Cloud

Dell Tech World: Michael Dell Proclaims That the Future Is Multicloud

Dell envisions a future powered by human inspiration and technology innovation that can improve lives on a global scale — and he sees that progress taking place in a multicloud environment.

Joe Kuehne

Joe Kuehne is an Associate Editorial Director at BizTech magazine.

In the opening keynote of this year’s Dell Technologies World conference, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, said,“The pandemic put an exclamation point on the importance of digital technology for everyone. Our PCs kept us connected and productive while working from anywhere.”

As the world continues to re-emerge from the pandemic, Dell said technology has become even more essential than ever before. In his vision for the future, “personal computing is the center of engagement, productivity, collaboration and creativity. And behind that incredible end-user experience, we’re taking the next leap forward with a multicloud ecosystem that encompasses the edge, where AI processes and moves data across 5G networks in highly automated environments.”

Over the course of the four-day event in Las Vegas, the company made a series of announcements, including new partnerships and projects, as well as enhanced analytics and storage services for multicloud environments.

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Dell Supports Continued Mass Migration to the Cloud

“Look,” Dell continued, “the on-prem/off-prem debate is over. The future is multicloud, with workloads and data flowing seamlessly across the entire environment. Today, 90 percent of customers already have both on-prem and public cloud environments, and 75 percent are using three to four different clouds.”

“Anything you want to do in today's world, from DeFi to blockchain to metaverse, and autonomous vehicles, and robotics, smart everythings, based exploration, AI, disaster recovery, AR/VR — all these things consume and create tremendous amounts of distributed data and distributed computing power,” he said. “And because workloads follow data, the distributed future will be much bigger than you can imagine, and so will the attack surface. Ransomware attacks are the No. 1 threat for most organizations, and are occurring every 11 seconds, with an average cost of $13 million per occurrence.”

Business Outcomes Should Be the Driving Force Behind IT Decisions

Both Dell and Jeff Clarke, Dell Technologies’ vice chairman and co-CEO, spoke about the need to focus on business outcomes and to keep them in mind when developing an IT strategy. Tom DeCoster, vice president of hybrid infrastructure solutions for CDW, agreed, laying out the five most common business outcomes in the session he presented.

Claiming that every organization is seeking to achieve at least one of these outcomes, DeCoster listed innovation, cost savings, agility, reduced risk and better user experience as the goals that should be kept in mind when strategizing a company’s IT infrastructure.

Speakers consistently stressed the importance of business outcomes throughout the event. Cheryl Cook, Dell’s senior vice president of global partner marketing, spoke about customer experience as a competitive advantage. And Tiffani Bova, global growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, shared her thoughts on how a good employee experience has a direct impact on the customer experience.

In a session on edge computing, Bill Schmarzo, customer advocate for data management incubation at Dell, echoed the importance of desired outcomes. “What is the organization trying to accomplish?” he asked. “There are a bunch of use cases out there. And this is where we're going to define them. Not in isolation of the business, but in collaboration with the business, speaking their language.”

Keep this page bookmarked for our coverage of Dell Technologies World, which took place May 2–5 in Las Vegas. Follow us on Twitter at @BizTechMagazine and join the conversation at #DellTechWorld.

Getty Images/ Igor Kutyaev