As workplaces have evolved, so have the workforces that use them. Several distinct worker personas have emerged, each with its own demands for specific hardware, software and services. We think it’s time your customers knew more about them.

Thinking about how people work forces you to categorize them almost immediately. What’s their role? What components do they need to fulfill that role? By understanding Dell EMC’s personas, your sales team can quickly identify these different categories, helping them pick the technology that’s right for customers’ users.

Thinking even deeper, you can split personas into different groups, too. Creatives and engineers are two such personas, and are the most likely to use our workstation products.

Engineers

Driving industry transformation, this persona uses computer-aided-design and computer-aided-manufacturing software to create products. Engineers design the products that are integral for your customers’ development, and Dell EMC has a solution for each stage of their workflow.

Take the Dell Precision 7000 Series, for example, with Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. It has a dual-socket motherboard to allow for massive processing power, and it can support up to four NVIDIA Quadro or AMD Radeon graphics cards. Combine this workstation with the Dell UltraSharp monitor, and engineers get a fully immersive working experience. The same series in 2U rackmount provides a centralized workstation environment, and with that, customers can expect to get remote configuration, operating system deployment and health monitoring.

Swiss engineering and research company, GKP Fassadentechnik is solving complex environmental issues with its engineering models and sees Dell EMC as a strategic partner for its increasing productivity. Read the case study in our engineer persona guide to learn more.

Creatives

Whether your customer is developing the latest blockbuster movie, creating an immersive virtual reality experience for a product launch, or editing 8k videos, an ISV-certified Dell Precision workstation with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro is the tool they can rely on. To bring their creations to life, however, these devices need to connect to render farms, and Dell EMC offers PowerEdge servers in an array of configurations, as well as switches to provide fast connectivity, and Isilon storage for sharing across multiple national or global sites.

In our guide to creative workers, we introduce Animal Logic, an Australian animation and visual effects company behind Happy Feet, The Matrix and The Great GatsbyIt has partnered with us for the last 10 years across its bases in London, Vancouver, Sydney and California. You can find out why by downloading the guide.

Our Approach

Technology has a huge potential to help organizations transform their workplaces, and by extension, transform their people’s working lives. We believe that approaching workers as personas is a critical part of workplace transformation, providing personalized products for how employees work today and in the future.

We’ll take care of the solutions, so you can take care of your customers.

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Read the Creative User and Engineer guides, as well as others, here.

We’ve also created related emails here, on our new Digital Marketing Platform so that your marketing teams can quickly get these guides into the hands of your customers. The guides explain how to maximise the productivity of their employees through the right choices from our end-to-end portfolio.

If you don’t have access to the Digital Marketing Platform, please register here.

Frank Hauck started his EMC career 30 years ago. He currently serves as principal liaison to global customers, strategic international countries and markets and other external stakeholders, helping to coordinate account teams, alliance teams and others around the world to engage customers on their transformative IT journey.

As President of Dell EMC Customers & Markets within the Infrastructure Solutions Group, Frank has traveled the globe and participated as the Keynote presenter at numerous Dell EMC Forum Events. Most recently, he was the keynote speaker at one of the last Dell EMC Forum Events in Charlotte, North Carolina. While his schedule was tight, I was honored that Frank agreed to spend some time talking about our Global Customers and his experiences helping those customers along their Digital Transformation. Thanks for the time Frank, and we look forward to Dell Technologies World and the Dell Technologies Forum events that will follow.

Get The Source app in the Apple App Store or Google Play, and Subscribe to the podcast: iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play.

Dell EMC The Source Podcast is hosted by Sam Marraccini (@SamMarraccini)

Choosing the right Software-as-a-Service application to consolidate and modernize your company’s Human Resource platform is a significant challenge under most circumstances. Making that transition to unite HR operations of two, newly merged high-tech heavy hitters (Dell & EMC) with approximately 160,000 employees around the globe is a downright monumental task.

After heading up a 90+ member core IT team that worked across IT and the business to successfully bring together legacy EMC and Dell HR systems onto one common HR platform in 16 months, I can offer insights on how to find the right SaaS providers for your HR transformation.

I can also tell you that selecting the right tools and technologies are only part of the process to forge a system that is so critical and fundamental to creating a happy and motivated workforce. Bringing the key players together to communicate and collaborate to define requirements to take care of the needs of your company’s human resources is even more important.

After all, the ultimate table stakes in any HR application modernization program is ensuring employee paychecks are accurate and on time.

Hopefully underscoring that reality, along with some other strategies we learned in the course of this project, will help you in your pursuit of creating a more efficient, cloud-based HR platform.

Agreeing on the Future State

At the time of the merger that created Dell Technologies, Dell and EMC were using different legacy HR vendor tools, applications and processes. We literally had two of everything from an HR and vendor management applications perspective.

The first step in creating a new HR platform was to bring the various business stakeholders together to define what the end state of a unified HR application would look like regardless of which SaaS applications were chosen. Central to that effort was a strong partnership between IT and business leadership. HR and IT worked with teams from each BU to look at everything from job codes to recruitment to payroll—all the processes across the whole HR ecosystem—to determine what we wanted the new “digital” HR experience to be.

These business teams were joined at the hip with IT, working to define IT requirements for how the new platform would interface with the many applications from both legacy companies.

Once the HR team defined a set of operating principles for the new company, the next step was for HR and IT to join forces to evaluate each prospective SaaS provider. There were several large SaaS providers that could serve our objectives. We finally chose a provider based on how they scored on meeting our requirements laid out by both business and IT.

Our IT requirements focused on performance, scalability, and how easy it would be to integrate with the different applications across the company with the chosen SaaS solution. We had more than 275 direct integrations into these SaaS applications, so they would have to scale across the whole IT ecosystem as well as from on-premises to the cloud.

One of the things that I think played a huge role in the success of the program is that this wasn’t a matter of legacy-Dell’s app being pushed on legacy-EMC. Both companies were coming into the process with a blank canvas and team members focused on a unified vision for the new company. That became the key factor in determining the right SaaS providers. While there were debates, it didn’t become confrontational. We kept things focused on making logical decisions to meet our goals.

At the end of the review process, we arrived at unanimous choices for three SaaS providers—one for our overall HR platform, another for an HR portal and a third to provide our vendor management process.

We then set out to integrate the many applications, migrate files, and take the data from each legacy company and restructure it to match the new HR world going forward. We repeatedly ran conversions for some four million records until we achieved 99.5 percent accuracy, and ran extensive system integration and user acceptance testing.

After 16 months, we launched our new HR platform—called My HR—as scheduled.  The big bang launch—in which we deployed our HR platform, the portal, data analytics, and vendor management application in a 7-day span—went off without a hitch.

Lessons Learned

While a single blog can’t begin to cover the many facets of this project, there are some key pieces of advice you may find helpful.

1. Get business groups aligned to speak with one voice on the requirements for your future HR platform before considering SaaS providers.
2. Ensure that the Business and IT project leads work together towards a common goal and not separate agendas.
3. Set a project completion (go-live) date, get everybody rowing in that direction and don’t blink.
4. Communicate constantly with all stakeholders, across all aspects of the business. You can never communicate too much.
5. Make sure team leaders “walk the walk” by being constantly involved in every aspect of the project.
6. Limit the amount of history you include in your new HR system and archive the rest.
7. You can never start too early to define the launch orchestration sequence, which needs to be precise to accommodate the many interdependencies of business and HR functions.
8. Get feedback from other companies, similar in size, that have migrated to HCM SAAS cloud solutions.

Certainly implementing the right SaaS applications were important to our HR transformation, but the IT/business partnership and the collaboration of hundreds of people both in our core teams and across the company were what really made this project a groundbreaking success.

On a cold January morning, our Media Agents video crew and I arrived at a modern Dallas office building housing Epsilon’s headquarters. You may be asking, “who is Epsilon?” They’re the quiet marketing powerhouse behind many Fortune 500 loyalty programs. According to Epsilon’s Chief Information Officer Robert Walden, Epsilon is happy to stay in the background servicing their Fortune 500 customers.

As I sat down in the lobby, a promotional video was running that really brought to light the work Epsilon is doing for industry giants such as Dunkin’ Donuts, AMEX, FEDEX, and Walgreens.  Have you ever considered who is behind the personalized email marketing communications and great offers you receive from loyalty programs, or how you can seamlessly redeem your loyalty points? That’s Epsilon.

During this visit, we took a look into the intricacies of the complex world of data analytics and building multi-channel relationships with today’s customers.

Our first video interview was with Robert. Robert articulated that Epsilon’s business is all about data, with a goal to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time through the right medium. Epsilon’s success depends on crafting and customizing messages to have the most value to their client’s customers. With a position as a Leader in the report: The Forrester WaveTM: Customer Loyalty Solutions, Q3 2017 and, as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q3 2016, Epsilon is definitely at the top of their game. They single-handedly often deliver and handle a billion emails every day and manage more than 600 million memberships.

To handle this volume of data, Epsilon built a multi-channel messaging platform called Agility Harmony^TM based on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. This purpose-built platform provides the flexibility, scalability, and performance to meet the requirements of their customers and internal stakeholders. When it comes to one of my favorite new technologies, machine learning, Epsilon is using these methods to better understand their customers at a faster rate.

Our second interview was with Jun Chen, the SVP of Operations for Epsilon. Jun is responsible for infrastructure technologies and operations, whether based in the cloud or on-site. She explained how, in the fast paced world of data analytics, the greatest challenge is keeping up with rapidly evolving technology, as well as ensuring her people have the necessary skill sets. One of the key differentiators for Epsilon is speed to delivery, whether they are delivering a solution or new feature to their customers.  She explained that by working with Dell EMC, Harmony’s platform capacity can be expanded in a matter of a few short weeks vs. a previous timeline that took months.

Next, we spoke to Prashanth Athota, SVP of Platform Engineering. He talked about Epsilon’s goal of making lifetime connections with their customers. The Harmony multi-channel messaging platform isn’t about sending bulk email, but building a story and intelligently creating connections based on individual preferences, interest, transactional history, off line activity, and cross channel activity to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time and on the right device. The Harmony platform using advanced data analytics, allows Epsilon to meet their client’s challenges and aggressive requirements.

Prashanth discussed the details of how Harmony big data clusters run on the Dell EMC R740XD. It was captivating to learn about the different big data technology stacks running on Harmony, including Hadoop, Cassandra, hedge based clusters, and memcached big data clusters. Epsilon chose to partner with Dell EMC because our technology allows them to support multiple types of workloads and horizontally scale on- demand. The flexible and scalable architecture of the Dell EMC PowerEdge servers allows Epsilon to support different types of workloads based on rapidly changing requirements, whether they need more CPU power, memory or storage data clusters.

Whew, what a fascinating journey. And these were only our morning interviews!  Follow us at @DellEMCservers for the upcoming Epsilon video, and to learn more about this global marketing solutions team and the Dell EMC solutions that power its success.

The fact that humans use machines is old news. Even as far back 4,500 years ago, the pyramids were built with the aid of machines; likewise, airplanes, excavators, and sewing machines didn’t just appear out of thin air. People have always developed certain ‘relationships’ with their machines out of necessity; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to use them.

But machines are bringing something new to the table, and in doing so, redefining the relationship between humans and machines – they’ve now become ‘intelligent.’ Beyond the philosophical question of what intelligence means today (which experts can’t even agree on), we see that machines have already begun to take on very complex tasks — work that we were certain could only be carried out by humans until now. By this I mean cars that can travel independently through traffic, or software that can make diagnoses or draw up legal contracts – in other words, tasks of great significance. It seems clear that we will not only use and operate machines in the future, but also work alongside them. And that’s the fundamental difference.

We wanted to know precisely where this new collaborative relationship between humans and machines now stands, and what it’s future may be. For that reason, Dell Technologies commissioned an international survey distributed to 3,800 managers. The survey results are now available. First of all, the numbers confirm the assumptions: 82% of managers anticipate that humans and machines will collaborate as ‘integrated teams’ within their companies in as few as five years.

That’s hardly a surprise. Anyone who is exposed to digitization and the use of new technologies every day knows the potential. But how far those surveyed diverged in their assessment of this upheaval’s consequences was the real surprise. Here, a very strange picture was painted: Roughly half responded to the majority of questions with a ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ which means that we can actually speak of two main camps.

No matter what question was asked, whether it was if automated systems will result in more free time, if work satisfaction will be increased by outsourcing unpleasant tasks to machines, if productivity will rise, or how the new technologies will influence the division of labor, the managers surveyed were resoundingly undecided about the future, and always split into two opposing groups. For that reason, there was no definite idea of how collaboration between humans and machines could look like.

So are we steering full steam ahead into an uncertain future? It’s undeniable that humans will work in close collaboration with machines, but are we playing a game with an uncertain outcome, if even managers from key sectors don’t have a clear opinion? I don’t think so, because here is where the opportunity lies; the opportunity to actively determine the upheavals ahead of us, and make them an asset by using machines where they can sensibly support people and where they — as described in the introduction — adopt tasks that do not necessarily (or no longer have to be) carried out by humans. That also means that many job profiles will have to change considerably in the future, even those that we had never even anticipated. But to do so, we also have to coordinate our education system. I consider education the key to a successful future. If new job profiles are created, there must also be people who match those profiles in terms of knowledge, experience and enthusiasm.

We still cannot say for sure where and how this great disruption to the working world will occur. But we’re the ones who hold sway over ensuring that technological progress has a positive effect on our working world and our everyday lives.

* Doris Albiez is Senior Vice President and General Manager at Dell EMC Germany

As we gear up for Mobile World Congress, Digital Transformation continues its rapid and profound effect across virtually every industry. Service providers, which play a unique and integral role in transformation initiatives, are not immune. In order to address their customers’ changing needs, they must undergo their own transformation to enhance capabilities while reducing costs and complexity.

This requires transforming across several dimensions – all at the same time:

• Their own operations and infrastructure – how do they embrace new technologies and architectures such as DevOps to more efficiently deliver services and how do they evolve and train their staff in new operating models to make it happen
• Their ecosystem and supply chain models – how do they evolve existing, and build new, relationships, with upstream partners, digital content providers and how do they navigate the procurement landscape to deliver the required flexibility
• Their service offerings and portfolio – How do they rapidly create and offer new, innovative, and differentiated services to existing enterprises and consumers while also expanding into new markets such as industrial IoT and machine-to-machine services.

Dell Technologies believes that service providers can achieve these objectives and turn IT into an innovation hub by modernizing, automating and transforming their infrastructure assets. For cloud service providers (X-as-a-service, consumer webtech and managed hosting providers), this means bringing the cloud to the enterprise by modernizing service offerings and automating processes to help their customers transform industries and how they operate. For communications service providers/telcos, this means bringing the cloud to the network by modernizing infrastructure, automating service delivery and transforming operations. As a result, they can use IT to accelerate innovation, increase agility, directly support business goals, and deliver differentiated business models and capabilities to their customers.

Each service provider will be on its own digital transformation journey and moving at its own speed. Additionally, each will arrive at a different destination specific to their needs, the needs of their customers and their relationships with their suppliers.

By investing in and modernizing their own operations and capabilities, service providers can enhance agility, reduce costs, speed time-to-service delivery and ultimately increase customer productivity and satisfaction.

The Dell Technologies family is uniquely positioned to help service providers address their specific requirements across multiple architectures and business models. We welcome you to stop by our booth in Hall 3, Stand 3K10.

There we will be featuring solutions from Dell EMC, a collective force of innovative capabilities trusted all over the world to provide technology solutions and services that accelerate Digital Transformation. Dell EMC solutions featured in the booth include:

 EDGE SOLUTIONS

• View the newly designed micro Modular Data Center (MDC) – debuting at Mobile World Congress – and learn how you can embed compute and storage capacity at the edge where data is being generated.
• Re-imagine the customer edge with new universal CPE platforms and SD-WAN Ready Node solutions.

 CORE / CLOUD SOLUTIONS

• See how you can bring the cloud to the network with our NFV solutions and Telco Cloud offerings.
• Experience Dell EMC’s larger MDC capabilities with a virtual and interactive tour. Put on a headset and be transported to one of our latest MDC designs, the Flex Module.
• View our open and flexible rack scale infrastructure, the DSS 9000, and see how Dell EMC is enabling NEBS-compliant rack scale solutions.

OEM SOLUTIONS

• Learn how network builders can leverage the unique capabilities of our OEM team to build bolder, innovate faster and scale smarter.

IoT SOLUTIONS

• See how Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) solutions provide highly efficient edge-to-core-to-cloud storage with built-in analytics to unlock the value of your IoT data.

• Discover how Dell IoT Gateways transform Fleet Management by eliminating machine to machine telematics silos, for more cost savings; increased customer satisfaction and safety; and improved employee performance.
• Learn how Dell IoT is revolutionizing the building services sector and facilities management by transforming high energy costs into savings with a powerful, integrated intelligent building solution.

FINANCIAL SERVICES AND GLOBAL SUPPORT

• Talk to Dell EMC’s financial services and global support teams to learn how you can get started today, with peace of mind, regardless of the location.

Visit the Dell Technologies booth in Hall 3, Stand 3K10 to explore the solution demos and join the conversation with our experts. We look forward to seeing you in Barcelona!

Do you remember the hilarious scenes of the summer of 2016, with people running around in public spaces, staring at their smartphones, looking for rare Pokémon? Although the Pokémon Go mania has died down, the future for Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality is bright, even for Business-to-Business (B2B) applications. For Service Providers looking for a lucrative niche, here’s a great opportunity.

According to IDC, worldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) market will reach almost USD 14bn this year, an increase of 130% over 2016. AR/VR spending is expected to accelerate over the next few years, says IDC, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 198% between 2015 and 2020, when the market will total USD 143bn. Over 40% of AR/VR spending this year was found in the consumer space, but applications in discrete manufacturing, retail, process manufacturing and personal and consumer services are set to take up a larger portion. Gartner too believes in the future of ‘immersive technologies’ in the B2B working space: “Enterprise architecture (EA) and technology innovation leaders should consider integrating AR and VR to improve customer and employee interactions and business performance,” their analysts wrote earlier this year.

Business leaders share this vision on the future of AR/VR: in a survey among participants in Dell EMC’s Transformation Conference in the Netherlands last June, 85% of them firmly believed that AR will be incorporated in all cars by 2030.

Getting Immersed

While it goes without saying that AR/VR is just one of the many shining stars in the sky of emerging technologies, it is also clear that this is a potentially lucrative niche for technology- and service providers. The possibilities are endless. To name just a few:

• Product design: in collaboration with Dell, Meta and Ultrahaptics, Nike is using immersive technology to let its creative thinkers develop new shoes. We showed a great movie on that at the recent Dell EMC World in Las Vegas.
• Testing and simulating in production environments: Airbus and Boeing are already building ‘virtual’ prototypes of airplane parts. This accelerates production, decreases prototyping cost and reduces time to market.
• Product launches: Jaguar Land Rover premiered its I-PACE concept car) during a virtual press event in both LA and London. All journalists were equipped with VR headsets and underwent an immersive experience, actually seeing the car being built around them. Each user was also able to interact personally with the car. This too happened in collaboration with Dell, check out the video!
• Maintenance: at the most recent CeBIT show, Atos and Siemens demonstrated how AR can be used to remotely manage maintenance assignments. Atos is building AR into Siemens’ MindSphere IoT operating system, and has been a true believer in AR/VR for years already.
• Hands-on training: online learning is a great tool already, but very unpractical if you need to get hands-on experience during the training. With VR/AR, you can actually perform and train all the movements you need to do.
• Construction: architects can build virtual houses, and let their customers take a tour through their house before any brick or mortar have been bought.
• Selling: how about ‘try-before-you-buy’? Getting the experience of driving a car definitely beats just sitting in the vehicle in a showroom.

VR-as-a-Service

Simulation has been around for a long time already, just think of pilots training to fly new airplanes. Over time, equipment will continue to go down in price, giving more companies access to these emerging technologies. In the meantime, both marketing- and technology service providers are setting up ‘VR-as-a-Service’, touting cloud platforms that allow companies to get experience on immersive technologies without having to invest in infrastructure themselves. This is definitely an area where our partner ecosystem can shine.

Another opportunity this market holds is for service providers offering ‛Data-Lakes-as-a-Service’: immersive technologies both use and generate huge amounts of data in different formats and from different sources. Being able to address, process and update data quickly can only enhance the immersive experience.

From a hardware point of view too, there is a fast-emerging market: workstations for the creative workers, servers that allow fast processing of data and scale-out storage to keep all the data in a safe environment. On the infrastructure side too, there are sales possibilities: AR/VR will boost the adoption of Edge Computing, since latency is the worst enemy of VR apps. That will provide Telco operators with a new very compelling competitive advantage in the arms race of the Digital Revolution.

Not every industry will benefit from AR/VR immediately, although the examples above show that there is a wealth of applications already. For Service Providers, there’s a great opportunity to diversify and differentiate themselves from the competition. Analysts predict enormous growth for the coming years. In the B2B market, AR/VR is definitely guaranteed a longer life than last summer’s hype on ‛Pokémon Go’ alone.

The U.S. is already one step ahead of the game — last December, members of the American Congress presented a bill on the ‘Development and Implementation of Artificial Intelligence’. Its aim is to establish a Federal Advisory Committee for AI. The drafters reasoned that understanding AI “is critical to the economic prosperity and social stability of the United States.”

How forward-thinking of them. But they have nothing on the Chinese — the Chinese State Council has stated that it wants China to be the leader in AI by 2025, which implies that they want to knock the U.S. from its pole position. Even the U.K. is eyeing up a lead position. But what about Germany? Ever since the pandemonium of last summer’s election, when the two largest parties frantically pushed for an AI ‘masterplan’ after China’s statement, not much has actually happened.

I didn’t expect a change in pace either, though. I think it’s much more important that politicians have the issue on their radar at all, and that they understand the implications of artificial intelligence.

Here is where opinions are diametrically opposed. Tesla’s Elon Musk and celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking have branded this technology “our biggest existential threat.” Steve Wozniak has attempted to offer a more balanced opinion, while Mark Zuckerberg has praised AI to the high heavens.

Of course, businesses are optimistic about what the future holds for AI, and are already using it for a wide array of applications: from communication, to cognitive searches and predictive analytics, to translation. The next big thing is the autonomous car. The (German) automotive sector, which used to focus on tin and steel, is also undergoing significant changes. Other sectors are following suit. To companies, AI is the game changer that will improve all our lives and revolutionize the economy. The results of our latest study on the working world of 2030 show that the majority of the 3,800 business leaders surveyed already anticipate a close human-machine symbiosis in the coming years. However, the same study also shows a clear split in opinions. Roughly half of the respondents were pessimistic about the effects of AI, while the other half were optimistic.

So what do we do now? The most important question concerns the implications that AI will actually have — will it usher in a bright new future or social disorder? The discussion on job losses is already in full swing.

Apocalyptic scenarios aren’t the only things we should be thinking about, but at the same time, it is worth reflecting on regulation at this early stage. I think that the AI expert Oren Etzioni has the right attitude. Following the example of Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics, he suggests three simple rules for artificial intelligence systems so that we are equipped for the worst-case scenarios and can prevent any conceivable damage. He says that AI must be strictly regulated, that AI must be discernable from humans, and that AI cannot arbitrarily handle confidential data. These may seem like superficial rules, but they serve as a very good starting point and basis for discussion.

Are these ideas a little too ahead of their time? I don’t think so. If we tackle these issues as early on as possible, then we will be in a much better position to plan the future of artificial intelligence. Isaac Asimov wrote his laws of robotics way back in 1942, and they are still considered exemplary, even today. And if that’s not a good source of motivation, then I don’t know what is.

There are two common challenges I hear from our customers when I ask how they are managing their IT transformation:

1. Pace of Change
2. Scope of Change

Businesses, regardless of their industry, need to be nimble in their strategy, efficient in the operations and responsive to their customers. It has become necessary for enterprises to innovate in all aspects of their business. Innovation is no longer confined to a limited group of people or restricted to some remote corner of the business. I see businesses, big and small, innovate in all aspects – build better products like Otto Motors, streamline operations and improve customer experience. The pace and scope of the change our customers experience is, paradoxically, relentless and constant. It is a testimony to our customers’ tenacity as they manage this change.

Using the right technology to drive innovation further and faster has become a strategic priority. Take, for example, the retail industry. Retailers need to closely track their inventory, monitor the product velocity and continuously improve customer experience. The Internet of Things (IoT) is enabling these retailers to monitor, analyze and respond to a dynamic situation in an effective manner. Similar innovations are emerging across industries and verticals creating complex, dynamic and demanding workloads. Supporting these emerging innovations require robust yet flexible technology platforms. These technology platforms should also have high performance, be scalable and provide maximum ROI.

To help businesses derive maximum value from these dual challenges of pace and scope of change, Dell EMC is expanding its formidable PowerEdge portfolio of servers with the PowerEdge R6415, PowerEdge R7415 and PowerEdge R7425. These three new PowerEdge servers, built with AMD EPYC processors, broaden our customers’ options in managing their IT transformation efforts effectively. Each PowerEdge server platform has been engineered and optimized to meet the complex computational and storage demands of the emerging and disruptive workloads such as:

• EDGE Computing Workloads – require server platforms that can not only handle the massive amounts of data created at the edge but have the performance density to manage these computations. The PowerEdge R6415 is a highly configurable, 1U single-socket server with up to 32 cores that offers the ultra-dense, scale-out computing capabilities needed for EDGE. With a support for up to 10 PCIe NVMe drives, the R6415 provides critical storage flexibility required for these workloads.
• Software Defined Storage (SDS) Workloads – have to manage exploding rates of data efficiently, securely and seamlessly across pooled resources. The PowerEdge R7415 is a 2U, single-socket with 128 PCIe lanes provides the bandwidth necessary for virtualization and supporting up to 24 NVMe drives for extreme storage requirements. The R7415 is the first AMD EPYC-based server platform certified as VMware vSAN Ready Node and offers up to 20% better TCO per four-node cluster for vSAN deployments at the edge.

• High-Performance Computing (HPC) Workloads – require server platforms not only with high performance but also the large bandwidth to move the results of the computations appropriately. The PowerEdge R7425 is a 2U, dual-socket has up to 64 cores and supports up to 4TB to provide the kind of accelerated computing that HPC workloads demand. It has been shown that the R7425 can deliver up to 25% superior performance for HPC workloads such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

Just as all the other servers of 14^th generation of PowerEdge servers, these three servers provide enterprises additional advantages:

• Intelligent automation through the very versatile iDRAC9 and easy system management support through Quick Sync 2
• The protection provided by PowerEdge’s integrated security features such as the cyber resilient architecture

We know the pace and scope of change will remain key challenges for our customers as they manage their IT Transformations, but with these customer-inspired features aimed to tackle these critical workloads, we’re confident these three new servers expand the Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio in supporting our customers’ IT infrastructure needs.

We continue to actively listen to our customers and ensure they are able to make the most of their data through our solutions. Just as the pace and scope of change remains challenging for our customers, building the right solutions continue to be a responsibility for us. I’m looking forward to continuing the journey with them.

Learn more about the complete PowerEdge portfolio at dellemc.com/Servers . Read the press release of these products and join the conversation at @DellEMCservers.

Your Brand Sets You Apart

I read an interesting article in Forbes the other day, which said, “No branding, no differentiation. No differentiation, no long-term profitability. People don’t have relationships with products, they are loyal to brands.” The brand is what keeps customers coming back.

As a marketer, I certainly believe that when you have invested in setting up your own company and spent countless hours innovating, designing and building your IP to run on Dell EMC OEM platforms, your brand deserves to be up front and central. It’s all about standing out from the pack. Of course, for some OEM customers, debranding is more important. The bottom line is we want to do what’s right for your business in the easiest way possible.

Rebrand and Customize Your Platform

In support of this principle, we have just launched the new Dell YourID portal, a one-stop shop customization portal for OEM customers and partners, allowing you to personalize your platform and custom brand your assets, both inside and out.

From the Outside: Bezel Customization

Go online and use a simple GUI to design and customize your bezels and badges. We offer three tiers of standard customization levels plus an advanced array of modifications including shapes, colors, textures and vent patterns. There’s a bezel branding option for any timeline or any budget – and almost no limit to what we can do for you. In terms of products, you can customize pretty much everything from Dell EMC enterprise servers and storage to desktops, industrial PCs, laptops and tablets.

From the Inside: Software Branding and Custom Default Settings

Choose software branding and custom default settings for any configuration, everything from custom splash and setup screen logos to the BIOS and iDRAC settings. And when it’s time for updates, your settings are maintained, translating into quicker turnaround and increased uptime for your end-customers. Again, you can choose from three different tiers – Express (basic branding); Professional (BIOS and iDRAC setting customization) and Premium (deeper system customization).

What’s New and Different?

Of course, we always offered branding options but we have now centralized and streamlined the process as well as providing you with an easier and more intuitive bezel experience. For example, you can now upload your badge artwork, choose your bezel color, customize your luggage tag, and kick off your project. The days of back and forth emails with bezel screen shots are gone. The Dell YourID portal also provides a dynamic preview to show you in real-time exactly how your logo appears on your chosen platform.

Easy as ABC

For bezel customizations, just upload your logo, choose your color and text, and you’re ready to go. For software customizations, simply enter your branding information and settings, review your customizations, and wait for your sample customized ID Module. Once you’re satisfied, submit your project and let us take care of the rest! It really is that easy. It’s all part of our commitment to simplify your life and give you the power to do more!

What do you think of DellYourID.com? Do you believe brand is important to drive revenue? I’d love to hear your feedback and comments.

• Visit DellYourID.com now and see how easy it can be to elevate your brand: https://www.dellyourid.com/home
• Learn more about Dell EMC OEM and the Dell EMC Partner Program.
• Keep in touch. Follow @DellEMCOEMon Twitter, and join our LinkedIn OEM Showcase page here.

Last week, on February 1^st 2018 “it-was-a-wrap” for the Dell EMC Forum series with our last stop in Charlotte, North Carolina. Dell EMC Forum is a global event series through which customers and prospects can engage with the latest and most popular content from Dell EMC. There were keynotes, breakout sessions, demos, and hands-on-learning at our Solution Showcase and of course, lots of industry networking.

“There’s lots of work left to be done educating Dell Technologies clients about the whole portfolio and what other solutions they might be able to take advantage of,” Mike Sharun, president of enterprise sales for Canada, told IT World Canada when the Forum was held there last year.

These in-person events have been a great opportunity for us to do just that and take the Dell EMC message to 14 cities across Canada and the US and talk to 7500+ attendees.

Now with the Virtual Forum Live Day we can connect with even more customers across both North America and Latin America!

 On February 15^th at 11am EST, the Dell EMC Virtual Forum Day will go live. Customers will have an opportunity to engage with interesting content including:

• Keynotes by Michael Dell, CEO & Chairman of Dell Technologies and John Roese, President, Dell EMC
• On-demand webcasts from a number of different tracks including, Digital Transformation, Modern Infrastructure, Cloud Strategy and Workforce Transformation.
• White papers, videos, infographics available for download in our IT Transformation and Workforce Transformation zones
• Live chat with some of Dell EMC’s finest technology experts including scheduled chats with David Fritz and Matt Cowger

Best of all, you can participate in our Scavenger Hunt for your chance to win some amazing prizes including a GPS Quadcopter Drone, GoPro Hero 6 and Amazon Echos!

Register now to save the date and learn what’s driving the next era and its impact on your business.

Contact Sonia.sharma@dell.com for more information. #DellEMCForum #Virtual

As workplaces have evolved, so have the workforces that use them. Several distinct worker personas have emerged, each with its own demands for specific hardware, software and services. We think it’s time your customers knew more about them.

Thinking about how people work forces you to categorize them almost immediately. What’s their role? What components do they need to fulfill that role? By understanding Dell EMC’s personas, your sales team can quickly identify these different categories, helping them pick the technology that’s right for customers’ users.

Thinking even deeper, you can split personas into different groups, too. Creatives and engineers are two such personas, and are the most likely to use our workstation products.

Engineers

Driving industry transformation, this persona uses computer-aided-design and computer-aided-manufacturing software to create products. Engineers design the products that are integral for your customers’ development, and Dell EMC has a solution for each stage of their workflow.

Take the Dell Precision 7000 Series, for example, with Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. It has a dual-socket motherboard to allow for massive processing power, and it can support up to four NVIDIA Quadro or AMD Radeon graphics cards. Combine this workstation with the Dell UltraSharp monitor, and engineers get a fully immersive working experience. The same series in 2U rackmount provides a centralized workstation environment, and with that, customers can expect to get remote configuration, operating system deployment and health monitoring.

Swiss engineering and research company, GKP Fassadentechnik is solving complex environmental issues with its engineering models and sees Dell EMC as a strategic partner for its increasing productivity. Read the case study in our engineer persona guide to learn more.

Creatives

Whether your customer is developing the latest blockbuster movie, creating an immersive virtual reality experience for a product launch, or editing 8k videos, an ISV-certified Dell Precision workstation with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro is the tool they can rely on. To bring their creations to life, however, these devices need to connect to render farms, and Dell EMC offers PowerEdge servers in an array of configurations, as well as switches to provide fast connectivity, and Isilon storage for sharing across multiple national or global sites.

In our guide to creative workers, we introduce Animal Logic, an Australian animation and visual effects company behind Happy Feet, The Matrix and The Great GatsbyIt has partnered with us for the last 10 years across its bases in London, Vancouver, Sydney and California. You can find out why by downloading the guide.

Our Approach

Technology has a huge potential to help organizations transform their workplaces, and by extension, transform their people’s working lives. We believe that approaching workers as personas is a critical part of workplace transformation, providing personalized products for how employees work today and in the future.

We’ll take care of the solutions, so you can take care of your customers.

###

Read the Creative User and Engineer guides, as well as others, here.

We’ve also created related emails here, on our new Digital Marketing Platform so that your marketing teams can quickly get these guides into the hands of your customers. The guides explain how to maximise the productivity of their employees through the right choices from our end-to-end portfolio.

If you don’t have access to the Digital Marketing Platform, please register here.

This blog was co-authored by Robert W Hormuth, Vice President/Fellow, CTO, Server & Infrastructure Systems and Jimmy Pike, Vice President/Fellow, Server Architect, Server & Infrastructure Systems Office of CTO.

Trends & Observations can serve two purposes. One, a view into a possible state and two, a reflection of things around us that can lead to disruptions.  Sometimes you have to look closely to see the trees and other times far away to see the forest.

#1 Customer is King

The customer it turns out, is indeed always right…something we have all heard many times but often forget in the technology world.  The winners this year will be technology companies that truly listen and respond to their customers with products, solutions, and services that actually solve customer problems and result in a better business outcome.

#2 The Real Customer Value is in the Data

2018 will see companies forced to find value in their data or be disrupted by competition that find ways to mine data to create business value and services.  Much of this valuation will be done using ML/DL techniques – see #11.  2018 will see both a heightened level of cyber-attacks and a whole new realm of security embedded in the very foundation of the server to protect a customer’s most valuable asset – see #16.

#3 Fabrication Equality

Not a commodity, but rather the various chip makers are at or so near enough to the same process node size that leadership via node size is no longer a differentiator.  Thus execution, architectural choices, and proper product definition wins.

#4 Competition for CPUs Emerge

Intel, AMD, QUALCOMM, Cavium, and IBM emerge with competitive CPU offerings.  Going back to Fabrication Equality as an equalizer.  This is healthy for the industry as a whole to enable and drive new innovations that solve real customer problems.

#5 Memory-Centric Computing

In 2018 the industry will fully conclude we must embrace memory centric computing.  This will open up innovation on a variety of fronts on HW and SW.  As more devices (FPGAs, Storage Class Memory, ASICs, GPUs…) move into the microsecond to sub-microsecond domain (see Attack of the Killer Microseconds) we can no longer treat these devices as second class citizens behind a thick protocol stack nor can we software define them without losing their intrinsic value.  GenZ is gaining greater industry participation as a truly open standard to address this problem.   But the first step in any 10 step program is recognition of a problem.

#6 Rise of the Single Socket Server

The industry has been on a journey from large SMP Machines to scale out for years.  We stopped at 2S, quite frankly, due to a lack of a real single socket optimized CPU.  With core counts (32) and memory channels (8) continuing to rise a single socket server is more viable than ever.  Dell EMC offers 2 single socket AMD EPYC systems for these reasons (PowerEdge R7415 and PowerEdge R6415).

#7 Heterogeneous Computing Saves the Day

With CPU performance CAGR flat lining on general purpose CPUs and businesses looking to disrupt in the digital transformation ahead of competition, businesses that want to get ahead and stay ahead will turn more toward specialized computing (GPUs, FPGA, ASICs, SmartNICs).  Optimized for these new digital big data problems where ML techniques can be used to find the needle in the sea of data.  Moore’s Law remember is an economic law, not a performance law, which basically says if you can extract enough value out of a silicon FAB investment you can continue to shrink your FAB about every 2 years.  So, where and how we spend those transistors is shifting.

#8 Let’s get RedFish’y

Thanks for the memories IPMI, after several attempts to standardize infrastructure systems management the industry has finally rallied and succeeded with Redfish. We can thank the founding crew of Dell EMC, HPE, and Emerson for having the vision, patience, and pragmatic approach along with next wave of supporters (MS, VMware, Intel) that took Redfish to the DMTF where a broad set of industry partners are now working together to continue Redfish expansion while SNIA has joined the party with Swordfish for Storage management.

#9 Storage Class Memory (SCM) Finds a Home in Server

The advent of storage class memory will disrupt server applications, operating systems, and hypervisors.  We have to remember though we have spent the last 2 decades pushing scale out and stateless computing.  Persistence was once frowned upon to enable application agility, but with the advent of real amounts of cost affective and fast enough persistence things will change as the industry figures out how to use this new technology in due time.  The first easy use case will be in storage applications, especially software defined storage. Beyond storage, persistent memory will find a home in large in-memory computing and in Memory Centric architectures that can be disaggregated and composed without trapping this valuable resource.

#10 Servers are not a Commodity

The notion that Servers have become a commodity seems to come and go.  But let’s think about it for minute…  Commodity by definition is (1) a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be sold, such as copper or coffee (2) a useful or valuable thing, such as water or time.  So let’s think about water by way of example – surely we all agree that water is a basic resource and widely available in modern industrialized countries – but is it really a commodity?  Checking the shelves at 7-Eleven would seem to indicate that is NOT the case. There are 20+ types;  different bottles,  purification differences, additives, and so on… so how the commodity (water) is bottled, sold, distributed,  filtered… is vastly different.  We pay more per gallon for bottled water than gasoline here in the USA.  So, water is a commodity, but bottled water is NOT is the net of the story. Now apply that thinking to servers and you find that compute cycles are the commodity (the water) and the server is bottling of those compute cycles.    Now that computing is ubiquitous in every toy, IoT device, mobile device….etc…..that makes compute cycles more or less a raw material of our digital lives.   What Servers do is bottle commodity compute cycles.   How servers bottle up the compute; add Dram, IO, slots, drives, systems management, high availability, density, redundancy, efficiency, serviced, delivered, and warranted in a wrapper of Security….is how they are not a commodity, but are in fact packaging up the real commodity – compute cycles.  The fact that the Super7 hyperscalers have not aligned on a common server form factor solidifies these points.   So, while we could all drink water from the Hudson, well…

#11 Machine Learning Disrupts

Business will adopt Machine learning techniques and disrupt or someone else will disrupt them. Hence greater demand for datacenters to become agile, automated and orchestrated while adopting new heterogeneous compute.  They will however, begin to recognize that it is a tool and not the answer all problems.  This will lead to more practical focus on problems where it excels.

#12 Rise of the Edge – Compute Follows the Data

Computing demands have always followed the data; from Mainframe-Terminal, to the Client-Server, Mobile-Cloud, and the emerging IoT-Edge Era. The location of compute has always been based on an economic function Fn(cost of compute cycles, size of data, complexity of data,  bandwidth costs).  Those variables have driven where we compute since the dawn of computing and will continue into the future. The cost of networking will further begin to drive the realization that not only should compute occur at the edge, but data storage as well.  Data should be stored as close as possible to the point of creation.  Information from the data may be needed elsewhere, or even replication of some of the data may be elsewhere, but not the general rule. Look for more compute at base stations, retail stores, factories, etc….anywhere large amounts of data is created to make business critical decisions or one wants to create a more real time experience for the consumer.  This will also spawn the next generation of hybrid cloud via distribution of processing between edge servers / edge data-centers and centralized data-centers/cloud. The goal will be to find the valuable data near the source (where data is generated), minimize the amount of data that needs to be stored at centralized location (public/private cloud), and deliver results most efficiently to where they are needed.  Focus on flawless remote operation and administration (no touch required) will become the emerging goal.  This will begin the revolution toward truly distributed computing performed and data stored at the edge.

#13 Public Cloud | Hybrid Cloud | Private Cloud Find Balance

The various cloud models will continue to grow and blur the lines between compute consumption models.  Companies will realize these are styles of compute and not based on location.   As the ease of use equalizes across (CI, HCI), companies will refine their TCO models finding a need for all three consumption models across different needs.  Multi-tenant nature and value of data will continue to raise security concerns in the Public Cloud.

#14 Software Continues to Eat Hardware

Personally, as Server dudes, we love Software, and Wirth’s law is fantastic J  (Wirth’s law, also known as Page’s law, Gates’ law and May’s law, is a computing adage which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster).  The evolution of infrastructure and software platform models continue adding abstraction.  From MaaS (Metal as a Service) to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) to SaaS (Software as a Service) to PaaS (Platform as a Service) to CaaS (Container as a Service) to the new FaaS (Function as a Service).  The goal of all of these models is to continue SW abstractions to aide in application agility, development speed (devOps), deployment, orchestration, and management of application lifecycles.  FaaS is positioned to be quickly adopted for green field applications while CaaS will likely take over as the predominate deployment within an IaaS or PaaS environment for legacy applications.  Now the funny thing, especially in the machine learning space, we see more and more MaaS pick up to eke out every last bit of performance.  You know the old saying, what is new is old and old is new again.

#15 SSD/NVMe in Enterprise Continue Rapid Adoption

Need more be said….NVMe & SSD’s will displace rotating disks in Servers.  From boot drives to high performance IOP monsters to super capacity. They simply make sense and the cost points/sizes make it a no brainer given the gains. And case in point, NVMe SSD have already reached price parity with SAS SSD.

#16 Security Must be End-to-End

2018 will see a definite shift in terms of security and the continuation of 2017 initiatives.  For example, the Dell PowerEdge 14G server family now has a cryptographic security architecture where part of a key value pair is immutable, unique, and set in the hardware during the system fabrication process.  This method provides an indisputable root of trust embedded in the hardware which eliminates the “man in the middle” opportunity all the way from manufacture of server to delivery to customer, and from power-on to the transfer of control to the operating system.  The term security, seems incomplete considering the scope of today’s need especially in lights of recently exposed security holes present in all modern CPU architectures.  2018 will see security expand to what is better termed as system-wide protection, integrity verification and automated remediation.   While impenetrability is always the objective, with the increasing complexity and sophistication of attackers, it is very likely that additional vulnerabilities and exploits will emerge. As recently seen, remediation can be extremely costly in terms of performance causing a reemergence of single tenancy in some environments.  One of the 2018 objectives will be holding a successful intrusions harmless. In other words, if someone can get into the platform, making sure they cannot obtain meaningful information or do damage.  This will lead to a more intense trust strategy based on more identity management.  Identity at all level (user, device, and platform) will be a great focus and require a complete end-to-end trust chain for any agency that is able to install executables on the platform and policy tools for ensuring trust.  This will likely include options based on block chain.  Emerging standards like Gen-Z where keys are embedded in the transaction layer will also be required.  In open environments where any user can run code, this struggle for “who is ahead” is likely to continue.  Greater focus on encryption will emerge requiring any data at rest to be encrypted.  (However, even this does not eliminate the risk associated with recent CPU vulnerabilities.) System designers will be forced to trade complications associated with data management and loss of features like deduplication against risk and will cause reconsideration of many software defined strategies to be compared to what is available on focused systems.

#17 Composable Marketing

Hype stays ahead of reality. Composability was a big buzz word in 2017.  Unfortunately, as blogged by Dell EMC , the hype is ahead of reality until we get new architectures in place that allow true composability via disaggregation that enable memory centric computing vs CPU centric computing for these new classes of microsecond devices.  The industry is on the right path with GenZ but we are still a ways out.

Your Brand Sets You Apart

I read an interesting article in Forbes the other day, which said, “No branding, no differentiation. No differentiation, no long-term profitability. People don’t have relationships with products, they are loyal to brands.” The brand is what keeps customers coming back.

As a marketer, I certainly believe that when you have invested in setting up your own company and spent countless hours innovating, designing and building your IP to run on Dell EMC OEM platforms, your brand deserves to be up front and central. It’s all about standing out from the pack. Of course, for some OEM customers, debranding is more important. The bottom line is we want to do what’s right for your business in the easiest way possible.

Rebrand and Customize Your Platform

In support of this principle, we have just launched the new Dell YourID portal, a one-stop shop customization portal for OEM customers and partners, allowing you to personalize your platform and custom brand your assets, both inside and out.

From the Outside: Bezel Customization

Go online and use a simple GUI to design and customize your bezels and badges. We offer three tiers of standard customization levels plus an advanced array of modifications including shapes, colors, textures and vent patterns. There’s a bezel branding option for any timeline or any budget – and almost no limit to what we can do for you. In terms of products, you can customize pretty much everything from Dell EMC enterprise servers and storage to desktops, industrial PCs, laptops and tablets.

From the Inside: Software Branding and Custom Default Settings

Choose software branding and custom default settings for any configuration, everything from custom splash and setup screen logos to the BIOS and iDRAC settings. And when it’s time for updates, your settings are maintained, translating into quicker turnaround and increased uptime for your end-customers. Again, you can choose from three different tiers – Express (basic branding); Professional (BIOS and iDRAC setting customization) and Premium (deeper system customization).

What’s New and Different?

Of course, we always offered branding options but we have now centralized and streamlined the process as well as providing you with an easier and more intuitive bezel experience. For example, you can now upload your badge artwork, choose your bezel color, customize your luggage tag, and kick off your project. The days of back and forth emails with bezel screen shots are gone. The Dell YourID portal also provides a dynamic preview to show you in real-time exactly how your logo appears on your chosen platform.

Easy as ABC

For bezel customizations, just upload your logo, choose your color and text, and you’re ready to go. For software customizations, simply enter your branding information and settings, review your customizations, and wait for your sample customized ID Module. Once you’re satisfied, submit your project and let us take care of the rest! It really is that easy. It’s all part of our commitment to simplify your life and give you the power to do more!

What do you think of DellYourID.com? Do you believe brand is important to drive revenue? I’d love to hear your feedback and comments.

• Visit DellYourID.com now and see how easy it can be to elevate your brand: https://www.dellyourid.com/home
• Learn more about Dell EMC OEM and the Dell EMC Partner Program.
• Keep in touch. Follow @DellEMCOEMon Twitter, and join our LinkedIn OEM Showcase page here.

Last week, on February 1^st 2018 “it-was-a-wrap” for the Dell EMC Forum series with our last stop in Charlotte, North Carolina. Dell EMC Forum is a global event series through which customers and prospects can engage with the latest and most popular content from Dell EMC. There were keynotes, breakout sessions, demos, and hands-on-learning at our Solution Showcase and of course, lots of industry networking.

“There’s lots of work left to be done educating Dell Technologies clients about the whole portfolio and what other solutions they might be able to take advantage of,” Mike Sharun, president of enterprise sales for Canada, told IT World Canada when the Forum was held there last year.

These in-person events have been a great opportunity for us to do just that and take the Dell EMC message to 14 cities across Canada and the US and talk to 7500+ attendees.

Now with the Virtual Forum Live Day we can connect with even more customers across both North America and Latin America!

 On February 15^th at 11am EST, the Dell EMC Virtual Forum Day will go live. Customers will have an opportunity to engage with interesting content including:

• Keynotes by Michael Dell, CEO & Chairman of Dell Technologies and John Roese, President, Dell EMC
• On-demand webcasts from a number of different tracks including, Digital Transformation, Modern Infrastructure, Cloud Strategy and Workforce Transformation.
• White papers, videos, infographics available for download in our IT Transformation and Workforce Transformation zones
• Live chat with some of Dell EMC’s finest technology experts including scheduled chats with David Fritz and Matt Cowger

Best of all, you can participate in our Scavenger Hunt for your chance to win some amazing prizes including a GPS Quadcopter Drone, GoPro Hero 6 and Amazon Echos!

Register now to save the date and learn what’s driving the next era and its impact on your business.

Contact Sonia.sharma@dell.com for more information. #DellEMCForum #Virtual

As workplaces have evolved, so have the workforces that use them. Several distinct worker personas have emerged, each with its own demands for specific hardware, software and services. We think it’s time your customers knew more about them.

Thinking about how people work forces you to categorize them almost immediately. What’s their role? What components do they need to fulfill that role? By understanding Dell EMC’s personas, your sales team can quickly identify these different categories, helping them pick the technology that’s right for customers’ users.

Thinking even deeper, you can split personas into different groups, too. Creatives and engineers are two such personas, and are the most likely to use our workstation products.

Engineers

Driving industry transformation, this persona uses computer-aided-design and computer-aided-manufacturing software to create products. Engineers design the products that are integral for your customers’ development, and Dell EMC has a solution for each stage of their workflow.

Take the Dell Precision 7000 Series, for example, with Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. It has a dual-socket motherboard to allow for massive processing power, and it can support up to four NVIDIA Quadro or AMD Radeon graphics cards. Combine this workstation with the Dell UltraSharp monitor, and engineers get a fully immersive working experience. The same series in 2U rackmount provides a centralized workstation environment, and with that, customers can expect to get remote configuration, operating system deployment and health monitoring.

Swiss engineering and research company, GKP Fassadentechnik is solving complex environmental issues with its engineering models and sees Dell EMC as a strategic partner for its increasing productivity. Read the case study in our engineer persona guide to learn more.

Creatives

Whether your customer is developing the latest blockbuster movie, creating an immersive virtual reality experience for a product launch, or editing 8k videos, an ISV-certified Dell Precision workstation with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro is the tool they can rely on. To bring their creations to life, however, these devices need to connect to render farms, and Dell EMC offers PowerEdge servers in an array of configurations, as well as switches to provide fast connectivity, and Isilon storage for sharing across multiple national or global sites.

In our guide to creative workers, we introduce Animal Logic, an Australian animation and visual effects company behind Happy Feet, The Matrix and The Great GatsbyIt has partnered with us for the last 10 years across its bases in London, Vancouver, Sydney and California. You can find out why by downloading the guide.

Our Approach

Technology has a huge potential to help organizations transform their workplaces, and by extension, transform their people’s working lives. We believe that approaching workers as personas is a critical part of workplace transformation, providing personalized products for how employees work today and in the future.

We’ll take care of the solutions, so you can take care of your customers.

###

Read the Creative User and Engineer guides, as well as others, here.

We’ve also created related emails here, on our new Digital Marketing Platform so that your marketing teams can quickly get these guides into the hands of your customers. The guides explain how to maximise the productivity of their employees through the right choices from our end-to-end portfolio.

If you don’t have access to the Digital Marketing Platform, please register here.

A recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek article entitled “The Tech Guy Building Wearables for America’s Olympians” profiles Mounir Zok, the man in charge of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s technology and innovation. The article discusses how Mr. Zok is bringing a Silicon Valley data scientist mentality to help America’s Olympic athletes more effectively leverage data and analytics to win Olympic medals.

To quote the article:

Zok won’t say who his partners were in the development process or even which athletes are using the suits; any hints might tip off Olympic engineers in other countries, erasing the USOC’s advantage.“I call it the 1 percent question,” he says.“Olympic events typically come down to a 1 percent advantage. So what’s the one question that, if we can provide an answer, will give our athletes that 1 percent edge?

Wait a second, what is this “1% edge,” and is that something that we can apply to the business world? I wanted to drill into this “1% edge” to not only verify the number, but to further understand how the “1% edge” might apply to organizations trying to effectively leverage data and analytics to power their businesses (see “Demystifying the Big Data Business Model Maturity Index”).

Verifying the 1% Edge

To start validating this 1% edge, I evaluated single athlete sports, where focusing on the singular performer is easier than a team sport. Here’s what I found.

Professional Golf. The top 5 worldwide professional golfers (as measured by strokes per round) are only 3 percent better than players #96 – #100. Even more amazing is that while the top 5 professional golfers are only separated by 3 percent in their stroke average, from golfers #96 through #100, the golfers ranked #96 – #100 earned 89.5 percent less than the top 5 (see Figure 1)!

Figure 1: YTD Statistics, Farmers Insurance Open, January 28, 2018

The 3 percent edge is quite evident in golf. Three strokes can be the difference between victory and defeat, and it also demonstrates the disparity in earning potential.

2016 Olympics Men’s Track. Next I looked at the 2016 Olympics men’s track events: 100 meter dash, 400 meter dash and marathon. The difference between the very best and those dreaming of gold medals was again only a small percentage, specifically fractions of seconds in sprinting events.

Figure 2: 2016 Olympic Men’s 100 Meter Results

Figure 3: 2016 Olympic Men’s 400 Meter Results

Figure 4: 2016 Olympic Men’s Marathon Results

In summary:

• The difference between a gold medal and no medal was between 1.22% to 2.28%
• The difference between a gold medal and 8^th place IN THE OLYMPICS was between 2.40% to 3.67%

Think about the years of hard work and commitment these world-class athletes put into preparing for these events, only to finish out of the medals by approximately 2%. So while the “1% edge” may not be entirely accurate, I think a 1% to 3% difference on average looks about right for athletes (and organizations) that want to be considered world class.

Applying the 3% Edge to Become World Class

What does a 3 percent edge mean to your business? What does it mean to be 3 percent better in retaining customers, or bringing new products to market, or reducing hospital readmissions, or preventing unplanned maintenance?

While I couldn’t find any readily available metrics about world class in these business areas, I came back to the seminal research from Frederick F. Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser, Jr. highlighted in the classic “Harvard Business Review” article “Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services” written in 1990. The bottom line from their research: increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95% (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Profitability Impact from a 5% Increase in Customer Retention

When these research results were published in 1990, they startled so many marketing executives that it set off a rush to acquire Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications like Siebel Systems.

The Power of Compounding 1% Improvements

One of the most powerful concepts behind “hitting lots of 3 percent singles versus a single 20 percent homerun” is the concept of compounding. So what does a “3 percent compounding” actually look like? Let’s walk through a fraud example.

Let’s say you have a $1 million run-rate business with an annual 10 percent fraud rate. That results in $100K in annual fraud losses. What if, through the use of advanced analytics, you were able to reduce the fraud fate by 3 percent each year? What is the cumulative effective of a 3 percent annual improvement over five and 10 years?

Figure 6: 3% Compounded Impact on Fraud

While the results start off pretty small, it doesn’t take much time until the compounding and cumulative effects of a 3 percent improvement provide a significant financial return. And though it may not make much sense to look beyond five years (due to customer turnover, technology, evolving competition and market changes), even at five years the financial return is significant.

Take it a step further and consider the impact when combining multiple use cases, such as:

• Waste and spoilage reduction
• Energy effectiveness
• Preventative maintenance
• Unplanned network or grid downtime
• Hospital acquired infections
• Unplanned Hospital readmissions
• Power outages
• Delayed deliveries

A business that acquires a 3 percent compounding effect across numerous use cases begins to look like a business that can achieve compound growth.

Summary

I believe there is tremendous growth opportunity for organizations that have the data and analytical disciplines to drill into what a 3 percent improvement in performance might mean to the overall health of their business. Such analysis would not only highlight the power of even small improvements, but offer clarity into what parts of the business should be prioritized for further acceleration.

Sources:

Table 1: YTD Statistics, Farmers Insurance Open, January 28, 2018

The post The 3% Edge: How Data Drives Success in Business and the Olympics appeared first on InFocus Blog | Dell EMC Services.

Seamlessly Extend to the Cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), introduced in August 2017 at VMworld, is an on-demand service for running vSphere based cloud environments on Amazon Web Services.  It enables organizations to extend their on premises data centers and easily migrate applications to the public cloud without having to go through a re-platforming process.

Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, the service integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX and enables vAdmins to manage cloud resources with familiar VMware tools.  Optimized to run on elastic, bare metal AWS infrastructure, the service provides enterprise-grade capabilities, a flexible subscription based consumption model, and is managed by VMware.  You can use VMware cloud on AWS in a variety of ways:

• Application migration (temporary or as the permanent primary platform for an application)
• Resource to accommodate host failures without having to overprovision for hardware
• Instant on-demand capacity boost to meet host demand increases (expected seasonal or unplanned)
• Disaster recovery, and
• Test/dev environment

Protect Your VMware Cloud on AWS Workloads With Dell EMC

And, data protection of workloads running in the cloud is your responsibility. Dell EMC was the first VMware partner to provide data protection for VMware Cloud on AWS with our Data Protection Software that provides enterprise-grade data protection, best-in-class deduplication, and integrated management for on premise and cloud workloads.  Our solution provides customers with a number of advantages:

• Proven enterprise data protection for the enterprise public cloud
• Seamless integration with on-premises data protection
• Industry’s best-in-class deduplication leads to lower consumption costs
• Protects VMware workloads on AWS storage for increased resiliency
• Natively integrates into VMware management tools for the ultimate automation experience

New Dell EMC Data Protection Bundle for VMware Cloud on AWS Makes It Even Easier

We are now making it even easier and simpler for VMware Cloud on AWS customers to protect these environments with a single product bundle that includes everything they need for backing up and recovering VMware Cloud on AWS workloads – Dell EMC Data Protection Software and Data Domain Virtual Edition.

“We have been working very closely for over a year on Dell EMC data protection for VMware Cloud on AWS.  This is a co-engineered solution from VMware and AWS which was officially announced last year. Dell EMC was the first data protection solution for VMware Cloud on AWS. Until now our customers have leveraged their own DPS (Data Protection Suite) and DDVE (Data Domain Virtual Edition) licenses to protect their VMware Cloud on AWS workloads. Today we are proud to announce a new subscription sold specifically for VMware Cloud on AWS. This is an incremental opportunity in a brand-new market where Dell EMC Data Protection is the leader.” – Orna Berryman, Office of the CTO, VMware

Dell EMC’s Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS bundle provides many advantages:

• Purchased as a single product that includes all necessary Dell EMC software for backing up and recovering VMware Cloud on AWS workloads
• Pricing is similar to VMware Cloud on AWS and priced on a per host subscription model for a 1 or 3 year subscription
• Industry leading Data Domain deduplication to reduce backup storage capacity needs
• vSphere integration and attractive pricing that makes it painless to protect VMware Cloud workloads on AWS

Just because applications are being moved to the cloud doesn’t mean that data protection is any less important. With Dell EMC’s enterprise-grade data protection, you can leverage the same data protection solution of VMware Cloud workloads as that used for your on-premises workloads. Using one solution to protect hybrid cloud workloads simplifies administration and lowers the total cost of ownership.

• To learn more about Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware, please visit: www.dellemc.com/vmwareprotection
• Dell EMC Data protection for VMware Cloud^TM on AWS Solution Brief: http://www.dellemc.com/en-us/collateral/handout/h16519-data-protection-vmware-cloud-aws.htm
• Data Protection Bundle for VMware Cloud^TM on AWS: https://www.emc.com/collateral/handouts/h16900-dp-bundle-for-vmc-on-aws.pdf