on this journey through the dynamic world of technology services. We hope you've gained new perspectives on how services can be a catalyst for accelerating innovation within your own organizations. So just before we wrap up today, I encourage you to continue the conversation by attending the Dell Technologies Forum Roadshow at a city near you where more in depth conversations around all of this will take place.

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Courtney

And if you missed it, don't even worry about it. There is a wealth of valuable resources on the Dell Technologies Forum site where you can listen back on demand. Doug, again, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights. It is truly been a pleasure to speak with you. And to our listeners, thank you. We hope you join us next time.

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Courtney

This series has been brought to you in association with Intel, Microsoft and Nvidia.