It seems like everyone’s talking about big data these days to achieve competitive advantage through business efficiencies, improved customer service, and industry-disrupting innovation. Gaining access to massive amounts of information is definitely important for the modern enterprise, but what you do with that data is what really matters most.

To start thinking more strategically about your data, imagine you’re on an analytics journey that takes you to three exciting places. Each stop along the way will help you harness greater value from the data generated by your automation systems, including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, e-commerce, warranty management, and much more.

Descriptive Analytics

The most basic type of data analytics is descriptive analytics, which involves using data to gain insights into your current business realities. With this type of analytics, you can gain visibility into a whole host of things, such as what it’s costing you to manage a fleet of vehicles or how successfully your marketing automation campaigns are delivering qualified leads.

Being able to generate reports about what’s going on across the enterprise helps business leaders make better decisions. And as more data is collected, you can start noting trends and patterns that can give you further insights into possible future states.

Predictive Analytics

In this way, descriptive analytics becomes the springboard to the second stop on our data journey, the realm of predictive analytics. Predictive analytics requires a more expansive use of data, combining it with sophisticated mathematical models and algorithms to discern why things are happening and to facilitate more accurate forecasting based on different data inputs.

Predictive and descriptive analytics both rely on human beings to interpret data through engaged inquiry. We must look at the data and figure out what it means. But what if machines could do that work for us instead? Machine learning is the next destination you need to explore, because it’s opening huge opportunities for businesses to accelerate innovations.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is the capability of computer systems to adapt and get better at specific tasks without explicit programming. When massive amounts of data are being analyzed far faster than people can do it, businesses can more quickly and accurately do things like anticipate and stop security breaches and fraud, diagnose diseases, personalize customer communications, conduct scientific research, and much more.

A Data Journey, Completed

As an infrastructure company, Dell EMC offers solutions to advance enterprise organizations on their data journey. Hardware is often the key factor in effective data management, and our dedicated engineers are constantly configuring Ready Solutions to help companies achieve optimal performance with critical data storage and management systems, from SAP and ScaleIO to Hadoop and Splunk. These solutions include all the hardware, software, resources, and services you need to extract value from your data faster and with less risk.

A classic example of a company that has advanced its data journey with us is Mastercard. The leading payment solutions company started using our Ready Bundle for Cloudera Hadoop for descriptive analytics. Eventually, the company started using predictive analytics to anticipate customer spending patterns and is now using advanced machine-learning algorithms to automatically shut down credit cards and notify customers when their spending patterns look like fraud.

Contact Us Today—Or Meet with Us at Strata Data

All large organizations capture and store big data, yet many don’t have the systems and processes in place to capitalize on all information they have. At Dell EMC, we know that a successful big data project doesn’t begin with the deployment of a particular technology or solution. It begins with a business use case and a strategic roadmap that will take you from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow.

To learn more about our Ready Solutions, contact your Dell EMC representative at 1-866-438-3622. Or stop by and see us at the Intel booth at this year’s Strata Data Conference in San Jose from March 5–8. Thousands of top data scientists, analysts, engineers, and executives will be there to learn how to turn algorithms into greater advantage – you don’t want to miss it.

Part Two – From the Company’s Perspective – Innovation Leads to Optimization

As discussed in Part One, a well-constructed CSR plan has the potential both to benefit global sustainability and enhance customer trust. While amplifying customer loyalty is certainly at the heart of any company’s game plan, the influence of a sound CSR strategy goes beyond increasing the bond between customer and company.

The push to create and maintain a business model with social purpose often leads to increased efficiency and the development of new ways of working, with the positive effects felt both globally in terms of the environment and impact on the community, and internally, in the form of increased ROI and optimized performance on a company-wide scale. To those corporations who have already implemented long-range sustainability strategies, it has become increasingly clear that working in conjunction with Mother Nature is not only easier, more ethical and more sustainable than fighting her – it can also be more profitable.

Take Dell EMC, for example. Our own CSR vision began at the very top. When Michael Dell started this business in 1984, he wanted to enable human potential through technology, and our corporate responsibility efforts are an extension of this mission he set out to accomplish 30 years ago. This has led to the creation of our Dell 2020 Legacy of Good Plan, a set of ambitious goals related to the environment, our people, and the communities where we live and work.

We have found that championing CSR has been the catalyst for the development and adoption of new techniques for doing business, which have helped to reduce our corporate environmental footprint and cut down on waste throughout every step of the value chain. Here are the results of a few of our efforts:

• Innovative, sustainable packaging – We are the first technology company to create packaging from fast-growing biodegradable materials such as bamboo and mushrooms. Currently, 94 percent of packaging materials (by weight) are made from sustainable sources, helping us toward achieving our goal of delivering waste-free packaging by 2020.
• Reinventing ocean-bound plastics – Our drive to keep plastics in the value chain and out of the ocean benefits everyone. Plastics collected from beaches, waterways and other coastal areas are being incorporated into a new packaging system for our XPS 13 2-in-1 and XPS 15 2-in-1 laptops. This initial pilot project will start by keeping 16,000 pounds of plastics out of the ocean, and in support of UN SDG Goal 14, we are committed to increase annual usage 10x by 2025.
• Recycling precious metals – A ton of motherboards contains up to 800 times more gold than a ton of ore from the earth. With this in mind, Dell’s Circular Gold initiative has teamed with activist Nikki Reed to increase awareness of the need to recycle technology by upcycling our reusable gold into a jewelry line. We are also piloting the use of recycled gold in motherboards for select Dell laptops, continuing our leadership in supporting a closed loop supply chain and circular economy.
• Reshaping delivery processes – Flexible shipping strategies can have a dramatic effect on a company’s carbon footprint. When transporting products to 180 countries at a rate of one system per second, we partner with SmartWay, who provides us access to thousands of product carriers committed to collecting and sharing data with the goal of transporting goods efficiently and responsibly.
• Promoting better work environments – We work diligently with our suppliers to ensure that high working standards and labor practices are implemented within the supply chain. Our policies and standards are aligned with the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC), of which Dell is a founding member. This allows us to work together with industry partners to drive systematic change in our supply chain.

As a concept, CSR marks the spot where positive global initiatives, changing customer priorities and a company’s bottom line intersect. Properly nourished, it has the ability to positively impact all three. Incorporating a solid CSR plan into long-range strategies makes good common sense as well as sound business sense. More and more, we recognize that customers are putting their trust in forward thinking companies whose innovative outlook strives to create a more sustainable future.

It’s accepted knowledge across industries that companies that don’t undergo a digital transformation will find it difficult to survive in the coming decade. Legacy technology simply can’t support the performance and virtualization that businesses need to operate efficiently and provide modern products and services to their customers.

But demand for modern infrastructure really begins upstream, with the Communications Service Providers (CoSPs) that own the networks powering business connectivity. The problem is that many large CoSPs are still operating on a wide range of proprietary, legacy technologies themselves. These technologies require a large number of people to maintain and operate them. In addition, these technologies deliver network speeds and responsiveness that are less-than-optimal for the businesses downstream.

To start the transformation process based on this starting point, CoSPs have the seemingly insurmountable task of becoming virtualization experts, sorting through hundreds of vendors and products to architect the ideal infrastructure, and implementing the new technology in an optimal way, all without disrupting existing services.

More realistically, CoSPs need a reliable, knowledgeable partner to help them set a digital transformation strategy, prioritize and select technologies, and undergo digital transformation in a way that sets them up for success.

5 Key Focus Areas

CoSPs’ most pressing need (and opportunity) is to infuse infrastructure with more cloud technology to make it faster, more responsive and more automated. To do so, they need to adopt a significant amount of compute and virtualization technology across nearly every aspect of their infrastructure, starting with the following five areas:

• CoSP cloud – Central Offices need to evolve beyond physical appliances to provide cloud-based services to customers. This means upgrading to virtual appliances, then implementing virtual network functions, including software-defined networking (SDN). This will serve as a mechanism to stitch services together as well as help scale the networking topology between virtual functions.
• Next-gen access – Today’s companies need higher bandwidth to support their day-to-day operations and provide products and services in a fast and reliable way to their own customers. Providing next-gen access typically means migrating from static and expensive multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) virtual private network (VPN) circuits and physical customer premise equipment (CPE) nodes to more virtualized CPE nodes and secure access technologies, along with software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).
• Operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) transformation – CoSPs need to make it faster and easier to launch new services to customers by incorporating automation and telemetry and ensuring the systems they use to deliver network-based services have application plug in (API) -driven capabilities.
• Edge computing – To deliver services more rapidly across widespread markets, CoSPs will need to adopt enterprise edge computing in the next 12-18 months. There are a number of approaches for doing this, from evolving the Central Office with architectures such as Central Office Architected as a Data Center (CORD), to building an edge services cloud incorporating capabilities such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) to the evolution of the edge outside of existing physical facilities with modular data centers.
• 5G infrastructure – When 5G becomes available in the next 18-36 months, CoSPs will be tasked with a new set of challenges. The requirements of 5G are roughly between 100-1000 times the performance and scale of 4G, at 1/1000^th the latency, with significantly different economics on the monetization and operations. SDN will no longer be contained within the Central Offices, and CoSPs will need to embrace end-to-end SDN principles, such as network slicing. Network functions virtualization (NFV) will no longer be a centralized function running inside a virtual machine (VM), but inside containers or even running on top of bare metal.

The Partner CoSPs Need

Dell EMC makes digital transformation much easier for CoSPs. Not only are we a worldwide leader in compute and cloud-enabled IT infrastructure, we have the partnership framework in place to strategically and holistically guide CoSPs through the process of modernization across all five key areas.

Our experts give CoSPs the technology and tools to assemble the right combination of infrastructure and service capabilities to serve their business customers and remain competitive for years to come. Dell EMC’s focus on open-standards-based, disaggregated architecture means CoSPs won’t relive the mistakes of the past, trading proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in for a flexible, future-ready, scalable architecture.

The harsh reality is that most CoSPs won’t achieve the levels of virtualization and optimization they need without the right partner on their side. Dell EMC is poised to play a pro-active role in reshaping the future for service providers as they achieve digital transformation and provide the modern technology that will power the coming evolution of business.

It’s accepted knowledge across industries that companies that don’t undergo a digital transformation will find it difficult to survive in the coming decade. Legacy technology simply can’t support the performance and virtualization that businesses need to operate efficiently and provide modern products and services to their customers.

But demand for modern infrastructure really begins upstream, with the Communications Service Providers (CoSPs) that own the networks powering business connectivity. The problem is that many large CoSPs are still operating on a wide range of proprietary, legacy technologies themselves. These technologies require a large number of people to maintain and operate them. In addition, these technologies deliver network speeds and responsiveness that are less-than-optimal for the businesses downstream.

To start the transformation process based on this starting point, CoSPs have the seemingly insurmountable task of becoming virtualization experts, sorting through hundreds of vendors and products to architect the ideal infrastructure, and implementing the new technology in an optimal way, all without disrupting existing services.

More realistically, CoSPs need a reliable, knowledgeable partner to help them set a digital transformation strategy, prioritize and select technologies, and undergo digital transformation in a way that sets them up for success.

5 Key Focus Areas

CoSPs’ most pressing need (and opportunity) is to infuse infrastructure with more cloud technology to make it faster, more responsive and more automated. To do so, they need to adopt a significant amount of compute and virtualization technology across nearly every aspect of their infrastructure, starting with the following five areas:

• CoSP cloud – Central Offices need to evolve beyond physical appliances to provide cloud-based services to customers. This means upgrading to virtual appliances, then implementing virtual network functions, including software-defined networking (SDN). This will serve as a mechanism to stitch services together as well as help scale the networking topology between virtual functions.
• Next-gen access – Today’s companies need higher bandwidth to support their day-to-day operations and provide products and services in a fast and reliable way to their own customers. Providing next-gen access typically means migrating from static and expensive multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) virtual private network (VPN) circuits and physical customer premise equipment (CPE) nodes to more virtualized CPE nodes and secure access technologies, along with software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).
• Operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) transformation – CoSPs need to make it faster and easier to launch new services to customers by incorporating automation and telemetry and ensuring the systems they use to deliver network-based services have application plug in (API) -driven capabilities.
• Edge computing – To deliver services more rapidly across widespread markets, CoSPs will need to adopt enterprise edge computing in the next 12-18 months. There are a number of approaches for doing this, from evolving the Central Office with architectures such as Central Office Architected as a Data Center (CORD), to building an edge services cloud incorporating capabilities such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) to the evolution of the edge outside of existing physical facilities with modular data centers.
• 5G infrastructure – When 5G becomes available in the next 18-36 months, CoSPs will be tasked with a new set of challenges. The requirements of 5G are roughly between 100-1000 times the performance and scale of 4G, at 1/1000^th the latency, with significantly different economics on the monetization and operations. SDN will no longer be contained within the Central Offices, and CoSPs will need to embrace end-to-end SDN principles, such as network slicing. Network functions virtualization (NFV) will no longer be a centralized function running inside a virtual machine (VM), but inside containers or even running on top of bare metal.

The Partner CoSPs Need

Dell EMC makes digital transformation much easier for CoSPs. Not only are we a worldwide leader in compute and cloud-enabled IT infrastructure, we have the partnership framework in place to strategically and holistically guide CoSPs through the process of modernization across all five key areas.

Our experts give CoSPs the technology and tools to assemble the right combination of infrastructure and service capabilities to serve their business customers and remain competitive for years to come. Dell EMC’s focus on open-standards-based, disaggregated architecture means CoSPs won’t relive the mistakes of the past, trading proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in for a flexible, future-ready, scalable architecture.

The harsh reality is that most CoSPs won’t achieve the levels of virtualization and optimization they need without the right partner on their side. Dell EMC is poised to play a pro-active role in reshaping the future for service providers as they achieve digital transformation and provide the modern technology that will power the coming evolution of business.

It’s simple. The conversation is simple because the objective is simple:

How do I become more effective at leveraging (big) data and analytics (artificial intelligence) to power my business?

Success with artificial intelligence doesn’t begin with technology, but rather the business, and more specifically the people and processes running the business. Before deploying technology, leaders should seek to understand (envision) how artificial intelligence could power a profitable business, and drive compelling customer and operational outcomes.

Collaboration with stakeholders and key constituents is critical to understanding the decisions and needs of the business. While every organization’s needs vary, there exists a consistent, transparent process that can drive a more stable and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence.

Note: throughout this blog, when I use the term “artificial intelligence,” I mean that to include other advanced analytics such as deep learning, machine learning (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement), data mining, predictive analytics, and statistics (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Evolution of AI, ML and DL.

Artificial Intelligence Solution Decomposition Process

I teach a “Solution Decomposition Process” course at the University of San Francisco as well as at other universities whenever I guest lecture (like I will be doing at NUI Galway, Ireland on March 16 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm). I also spend considerable time teaching the “Solution Decomposition Process” to executive teams to help them successfully adopt artificial intelligence into their business. Whether lecturing or meeting with a small group of executives, I always begin by first addressing a basic question:

What do I mean by success?

If success is simply adopting and deploying advanced analytics technologies, then you don’t need strategic guidance to chart that journey.

However if success means deriving and delivering business value, and becoming more effective at leveraging big data and advanced analytics to power your business – then I have the process for you (see Figure 2)!

Figure 2: Solution Decomposition Process

Figure 2 outlines the “Solution Decomposition Process” that is designed to ensure that artificial intelligence is deriving and driving new sources of business value. The power of this process is its simplicity. By staying focused on the business or operational objectives and tasks, businesses can successfully transform how they use data and analytics to produce optimal outcomes.

There are six key steps to the Solution Decomposition Process to undertake before deploying AI solutions to derive and drive business value. Let’s take a quick look at each.

Step 1: Identify and Understand Your Targeted Business Initiative

Modernizing your data center is not a business initiative. Moving to the cloud is .not a business initiative. Installing an “Analytics as a Service” platform is not a business initiative.

So what is a business initiative?

A business initiative is a senior executive mandate that seeks measurable and material financial impact on the value of the business.

Here is a checklist of the key characteristics of a business initiative:

• Sense of urgency mandating results be delivered in 12-18 months
• Important to success and survival of the business
• Compelling and material financial impact (ROI)
• Clear business executive ownership – someone on the executive team is not sleeping at night due to their concerns on this initiative
• Analytically friendly in that customer, product, and operational insights have material impact on initiative success
• Bounty of potential data sources to be mined for actionable insights in support of the business initiative
• Strong CIO leadership and IT business collaboration

A thorough understanding of the business initiative is key before starting the journey, including:

• What are the targeted financial outcomes or returns from the business initiative?
• What are the metrics that will measure success?
• How will this initiative impact the customer for better or worse?
• What are the potential (and likely) impediments to success?

For example, PNC Financial Services Group’s annual report mentions the business initiative to “grow profitability through the acquisition and retention of customers and deepening relationships.” We will use this “increase customer retention/reduce customer attrition” business initiative for the rest of this exercise.

Figure 3: PNC Financial Services Group 2015 Annual Report

Step 2: Identify Your Stakeholders and Constituents

Next, identify the business stakeholders and constituents who either impact or are impacted by the targeted business initiative. This includes internal stakeholders (e.g., sales, finance, marketing, logistics, manufacturing) as well as external constituents like partners, suppliers, and don’t forget, the customers!

Start embracing some simple Design Thinking techniques. Create a single-slide persona for each stakeholder and key constituent as a way to make the key stakeholders “come to life” (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Create Persona for Key Stakeholders

See the blog, “Design Thinking: Future-proof Yourself from AI,” for more insights about the role of design thinking, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Step 3: Identify Key Decisions

Next, identify the decisions that the stakeholders and constituents need to make to support the targeted business initiative. Be sure to invest the time upfront to identify, validate, vet, and prioritize the decisions because: 1) not all decisions are of equal value and 2) there may be some decisions that need to be made prior to other decisions (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Identify, Prioritize and Create Decisions Roadmap

See the blog “The #1 IOT Challenge: Use Case Identification, Validation and Prioritization” for more details on how to identify, validate, and prioritize the organization’s key decisions.

Step 4:  Identify Predictive Analytics

The next step is challenging because it requires organizations to change their mindsets with respect to how they currently leverage data and analytics. Organizations need to guide their stakeholders through a process of identifying the most important predictions that will support the targeted initiatives. This process starts by identifying the most important questions that the stakeholders are asking today in support of their key decisions.

Questions can then be converted into predictive analytics. For example, instead of asking: “What was customer attrition last month?” we want to predict: “What will customer attrition likely be next month?” See Figure 6.

Figure 6: Creating Predictive Analytics

See the blog “Business Analytics: Moving From Descriptive To Predictive Analytics” for more details on the differences between descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

Step 5: Brainstorm Data That Might Be Better Predictors of Performance

Next, we want to collaborate with the business stakeholders and constituents to brainstorm what data they might need to make those predictions. Continuing with our “increase customer retention / reduce customer attrition” business initiative, we highlight one of top predictions:

“What will customer attrition likely be next month?”

To support the data brainstorming exercise, we would simply add the phrase “and what data might I need to make that prediction?” to the desired prediction. The results of this exercise might look like Figure 7.

Figure 7: Brainstorming Data that Might be Better Predictors of Performance

See the blog “Data Science: Identifying Variables That Might Be Better Predictors” for more details on how to brainstorm data sources that might be better predictors of performance.

Step 6:  Implement Technology

The final step – not the first step – is now to identify the architecture, systems, and technology necessary to support the business initiative. Understanding in detail the business, data, and analytic requirements helps determine what technologies are needed – and what technologies are not yet needed – as IT builds out their big data architecture and infrastructure (see Figure 8).

Figure 8: Data Lake Components

The availability of scale out architectures and cloud environments ensures storage and compute can be expanded as needed, reducing the need to overspend on technology while achieving a compelling return on investment.

Summary

There is a logical workflow in successfully adopting and tapping into the potential of artificial intelligence. Decision makers all too often put their immediate attention to the technology, but there is a host of activities to complete beforehand. If you are serious about monetizing data to drive business value, it is imperative to begin with the business – the people, customers, and stakeholders – that have different roles and responsibilities in determining the success of a business initiative. Start small, work your way outward to identify the supporting decisions and financial value – then get to the technology.

Sources:

Figure 1: What’s the Difference between Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning?

The post Artificial Intelligence: 6 Step Solution Decomposition Process appeared first on InFocus Blog | Dell EMC Services.

Five short years ago, Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) was a disruptive technology, and today it’s become a mainstream IT solution for all virtualized workloads. Customer adoption and year-over-year demand growth – estimated at 60% in 2018 – are evidence this trend is undeniably real and will continue.

As the leading HCI system sales vendor, according to IDC, Dell EMC has played a primary role in enabling and supporting this transition, and our goal is to offer a broad set of approaches that deliver the best fit for customers’ unique needs. One example of this is our XC Series, the best platform for those customers who have committed to Nutanix software.

We are continuing to expand the XC Family, and today we are announcing XC Core, a new offering that provides customers with an additional way to acquire Nutanix software licensing while leveraging the benefits of the Dell EMC XC platform. XC Core, available today, uses the same Dell EMC hardware and software as the XC Series appliances while the software is licensed and supported directly by Nutanix. This alternative lets customers buy Nutanix software licenses directly from authorized partners, and then add the licenses to pre-validated XC Core systems that are configured, built and tested by Dell EMC. It also enables license portability across infrastructure components and separate management and support of hardware and software lifecycles.

The XC Family – comprising XC Series appliances, XC Xpress appliances and now XC Core – is arguably the most complete and robust platform for customers deploying HCI with Nutanix software. Here’s why:

1. The XC platform is based on industry-leading and proven Dell EMC PowerEdge servers that are configured and optimized for HCI and Nutanix software. These latest 14^th generation PowerEdge servers were built with more than 150 custom requirements specifically for software-defined storage (SDS).
2. PowerEdge server BIOS and firmware for the XC Family are tuned and optimized for performance to run Nutanix software.
3. The XC platform includes Dell EMC IP that enables streamlined deployment, rapid restore to factory settings and bare metal recovery, rich in-band hardware monitoring and management, 1-click firmware and software upgrades, and workflow orchestration across a cluster.
4. Customers can choose the Nutanix licensing and support model that is best for their needs while still leveraging the benefits of the XC platform.
5. The XC Family comes with an ecosystem that includes reference architectures, network validation tools and integration with other Dell EMC and Microsoft technologies, including Pivotal, Avamar, Data Domain and Azure.
6. Customers can rely on global service and support that includes support centers and teams in 167 countries, over a thousand spare parts depots around the world, and technical experts fluent in 55 languages.

Dell EMC’s HCI leadership is based on building a world class portfolio of industry-leading technologies and solutions to address essentially any adoption model for consuming HCI. Working with customers around the world, we know there’s no single way—no silver bullet—to address every opportunity or challenge. Customers know they can turn to Dell EMC to find the solution that makes the most sense for their own unique requirements.

Based on our industry leading portfolio, we’re excited to offer yet another onramp to Dell EMC and our proven technologies and support. As customers increasingly turn to HCI, we look forward to continuing to offer them the industry’s best options to simplify and transform their IT.

Several years ago the industry coined the phrase “big data” and we discussed what this new term meant for Dell EMC. We framed our thought process using the three Vs: velocity, volume, and variety. Taming the three Vs meant significant business insights and dramatically improved financial results for our customers.

But looking back, it hasn’t worked out quite that way. We are now living in a post-big data era where we are dealing with an increased compute capacity and massive data sets.

Over the years data took the steering wheel while compute sat in the back seat. What has been missing over the last few years (as John Roese points out in his 2018 predictions blog) is the reality of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Our massive data sets are being processed by new systems that not only need to learn and reason with huge data sets, but also need to do that in a quick and reliable way at the speed of business.

Extracting the expected insights and business value from all of that data is a challenge – and an opportunity – for organizations. John Roese mentions that Big Data will become Big Intelligence; we need to embrace “Data Valuation with Big Intelligence”. We’ve moved beyond simply Big Data.

Why Data Valuation?

• “Data”: the Dell EMC journey continues to feature the handling of mission-critical data in all its forms, from mission-critical databases to unstructured data stores.
• “Valuation”: the process of calculating or reasoning about data’s value is a matter of computing intensity.

To process this critical business information in the age of data valuation we are going to need to process data differently. This requires the combination of storage and compute innovation. It’s a good thing we’ve already been at this for a few years!

In 2014, Dell EMC launched a data valuation research partnership with Dr. Jim Short of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Our research findings, published last year in MIT’s Sloan Management Review, highlight billion-dollar data valuation examples:

• The most valuable asset in Caesar’s Palace bankruptcy filing is the Total Rewards Customer Loyalty database. It has been valued at one billion dollars by creditors.
• LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com was mainly a data valuation exercise that also exceeded one billion dollars.
• Tesco placed an internal valuation of over one billion dollars on their Dunnhumby data asset, which contained the shopping habits of some 770 million shoppers (Kroger purchased the data for less than one billion).

The key to performing this type of data valuation will be to continually reason and value data at speed.

The “brains” of the IT infrastructure will evolve to quickly and efficiently recognize, analyze and label data, know what data goes where, identify how it needs to be stored and accessed in the future, and decide where it needs to live specifically. – John Roese

Data valuation will require the combination of multiple forms of data: legacy mission-critical data, recently-collected Big Data, and emerging forms of IoT data. Combining all three types of data together is crucial: they each represent evolving patterns of business activity over time. John Roese explains the transition from mission critical to Big Data (second wave) to IoT:

All three types of data must exist in a way that enables compute-intensive valuation. This valuation must extend from the cloud to the edge, and in future years to gateway devices.

The “Age of Data Valuation” will also require additional innovations in the areas of data trust (e.g., blockchain) and data visualization (e.g., AR/VR).

In future posts, I will expand on these technologies and their relation to data valuation.

Several years ago the industry coined the phrase “big data” and we discussed what this new term meant for Dell EMC. We framed our thought process using the three Vs: velocity, volume, and variety. Taming the three Vs meant significant business insights and dramatically improved financial results for our customers.

But looking back, it hasn’t worked out quite that way. We are now living in a post-big data era where we are dealing with an increased compute capacity and massive data sets.

Over the years data took the steering wheel while compute sat in the back seat. What has been missing over the last few years (as John Roese points out in his 2018 predictions blog) is the reality of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Our massive data sets are being processed by new systems that not only need to learn and reason with huge data sets, but also need to do that in a quick and reliable way at the speed of business.

Extracting the expected insights and business value from all of that data is a challenge – and an opportunity – for organizations. John Roese mentions that Big Data will become Big Intelligence; we need to embrace “Data Valuation with Big Intelligence”. We’ve moved beyond simply Big Data.

Why Data Valuation?

• “Data”: the Dell EMC journey continues to feature the handling of mission-critical data in all its forms, from mission-critical databases to unstructured data stores.
• “Valuation”: the process of calculating or reasoning about data’s value is a matter of computing intensity.

To process this critical business information in the age of data valuation we are going to need to process data differently. This requires the combination of storage and compute innovation. It’s a good thing we’ve already been at this for a few years!

In 2014, Dell EMC launched a data valuation research partnership with Dr. Jim Short of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Our research findings, published last year in MIT’s Sloan Management Review, highlight billion-dollar data valuation examples:

• The most valuable asset in Caesar’s Palace bankruptcy filing is the Total Rewards Customer Loyalty database. It has been valued at one billion dollars by creditors.
• LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com was mainly a data valuation exercise that also exceeded one billion dollars.
• Tesco placed an internal valuation of over one billion dollars on their Dunnhumby data asset, which contained the shopping habits of some 770 million shoppers (Kroger purchased the data for less than one billion).

The key to performing this type of data valuation will be to continually reason and value data at speed.

The “brains” of the IT infrastructure will evolve to quickly and efficiently recognize, analyze and label data, know what data goes where, identify how it needs to be stored and accessed in the future, and decide where it needs to live specifically. – John Roese

Data valuation will require the combination of multiple forms of data: legacy mission-critical data, recently-collected Big Data, and emerging forms of IoT data. Combining all three types of data together is crucial: they each represent evolving patterns of business activity over time. John Roese explains the transition from mission critical to Big Data (second wave) to IoT:

All three types of data must exist in a way that enables compute-intensive valuation. This valuation must extend from the cloud to the edge, and in future years to gateway devices.

The “Age of Data Valuation” will also require additional innovations in the areas of data trust (e.g., blockchain) and data visualization (e.g., AR/VR).

In future posts, I will expand on these technologies and their relation to data valuation.

From the blackboard to bots, technology has made inroads into classrooms all over the world. Where will the next innovation in education come from? We take you to the head of the class in this episode.

For more on these stories go to delltechnologies.com/trailblazers. Please let us know what you think of the show by leaving us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts.

Technology changes, it’s a fact of life, and sometimes making a multi-year commitment can be a difficult decision.  The Dell EMC Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program gives you additional peace of mind with guaranteed satisfaction and investment protection for those future technology changes.

The program covers the Dell EMC Storage Portfolio including; VMAX All-Flash, XtremIO X2, SC Series, Dell EMC Unity, Data Domain, Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA), Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) appliance.

Dell EMC Storage and Data Protection offers unbeatable value with a modern, efficient and feature rich product portfolio at no additional cost to you with purchase of a support agreement.

Brian Henderson (@BHendu), Storage Portfolio Marketing Director, gives us the details on the 3-Year Satisfaction Guarantee, Hardware Investment Protection and Predictable Support Pricing along with 4:1 All-Flash Storage Efficiency Guarantee, Never-Worry Migratio, All-inclusive Software and Built-In Virtustream Storage Cloud.  www.dellemc.com/futureproof

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

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.

Our goal is to help businesses use the most appropriate technology to suit employees’ needs – whatever their role, wherever they work, and however they work. That way, users get a better experience and organizations get more productive employees. Our guides offer the first step by providing you with the right information to further educate your customers about this critical component of workplace transformation.

This blog explores what offerings from the Dell Technologies portfolio would suit the needs of field workers.

Technology match-up

These workers can be found working in any environment. Their devices need to be robust enough to withstand less than optimal conditions, while maintaining a good mobile connection to data.

The Dell Rugged and Rugged Extreme ranges — including both laptops and tablets with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro — have been subjected to independent MIL-STD-810G testing, and have come out unscathed. The Latitude Rugged can survive drops of up to 36 inches. Dust, shocks, humidity, altitude and even extreme temperatures (between -13°F and 140°F) are powerless against its performance. As the name suggests, the Rugged Extreme range goes even further. Add salt fog, freeze/thaw cycles and explosive atmospheres to that list. These workers can go anywhere.

Increasingly, organizations are equipping their field workers with sensors to manage assets deployed in the field. This is where Dell EMC’s internet of things (IoT) capabilities come in, providing a way to manage and connect field devices back into a central infrastructure. When machine learning algorithms are applied to the incoming data, a predictive model can be developed to ensure field services teams are able to respond to asset failures before they happen, rather than after they do.

Read our field worker guide to discover more about how Talisen obtains meaningful analytics in the aerospace and defence industries by taking advantage of IoT components, maximizing operational efficiencies with Dell EMC technology.

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 Field Services 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 maximize 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.

The current draft of the coalition agreement for the new German government does not include keywords such as the Internet of Things or IoT; however, there are a number of references to Industry 4.0 that could be pointing to IoT. The passage talking about the “central goals are…the creation of open and interoperable standards” garnered much attention. It succinctly explains the actual, miserable situation of IoT; every service provider is following their own design for developing software for IoT solutions, machines, and robots. They could hardly be considered compatible with one another, which only catapults us back to the fragmented IT landscape of the 1980’s. Haven’t we learned anything? It is costly to implement these proprietary systems and operating them is ineffective. And it also enables hackers to flourish because it’s difficult to protect so many different devices and equipment.

However, the various manufacturers are not to blame. The problem is the lack of standardization, but of course, the question is how we can develop this if our sights are set on creating a new and dynamic market. There are many attempts being made by many players (manufacturers, for the most part) who are mixing up their own batch of standards in the meantime. Yet none has pushed to the forefront. Individual countries like France are even trying to develop their own standards. The next German government has also finally announced that it would start to tackle the issue (see above). It doesn’t really matter if these individual entities serve up specific results because it will only end up in a patchwork of standards at best, which defeats the purpose of standardization in IT. Cooperation with global standardization bodies and other countries will play a major role in the process. The current coalition agreement rightly states that “the development of common global standards and norms needs to be pushed forward.” 
But it’s one thing when politicians state their intent, and it can take a while before things are implemented.

Nevertheless, the delayed development hasn’t stopped market researchers from churning out forecasts using nothing but superlatives and publicizing their very optimistic forecasts. For example, BI Intelligence speaks of a five-year market volume of $6 trillion. Other analysts foresee very similar things.

It’s no wonder that we are seeing rapid growth. IoT offers many advantages: streamlined processes, more rapid response times on the market, predictive maintenance, improved capacities for machines/equipment, traceability of products, new and innovative markets, more satisfied customers, and lower costs overall for IT, product R&D, and companies.

However, these advantages exact their price: gigantic quantities of data. New analysis procedures based on machine learning and artificial intelligence are necessary in order to manage this amount of data and to extract high-quality (business) insights from it. Both technologies are being implemented more and more in IoT, and I am willing to bet that AI and IoT will soon be inseparable. I will even double down and predict that, in a few years, we will look back to a time when IoT and AI changed the very essence of how we live and how our economy works.

Automated driving provides a wonderful example. It will not only replace conventional vehicles and demonstrate the purest form of innovation, but it will also change the lives of millions of businesspeople who will no longer consider the time spent behind the wheel of their personal vehicles as wasted time. It will mean that they can finally combine their time spent at work with their commute more effectively. At the same time, millions of people with an aversion to driving or those unable to drive will experience tremendous gains in unlimited mobility again. Automated driving will shake the very foundations of our lifestyles.

Dell Technologies is also in the vanguard of IoT. Michael Dell confirmed this fact at a presentation of new IoT strategies last fall: “IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works.” And these words have been heeded: A new business division for IoT has been created, and we will invest $1 billion in the Internet of Things over the next three years.

The recent news of side-channel analysis vulnerabilities affecting many modern microprocessors has, as you can imagine, generated more than a few inquiries from our customers about updating their PowerEdge servers. If you’re in the same boat, asking yourself “What comes next? How do I apply these BIOS updates?”, then this post should help.

First things first, applying a BIOS update to a PowerEdge server is easy. Dell supplies different tools so you can choose the method best suited to your particular IT environment and needs.

Updating One or Two Servers?

If you’re just updating one or two servers in a small shop, a BIOS update packages can be obtained from support.dell.com manually by keying in your server’s system tag and then looking for a BIOS update such as that shown in figure 1.

Fig 1 – support.dell.com showing a BIOS update for PowerEdge server

NOTE: Dell EMC downloads and driver updates are free. That’s always been the case and there are no plans to change that.

Downloading this file and then applying it manually to a local server is straightforward, but if you have hundreds or more servers in a remote data center you’ll want to keep reading because we have better options for you.

Updating Lots of Servers, Even Automatically

Intelligent Automation is a Dell EMC hallmark, and Dell EMC offers a range of OpenManage solutions that can simplify mass server updates. With Dell EMC Repository Manager, new updates from Dell EMC online catalogs can be automatically downloaded, as shown in figure 2.

Fig 2 – Dell EMC Repository Manager interface

You can tell Repository Manager when to download updates, which servers you own, and what kind of updates you want. You can also command Repository Manager to download different sets of updates for different logical or physical groups of servers, and then to separate them into repositories in different locations. This gives you the flexibility to support different deployment methods.

So now you have a BIOS update. You’ve tested it and you want to deploy it to the production servers in your datacenter. Now what? Dell EMC recommends one of the following approaches to automate updates:

• Use OpenManage Essentials or OpenManage Enterprise
• Use an OpenManage integration for either Microsoft System Center or VMware vCenter
• Create a custom automation script that operates with standard management APIs provided by the iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller embedded in every PowerEdge server.

As an example, OpenManage Enterprise, the next-generation Dell EMC management console, provides a simple click-and-go process to schedule and perform BIOS updates for thousands of servers (see figure 3).

Fig 3 – OpenManage Enterprise screen showing target servers to update

Those systems will process the update as scheduled and with no further intervention. If you’re new to managing PowerEdge servers, this is an easy way to efficiently update thousands of servers without a lot of effort.

If you already manage your IT environment with an existing management platform such as System Center or vSphere, our integrations and connections make short work of incorporating PowerEdge servers.

And you use scripts to perform IT operations, we offer resources on Dell TechCenter as well as open source PowerShell and Python Scripting repositories http://github.com/dell. These assets provide a good starting point for automation, and can be adapted to the specifics of your IT environment.

Dell EMC Advantage: Dell EMC provides the tools to deploy updates in a manner that best suits your needs. We realize that one method does not fit all situations.

Final Thoughts

Dell EMC makes a variety of tools so you can perform server updates quickly and securely, particularly as part of an automated one-to-many update workflow. And because Dell EMC provides easy-to-use tools that integrate well with each other and with third-party tools, they are readily adapted to a variety of IT environments.

If you want to download a slightly longer version of this post, you can find it online at http://dell.to/2CpiSEg. For detailed, technical information on performing updates on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, please visit this Dell TechCenter archive: http://dell.to/2o04cSn or for more on OpenManage systems management tools and technologies, please reference the Dell TechCenter wiki at http://dell.to/2w4myYE.

Introducing a Single Product to Bundle Data Protection with VMware workloads in Amazon!

As more organizations continue to move applications and data to the cloud, the value of data protection is now more important than ever. Solid and reliable data protection workflows guarantee data is always available and ready for recovery when needed, and ensures little to no downtime for our customers’ business operations. For our customers virtualizing with VMware in the cloud, Dell EMC makes it easy to now protect VMware workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with an all-in-one bundle that is cost effective and provides simplicity in purchasing and management.

Top Customer Advantages of the Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS” Bundle:

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

Top Partner Advantages of the Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS” Bundle:

• Simplifies sales campaign by providing one complete solution to sell
• Improves sales cycle by reducing number of resources that need to be engaged
• Enables partners with upsell opportunities by selling more value with pre-bundled solution

Top Solution Benefits of Running Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS:

• 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

Ways to Learn More:

• Get a deep dive about Data Protection for VMware here
• Check out the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS
• Download and review the latest assets from this announcement on the Partner Enablement Center.
• Questions? Email us at askdps@emc.com

We are excited to go big and win big with you this year! Good selling!

The coming together of the Dell EMC Partner Program, including the Cloud Service Provider and Strategic Outsourcer and System Integrator tracks, a little over a year ago was truly legendary. How legendary? Well, as I just shared on the Dell EMC Global Alliances Partner Program Broadcast, your partnership has been nothing short of phenomenal. Thank you. Over the past year YOU made the following possible:

• We launched a brand new partner program based on your feedback and support
• Increased attendance and mindshare at Global Partner Summit (GPS) at Dell EMC World 2017. And GPS is shaping up to be the best ever in 2018
• We added over 100 new, talented men and women to the Global Alliances team to support you, our partners
• Partner Growth Plans continue to grow, proving that we’re here to build businesses, not just do business
• We grew the Global Alliances business because we’re simple, relevant and incremental

What does all of this mean for 2018 and beyond? It means we’re accelerating our success together. We’re going to continue to develop personnel resources to ensure we have the right folks in the right place to allow you to access and support Global Alliances. We must work together to deliver more industry-specific offers, marrying the depth and breadth of the industry skills of our partners and Dell EMC’s technologies. Most importantly, we must keep doing three things:

1. Ensure your business plan is in place and effective. If it’s not relevant and effective, modify and work the plan
2. Create and drive more industry-specific offers to enable differentiation in the market and deliver value for both Dell EMC and you, our partners
3. Think BIG, across Dell Technologies capabilities and solutions, to bring the full thrust of Dell Technologies to life and add value to our joint customers

I wholeheartedly want to thank each and every one of our Global Alliance partners for a legendary year. Together we can accelerate success into the future and do extraordinary things.

We hope to see many of you at GPS at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas on April 30-May 3. Learn more about the event and register at www.delltechnologiesworld.com/global-partner-summit.htm

The Dell EMC Heroes Program was launched at Dell EMC World 2017.  The program is designed to create a technical community between Dell EMC Systems Engineers and our Partners Systems Engineers globally.  The Heroes Program is all about you, our partners and connecting you with the latest information on our products, solutions and technologies.  Attend Quarterly Heroes Exchange events featuring the latest details on product features, roadmaps, and a solution showcase in your area.  Other offerings include a Semi-annual Partner Technology Advisory Board and Annual Partner CTO Summit, the Heroes Program is designed to enable you our partners to fully understand the scope of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC solutions.

I sat down with Patti Moy, Director Dell EMC Heroes Program, to get a mid-year update on the program and what to expect leading into Dell Technologies World and the Global Partner Conference.  Patti talked about a holistic approach to Data Center Design, not just storage, not just servers but everything in the Data Center.

If you’re a Dell EMC Partner, you can learn more about the Heroes Program on the Partner Portal, from your local Partner SE or by dropping a note to DellEMCHeroesProgram@dell.com; there is also a LinkedIn community here

Get Dell EMC 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)

Today’s business world demands continuous operations across the data center, including mission-critical data protection procedures. As some admins have learned the hard way, any amount of downtime can mean a loss in revenue and productivity for an organization. This is why business continuity has become a top IT priority for global enterprises – and why Dell EMC has implemented support for high availability configurations in our latest generation of Data Domain systems for midsized and large enterprises.

High availability empowers organizations with greater resiliency through a second line of defense via Data Domain, ensuring continuous operations in the event of a failure. This month, Dell EMC has introduced a new promotion around high availability configurations for Data Domain systems, enabling customers to purchase their second controller at a 50% discount.

By adding a second Data Domain controller to your protection storage investment, you create the active/standby configuration need to achieve high availability. During any unplanned system downtime, a simple failover between the two controllers is activated.

Since the two controllers are attached to a shared storage pool, with one handling data ingestion and the other on standby, the backup jobs can resume in just minutes on the standby controller. Plus, this whole process can be easily monitored and managed via Data Domain System Manager. In addition to minimizing unexpected downtime, high availability configurations can also complete Data Domain Operating System upgrades without taking the system offline.

Gain this feature with a new Data Domain DD9800, DD9300 or DD6800 that is preconfigured for high availability. Customers can purchase a second Data Domain controller at a 50% discount from Dell EMC and our partners now. The promotion will run through Friday, August 3, 2018. To learn more about Dell EMC Data Domain, please visit the Dell EMC Store to compare products and follow @DellEMCProtect on Twitter for the latest announcements, customer case studies and topical content.

Are you leaving money on the table by not recommending comprehensive, must-have data protection in every proposal for servers, storage or VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that you make to your prospects and customers? You could be. Watch this video, also hosted at channel campaign playbook, explaining why Data Protection is a critical criteria when selecting a converged infrastructure solution.

In 2016, Dell EMC commissioned the Global Data Protection Index report about the maturity of data protection strategies of 2,200 IT leaders across the 18 most developed nations worldwide. The results of this landmark survey showed vast opportunities for Dell EMC partners to cross-sell comprehensive data protection to their prospects and customers.

You may recall reading this report, and it’s worth money in sales to revisit it now because of a key finding: While true IT transformation requires sound data protection, the vast majority of enterprises are still way behind the curve in their ability to provide that.

Data Protection Opportunities Are as Big as Ever

According to the survey, 36 percent of organizations had suffered unplanned systems downtime or data loss due to hardware/ software failure or loss of power. The average cost of those losses? $914,000.

Of course, since 2016, many respondents may well have deployed data protection solutions. Or they may have just gotten around to upgrading their data protection as part their 2017 plans and budget cycles.

Contrary to the above, many IT leaders and their teams are still too busy fighting their day-to-day fires and juggling multiple priorities to have time and resources to get comprehensive, mature data protection in place. That’s where you, as a Dell EMC reseller, can help by adding Dell EMC data protection into every proposal you make for Dell EMC solutions.

Fact is, with the explosion of enterprise data, organizations of all sizes simply must have data protection. And it’s absolutely essential for software-defined data centers.

Better Together: Dell EMC Data Domain and Dell EMC Data Protection Suite

To serve your customers as their data protection expert and consultant, you couldn’t have a better partner than Dell EMC. Dell EMC is #1 in the Data Protection¹ market. By combining Dell EMC Data Domain with the Dell EMC Data Protection software, your customers can cover the entire data protection continuum, including replication, snapshots, backups and archive and achieve up to 81% lower cost of capacity to protect² over 3 years vs. the competition.

With three core value propositions, it’s:

1. SIMPLE, providing scalable protection with single-pane-of-glass management to reduce administrative burdens
2. FAST, with optimized data deduping and throughputs to meet strict SLA backup windows
3. EFFICIENT, with highly integrated hardware and software to help reduce costs and better manage risks

What’s more, Dell EMC data protection portfolio provides specific suites, so you can tailor solutions to your customers’ specific needs: backup, applications, VMware, archive, and cloud-based, long-term retention. The Dell EMC Data Protection Suite Enterprise Edition meets all these requirements. In addition, when combined with Dell EMC Data Domain, your customers can achieve up to 20x faster backup and up to 10x faster recovery for mission-critical apps while eliminating back up impact on servers³.

To help you fully capitalize on this must-have, data-protection solution opportunity, we have an array of sales & marketing resources you can take advantage of. They include highly effective sales call scripts and FAQs that you or your sales teams can use to qualify prospects. Customer presentations, infographics and many more assets can help you and your teams highlight core Dell EMC data protection advantages.

To find out more about how our Dell EMC Data Domain and Data Protection Suite software can help ensure you’re not leaving money on the table in all your customer deals, visit Dell EMC Data Protection Sales Plays.

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¹Data Protection defined by Dell EMC as the combination of IDC’s Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Hardware and Data Protection & Recovery Software market segments, IDC 12/17.

²Based on ESG whitepaper commissioned by Dell EMC, “The Economic Value of Data Domain,” May 2017. Data Domain deduplication capacity savings based on ESG analysis of call-home support data from over 15,000 Data Domain systems deployed worldwide.

³Based on Dell EMC internal testing, July 2016 compared to traditional backup.

People Make Digital Transformation Real

The pace of digital change is rapid, and recent research by Dell Technologies and Vanson Bourne reveals this can be overwhelming. No industry is immune. The pressure to transform to stay competitive in the digital economy is immense. But organizations struggle with how to build a digital vision – and they realize that their most important asset, their people, need the skills to “go digital” as well. In fact, the research, Realizing 2030: A Divided Vision of the Future, shows that lack of workforce readiness is one of the top two barriers to digital progress.

Consider one of our customers, a local U.S. government authority, was evaluating a data center modernization. As plans began to take shape, skills gaps became a major concern, causing the customer to hesitate in committing to the transformational project.  The tipping point in giving the customer confidence to move forward was the creation of an ongoing education strategy that would help develop and retain a skilled and certified team to drive the project.

Skills gaps can often be seen in IT, where organizations are rapidly moving from silo’d legacy infrastructure to dynamic, multi-cloud environments.  The days of having a single role such as storage or server admin are being eclipsed by new roles that span multiple technologies such as networking, server, storage, cloud and virtualization, with a security-first mindset.

A recent IT Transformation study conducted by IDC for Dell EMC found that a key differentiator between organizations that are the most agile and ready for transformation, and those that are the least ready, is that they view IT employee development as a strategic differentiator. 98% of the most advanced organizations incorporate training into IT’s overall strategic planning and all key initiatives, compared to only 38% of the least advanced.

Empowering Customers with the Skills to Gain the Edge in the New Digital Economy

The transformation journey begins with mapping the organization’s skills readiness to its ability to meet the challenges of rapidly evolving processes and technologies. In fact, the Vanson Bourne study found that 85% of business leaders advise aligning training to digital goals and strategy.

Transformation success increases when organizations begin their journey by building from three fundamental tenets:

1. The skills needed to build and manage digital enterprises differ from the skills businesses possess today.
2. Individuals need to learn and evolve, taking advantage of both formal and informal opportunities to do so.
3. Companies need a development strategy that incorporates training and certification as an essential component for retaining and growing future-ready talent.

Dell EMC Education Services is launching a set of new transformational certifications that helps develop the highly-skilled talent who can help companies make transformation real, achieve business goals and lead the competition.

These new certifications bridge skills gaps at every stage of transformational maturity. They establish and validate skills required for digital, IT, workforce, and security transformation, including:

• Understanding how to manage converged/hyper-converged platforms
• Developing expertise to enable automation and service delivery with multi cloud-solutions
• Incorporating critical security controls for Dell EMC enterprise infrastructure
• Translating emerging business trends into the technology solutions and new operating models of the future-ready organization

The new highest level certification, Master Enterprise Architect, is an experience-based board review certification that identifies and validates those unique individuals who possess the technical acumen to architect modern and secure IT as a Service solutions, coupled with a holistic understanding of the business drivers that fuel digital transformation.

In addition to the Proven Professional certification, learners also have the opportunity to earn co-branded badges that demonstrate proficiency across Dell EMC and VMware solutions.

These new certifications establish a new industry standard to validate the skills required for digital, IT, security and workforce transformation. The organization benefits by being able to establish teams of trusted advisors who, while having the skills to maximize the performance of today’s data center, also have proven capabilities to build and manage the digital enterprise of the future. At an individual level, these Proven Professional certifications validate expertise and the IT professional’s ability to be a critical influencer in charting the path of an organization’s transformation.

Making Skills Transformation Real

My story about the customer who required skills transformation to make their IT transformation real should resonate with everyone. Do you have confidence that you and your team are ready to compete in the digital economy? The race is on. Those who succeed will transform not only their processes and technologies, but most importantly, their people.

Are you ready to transform? Learn more by visiting the Dell EMC Education Services website.