Empowering Digital Evolution: Dell’s Customer-Centric Approach to Navigating the Digital Transformation Landscape

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Teja Manakame, Vice President (IT) at Dell Technologies

What steps Dell is taking to support its customers to become digital first?

Unlocking the potential of digital transformation for many key industries and sectors is no longer an aspiration, but a necessity to future-proof, secure, and flourish in the years ahead. Innovation can help organizations deliver new products and services, automate repetitive processes, and ultimately improve performance. It can also help make the lives of consumers and employees more efficient, enriching and stimulating.

Digital transformation is essential for business growth because it helps organizations keep up with the latest technology trends, build smarter products, reach new markets, and improve operational efficiency. Dell Digital, our IT organization, is leading our digital transformation journey. Built on our own solutions, Dell Digital is reimagining how it does business to meet everchanging needs, driving innovation and creating a cultural shift throughout the company. In Dell Technologies, our customers have an ally with the technology expertise, end-to-end solutions, world-class services and relentless spirit that will stop at nothing to help them harness the transformative power of technology for the needs of their organization and the demands of our 24/7 digital economy.

• Addressing the digital imperative – As businesses across the globe continue to make digital transformation a priority, Dell continues to focus on key challenges and needs. What’s clear is that digital transformation will continue to gain momentum. IDC predicts that by 2024, more than 50% of all IT spending will focus directly on digital transformation and innovation initiatives (up from 31%)
• Modernizing IT, applications and delivering a cloud operation model – Modernizing IT infrastructure enables businesses to become more agile, productive and competitive. A key factor is the ability to leverage cloud-native technologies like containers and Kubernetes to accelerate micro-service applications development and delivery and modernize your business-critical applications.
• Integration that powers digital future – At Dell, we are focused on helping customers to achieve their goals, and together we offer a unique combination of infrastructure and application delivery and management solutions that make IT scalable, efficient, secure and sustainable. We have solutions designed for the workspace, app modernization, multi-cloud and edge. Many of our offerings support enterprise, mid-market, industry-specific, and other environments. Operating together, these solutions make it easier for business to harness the power of technology to drive your business forward.

Dell is determined to continuously enhance and broaden its offerings to support businesses in their digital transformation efforts. We are committed to innovating and creating technologies that simplify the customer experience and promote advancement.

How is Dell enabling its customers with right infrastructure for AI workloads?

The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and use cases is astounding, with impacts across nearly all facets of business and personal lives. Generative AI will create new data, images, code, or other types of content that humans do not explicitly program, is becoming particularly impactful and influential. Hence, it requires significant amounts of computational power and storage, and often involves the use of specialized accelerators such as GPUs. Also, high-speed networking solutions are important to minimize latency during distributed training. By carefully considering these requirements, businesses can build and deploy generative AI models that are fast, efficient, and accurate. At Dell Technologies, we bring together the trusted partnerships and end-to-end IT infrastructure that organizations need to accelerate and simplify AI adoption:

• Dell PowerEdge servers: The PowerEdge adaptive compute approach enables servers engineered to optimize the latest technology advances for predictable profitable outcomes
• Dell file storage: Dell PowerScale supports the most demanding AI workloads with all-flash NVMe file storage solutions that deliver massive performance and efficiency in a compact form factor
• Dell object storage: These are object-based storage products, all of which are scalable and cost-effective for high volumes of unstructured data for AI workloads
• Dell Power Switch networking: It’s a future‑ready networking technology that helps improve network performance that lowers overall costs and network management complexity and experience flexibility to adopt new innovations
• Dell Open Manage Enterprise: IT management is the foundation for operational success and running a large multinode system that is needed for generative AI workloads can be especially complex

How can emerging technologies like IoT, multicloud, edge, AI/ML help in this acceleration towards digital transformation?

Businesses and organizations have varying needs that influence their IT strategies, but they all share common goals of reducing costs, increasing flexibility, and creating new value. The Edge is a crucial component in achieving these goals, as it is changing how people and machines interact with digital services. By processing data closer to where it is generated, the Edge enables new experiences, increases efficiency and improves control for businesses. As the world becomes more connected and IoT, AI/ML becomes more prevalent, the Edge provides a significant opportunity for businesses to create new value.

The utilization of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is becoming more widespread as companies seek to take advantage of the benefits these technologies offer. At Dell, we have been exploring this field and currently have multiple projects and products focused on using AI to improve our business. We are observing similar patterns among our customers, and in coming years, we expect to see more significant impacts of AI/ML.

We are dedicated to assisting our customers in achieving their goals through utilizing technology in the most secure and efficient manner. We are also focused on helping our customers navigate the rapidly changing landscape of multicloud environment and take advantage of the opportunities it presents. Multicloud has emerged as a key strategy for companies looking to harness the power of the cloud to drive their digital transformations. As data-driven outcomes become more important, we see a growing need for multi-cloud services that can help companies leverage the best of different cloud providers. With a strong track record of delivering innovative solutions, Dell is well-poised to help customers navigate the multi-cloud world.

By harnessing the transformative power of technology, businesses can build the secure digital foundation needed to be ready for what’s next. These technologies are also driving the need for specialized infrastructure to handle resource-intensive workloads, and at Dell, we are well-positioned to meet this need with our advanced servers and storage solutions.

What is your opinion on fast emergence and importance of as-a-service model?

Organizations all around the world are going digital in order to modernize operations and foster innovation. IT leaders want technology solutions that make work easier, offer the most flexibility, and empower them to run their business on their terms. Never before has the need for agility been more profound than in the past years as rapidly changing dynamics forced organizations to quickly adapt. Enterprises have increasingly turned to as-a-Service models to gain the agility and cost predictability required to stay competitive amid unpredictable circumstances.

One of the main advantages of as-a-service model is that it allows companies to reduce their capital expenditures and shift to a more predictable, operating expense-based model. This can help businesses better manage their cash flow and reduce the risk of investing in technology that may become obsolete quickly.

Dell Technologies had earlier launched Project APEX, a breakthrough portfolio of as-a-Service offerings that simplifies digital transformation by increasing IT agility and control. APEX is a radically simplified technology experience, delivering as-a-Service infrastructure wherever it is needed. Building on Dell’s IT as-a-Service expertise, Dell Technologies APEX reduces the time and complexity of acquiring, managing, maintaining and servicing physical IT infrastructure. Customers can scale IT as needed to launch new applications, kickstart new projects, and address the changing needs of their organizations – all managed by Dell and accessed through a single console. We are focused on what we can control – execution, relative performance, prudent cost management and delivering for customers.

Kindly talk about rise of AI and automation and types of skills that techies should focus on?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation are dramatically reshaping industries and reinventing the future. AI allows organizations to improve productivity, reduce risk, move faster, gain deeper insights and value from their data. As digital innovation continues to transform the workplace, enterprises are focused on adopting solutions that will power the ‘Future of Work’. These continuous advancements will require new skills and capabilities for employees to excel in current as well as future work environment.

AI fluency is critical in today’s world, leveraging machine intelligence to manage workflows and accomplish tasks as well as knowing the limitations. Digital transformation is happening now and will continue. AI does not replace human, instead humans will upskill themselves to intelligently leverage AI to be more innovative. Team members should focus more on upskilling and re-skilling themselves to stay up-to-date and relevant in the industry. Organizations need to invest in developing human capital, enabling team members to acquire new skills in this data-driven economy. Here are a few skills which would set them to this path:

• Data Analytics
• Coding
• Critical and innovative thinking
• Cybersecurity
• Adaptability to new changes
• Understanding and effectively leveraging new technologies like multicloud, AI/ML