Mark Davison at the Dell Solutions Summit, Brussels – The world as we know it has been redefined by technology and Dell has repositioned itself to fully address the new challenges that customers face in this new era, says Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell.
“It’s been a fantastic start to the year for us and we’ve been innovating to address the challenges from business that I have seen as I have travelled to meet customers around the world,” Dell says. “It has been great to meet thousands of customers – from Abu Dhabi to Berlin – and from our existing customer base through to large corporates and governments.”
Dell says that the EMEA region has become a key market for the company.
“We started the business in 1984 and in 1987 we launched in the UK, our first office outside of the US,” Dell says. “We further developed the business through the 1990s and we are now in 180 countries with 15 000 team members across the EMEA business/
“We also have a thriving channel business that has been experiencing double digit growth,” he adds. “So our momentum is very strong and we have become a trusted brand in the region.”
Dell says that the world has been redefined by technologies such as cloud computing, big data, mobility, the Internet of Things and security, and that Dell is tackling these challenges head on through four comparatives, or pillars: transform; connect; inform; and protect.
“Transform is about moving off proprietary architectures to the cloud,” he explains. “And at Dell we have no legacy to protect – we’re a standards-based, scale out environment, software defined and multi-processor-based.
“We’re now coming out with our 13th generation of servers and we really have increased the innovations going on in the data centre which is changing quickly to converged infrastructure because of the improved multi-processor
virtualisation running across the whole data centre. We see all the layers of the network – three through seven – essentially becoming virtualised machines inside the data centre.
“We will continue to deliver innovation and build capability within the data centre,” he says.
Connect, Dell continues, is about the devices, the hardware, customers use ranging from tablets and smartphones through to PCs and thin clients.
“Some people are getting out of the PC business, they say it’s dead,” Dell says. “We absolutely believe in the PC. Yes, it is taking on new forms, but we have consolidated our share in this market and we’re growing it.”
The Inform pillar is around the access that users now have t technology and data.
“Thirty years ago IT was expensive and was only found in the back rooms of big corporates and governments,” Dell says. “Now we have billions of machines. The cost has come down, there are an enormous number of devices and that creates a big opportunity as we look to help customers use that data that’s now available to make better decisions.”
The final pillar – protect – is all about security.
“Security is one of the top concerns of the customers I’ve met around the world,” he says. “They all have valuable information that they want to protect and it is an area where we are actively pursuing the right solutions. We’ve made a number of acquisitions and a lot of these have been in the security space which, again, presents huge opportunities for us.”
Dell says that these four pillars will form the core of business in the future – and not just for Dell.
“Across these four areas we are working with leading companies in EMEA to help them in this IT-driven world,” he says. “I really believe the future is bright and the opportunities are enormous.
“Every organisation is using IT to their advantage and that is driving growth for the industry and for Dell,” he says.
