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Dell EMC World 2017 Underscores Company's Unique Position To Capitalize On IT Transformation

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Dave Altavilla

When Dell put together the mammoth $67 billon dollar acquisition of big iron storage, virtualization and security giant EMC in late 2015, you could see the obvious synergies of the combined tech juggernaut but you also knew the devil was in the details of execution and integration. At last year’s Dell EMC World, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell offered a vision of how the company would pull this off but it was obvious the ink was still drying. At this year’s Dell EMC World 2017, (now affectionately referred to as DEW), Michael took the stage like the rock star CEO that he is, with Van Halen thumping over the sound system. Last year Dell looked confident in the direction the company was headed, this year at DEW in Las Vegas he looked downright pumped.

As press and analysts, we get used to seeing top CEO’s excited about a company’s competitive prospects but whether it was in Michael’s opening keynote or the follow-on sessions with top Dell Technologies execs, the strategic advantage of the company’s now more tightly integrated and massive portfolio, was more than palpable. Take, for example, the announcement of the company’s 14th generation Dell PowerEdge Servers. The May 8th press release underscores key benefits, like exponential increases in low latency NVMe storage and a 50% increase GPU-compute density, but there’s also a tighter coupling with software defined storage (SDS) environments and Dell's new OpenManage Enterprise console.

Dell Technologies

The OpenManage console represents direct integration between Dell server and EMC storage resources, giving the customer a unified UI for the platform. As you can imagine, this will be a strong selling point with IT managers as they will be able to take advantage of this expanded set of common APIs giving them a familiar feel and the ability to control and provision resources across a combined Dell-powered infrastructure. If there’s one take-away I had from the show, it was that Dell Technologies’ goal is to build a soup-to-nuts platform for IT transformation – from compute and cloud, to big data analytics, storage and storage management, virtualization, and security. The company wants to own the compute and data pipeline from womb to tomb, and competitively their prospects look strong.

On the client side of things, whether commercial or consumer, Dell underscored its passion to push beyond just maintaining relevance, but instead drive true innovation. This was punctuated by demonstrations of Dell’s new Canvas interactive display interface with Nike and another AR (Augmented Reality) demo with Daqri. Nike showcased cutting-edge athletic shoe conceptualization and design on Canvas, with its innovative pen and totem interface giving designers and artists the ability to stay in their creation flow while still having access to critical tools and controls.

Dave Altavilla

Daqri’s Industrial AR application portfolio with smart helmets and glasses, provides powerful data visualization, guided work and remote expert instructions for users of the technology. It maps critical data over the real world for the user, that would otherwise not be available. Of course it was being powered by Dell and the company also announced the launch of an AR/VR technology partner program intended to help bring new tools like this to its customers.

Dell Technologies

The AR/VR portion was capped off on day 3 with charismatic VP and General Manager of Dell’s Alienware, Gaming and XPS divisions, Frank Azor being joined on stage by Epic Games Founder, Tim Sweeney to discuss the state of VR and AR today. Sweeney specifically noted how the technologies are "going to be the next billion-user platforms over the next 10 years; it's already started to happen”. Sweeny further projected that, “in 3 years, all VR and AR cameras will have inward and outward-facing cameras for real-time motion capture, providing an incredibly immersive gaming experience, capturing your whole body.“ and that “...the hardware will be about the size of a pair of sunglasses. Within 10 years, it'll be about as affordable as an Android smartphone today.”

All told, from visualizing a world where VR and AR technologies are as ubiquitous as smartphones, to helping its customers “realize” their IT transformations almost solely on its platforms, Dell Technologies’ goals are rather lofty. Then again, when you consider how ambitious orchestrating the largest tech company acquisition and integration in history is, it all seems like business as usual for Dell.

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