As enterprise customers look for better business agility and consistency from their cloud deployments, Dell Technologies is driving a lot of innovations with the help of its Hybrid Cloud solutions.
Amit Luthra, Director & General Manager – Data Center Solutions, Dell Technologies India speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in aout the company’s current strategy and its future plans.
What is Dell Technologies doing to help its customers during these uncertain times?
At Dell Technologies, we are continuously striving to cater to the changing needs of our customers and partners to help them sustain and thrive in the ‘new normal’. As businesses across the world are working remotely, they have realized that they need to adopt multi-cloud solutions which will enable them to maintain business continuity. It’s true that multi-cloud helps customers achieve business objectives which are difficult to accomplish by using private-only and/or hybrid cloud architectures.
However, it is not a panacea and comes with its own challenges ranging from unpredictable costs to security vulnerabilities. Dell Technologies Cloud solves these challenges while enabling customers to establish a hybrid cloud strategy that aligns IT resources with business and application needs.
It also allows customers to simplify their IT operations, attain control and visibility of their cloud infrastructure while reducing the total cost of ownership. It makes hybrid clouds simpler to deploy and manage regardless of where data and applications reside. Organisations can now get the most from their entire infrastructure and can easily create modern applications experience in every cloud, simultaneously closing the cloud-native skills gap.
How is Dell Technologies doing as a brand in the hybrid cloud solutions space? What are the key differentiators it is bringing to the market today?
We have been able to maintain leadership in India for the past 2 years in the hybrid cloud space due to our holistic portfolio, HCI capabilities as well as our partner ecosystem. In fact, we have recently also been recognized as the best hybrid cloud technology provider in 2020 by Frost & Sullivan which is a testimony to the trust our customers and partners have on us.
What sets apart our hybrid cloud solutions is the agility and consistency in terms of performance it delivers across multiple clouds. Customers have the option to choose the right combination of platforms which will provide them with optimal efficiency across public, private and edge cloud resources for their business. Additionally, VxRail, our hyper-converged infrastructure platform has been integrated with VMware’s cloud foundation in order to provide customers with effective hybrid cloud solutions.
What is Dell Technologies’ Multi-Cloud focus for 2020?
Multi-cloud allows organizations to realize the main benefits cloud services offer such as agility, scalability, redundancy, and cost-effectiveness. Companies turn to multi-cloud to achieve business objectives which are difficult to accomplish by using private-only and/or hybrid cloud architectures. Since data has become the most valuable asset in the era of digitalization, it is important to focus on a cloud strategy with a data first mindset. This helps in delivering solutions which will help customers in their digital transformation journey and will keep their data safe, protected and available, as and when they need it.
In 2020, our focus has been to make our customers future-ready, by giving them control over their data and applications including the power to choose where they want their data to reside without any management or overall cloud deployment complexity. Therefore, we have taken a ‘customer-first’ approach which keeps us on the path to innovating and creating solutions that will be most beneficial to our customers in the current times.
How is Dell Technologies driving specifically tailored cloud solutions as per customer requirements? What is the business strategy in this space? Please name some of your big customers in this space?
Dell Technologies has always been at the forefront of bringing innovations to its portfolios. This has been made possible due to the close proximity that we maintain with our customers and our continuous efforts in listening to their evolving needs. For instance, in these uncertain times, many of our customers are trying to adopt multi-cloud strategies that meet the requirements of their workloads and support their applications while not exceeding the IT budget.
Keeping this in mind, we have been able to provide significant updates to Dell Technologies Cloud platform and as a result, have been able to cater to their growing needs in a tailored manner. With Dell Technologies Cloud advancements, organizations can more easily create a modern applications experience in every cloud, close the cloud-native skills gap and get the most out of their entire infrastructure.
Moreover, Dell Technologies Cloud Solutions combines the power of VMware software and Dell Technologies infrastructure to provide a consistent operating model and simplified management across public cloud, private cloud and edge locations, eliminating silos through a single operational hub.
What is Dell Technologies’ data-first approach and its impact on critical IT efficiency?
Organizations are striving to become more flexible by upgrading their IT infrastructure, to steer seamlessly in this data era. Hence, the combination of massive amounts of data and unparalleled technology innovation has given enterprises the opportunity to transform into disruptive digital powerhouses. So, as these organizations prepare themselves to make the optimal use of their data capital, I believe they will eventually transform into what is called a ‘Data-First Organization’ in the future.
Therefore, it is the need of the hour for organizations to adopt a ‘data-first’ approach. This means that businesses that are on their digital transformation path, to meet their future data needs, need to realise that they need a new architecture and new IT approach. In fact, this is precisely what we have been recommending to our customers. This approach will help the businesses understand their data patterns and other touchpoints, enabling them to pick apt IT solutions, customized for their everyday needs – allowing them to have greater IT efficiency. This approach entails that ‘data’ is the core to success in the current times, hence understanding how to maximise output by securing insights safely, is key to business success.
How does Dell Technologies look into the future within the hybrid cloud space?
I believe that we have always been one of the trendsetters in innovation and in evolving IT technologies and solutions. We are at the forefront of leading the implementation of best practices with respect to hybrid cloud solution deployment and management. We foresaw the hybrid cloud adoption trend in India and since then have been continuously developing holistic and integrated cloud solutions for the hybrid IT environment.
In terms of digital innovation, cloud is currently the key enabler within the reach of companies of all sizes and industries. Due to the current scenario, customers are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud approaches as part of their IT infrastructure. We believe that in the future, the demand for solutions that provide a single management and operations framework across private, public and edge locations solutions will skyrocket as organizations put data at the centre of their decision-making process. Hence, we provide our customers with a broad set of services that help them move forward in their hybrid cloud journey and we will continue to do so in the future.
