• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Dell has been active in the cloud market for quite some time, offering open, capable and affordable solutions across hardware and services. Bryan Jones Executive Director, Public Large Enterprise, Dell EMEA BRYAN JONES I 1-2-1 Helping customers to thrive in the Virtual Era PHILIP ALSOP Editor, SNS Europe In his new role as Executive Director, Public Large Enterprise, Dell EMEA, Bryan Jones brings with him a wealth of experience in the global storage and data centre markets, and is keen to ensure that the company’s customers are enabled, via innovative technology and data management approaches, to take best advantage of IT as the key business enabler. Q What do you see as both the challenges and opportunities Q What are the practicalities of this announcement – both of your new EMEA role? in terms of the implementation, and the value proposition for customers? A BJ I have a really strong team in place, which gives me an obvious base to work from as I transition in to the role. My A BJ Dell sees customers continuously looking for ways to previous role was global, so I’ve spent time in EMEA and APJ innovate and drive business results in the Virtual Era, and the for the last two years. My biggest challenge coming in to this $1 billion (USD) investment that we are making this fiscal year role is really making sure we continue to build on the success will deliver solutions, services and cloud-based delivery options this team has driven, while learning the nuances of the business to help customers capture the benefits from new compute and in so many different countries with different cultural and information delivery advances. There are three key deliverables language requirements. to come out of this project which include: Next generation cloud data centres that operate and deliver The data centre is the data centre, but doing business in this hyperscale efficiency. These new data centres will provide region has a fair amount of complexity if you work to optimise the foundation for next generation services and solutions each market. I’ll focus on that aspect through my team first. from Dell. Global Solution Centres will help customers to work with Q Presumably, a major part of your work will be in Dell experts to architect, validate and build the efficient data coordinating the EMEA part of Dell’s recent $1 billion centre environments to meet their own business and IT goals. announcement around next generation cloud data centres? New open, capable and affordable solutions for data management, client virtualization and data centre A BJ Having been responsible for the Large Enterprise virtualization. Business Unit’s Data Centre Marketing strategy globally, I’ve been in the loop on our strategic direction really since By bringing together technology and services alongside its inception. I’ve very excited about the opportunity to help capabilities from partners, the new data centres will allow operate that strategy here in EMEA for our customers. Building customers to take advantage of Infrastructure-, Platform- the go-to-market strategy that will inform our customers and and Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service offerings as well as IT prospects on our enhanced capabilities is my Enterprise team’s outsourcing. Through this capability, customers will benefit primary mission. from unlimited storage for production environments as well as off-premise back-up and disaster recovery with Storage-as-a- The concept of ‘The Cloud’ is very regionally influenced, Service. whether that is here in EMEA or APJ or the Americas. Getting to know what customers expect in this The flexible and scalable data centre offerings will also support space and how our enhanced capabilities can help will also be a customers’ application development and testing environments primary focus. through the ability to quickly provision systems with Platform- WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM MAY | 2011 33 1-2-1 I BRYAN JONES as-a-Service. In addition, a Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service Q How does the Dell cloud offering sit alongside the capabilities will allow customers to efficiently manage user data company’s existing hardware and services business – while enabling a more remote and mobile workforce. ie don’t they compete? Q How do you see this new approach from Dell in terms of A BJ Dell Services already manages 36 customer data centres how it fits in the cloud landscape right now, and into the future? in addition to our own data centres worldwide. Our experience also includes deep expertise with data centre consolidations and A BJ From our work with customers we know that enterprise migrations. Dell itself operates one of the world’s largest data IT organisations face the challenge of being more responsive repositories for our own operations, and the experience that we to business needs while also driving greater efficiencies. We have gained through this process has been invaluable to existing see this investment in cloud-based solutions and services as customers. Moving forwards, this announcement focuses a way to solve this challenge for customers through Dell’s around our plans to expand this existing set of expertise, and we real-world experience and IP, hardware infrastructure offerings, are engaged in planning and analysis for future periods as part professional services, and as-a-service solutions (Infrastructure- of Dell’s multi-year expansion strategy. as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service). Q Presumably, over time, Dell might end up as ‘just’ a service The expansion into the ‘X-as-a-Service’ market and our desire provider – with an internal market for its own IT hardware, to put data centres close to our customers to meet their needs but no third party hardware market? will not only help customers increase their own efficiency, it also will help Dell to reach new customers that require a local A BJ I don’t see that as a practical reality any time soon for presence. Dell or any other committed tier 1 technology provider. Our vision of the IT executive of the future is one of a portfolio Q How is this cloud offering being brought to market – manager. The CIO of the future will manage business through the channel, direct, or a mixed approach? requirements against the right combination of internal infrastructure (could be architected as private cloud), public A BJ Cloud based services and solutions offered through the cloud capabilities (infrastructure and managed services), and new regional data centres will be brought to market through a hybrid that are some combination of the two. mixed approach – the direct sales channel will work with new and existing customers through consultative planning Q Would you anticipate that, with Dell having taken processes, and the solutions will be available from Dell US something of a lead in the cloud market, other storage and Certified Partners this spring. EMEA Channel availability server focused companies will have to follow your model? is targeted within 60 days after EMEA direct availability is confirmed. A BJ Dell’s strategy for new in-region data centres uses smaller facilities that are contained, modular, highly efficient Q What are the USPs of this Dell cloud offering when and highly flexible. Among the benefits, this approach offers compared to the many other approaches being taken by greater business assurance through survivability and continuity the other blue chips (both IT and telcos/service providers)? of operations. A BJ Dell has been active in the cloud market for quite some As data centre technology has advanced, massive collocated time, offering open, capable and affordable solutions across facilities no longer necessarily offer the economic advantage hardware and services. Our cloud hardware solutions help they did in the era of manually intensive operations. With business speed deployment, lower total cost of ownership and Dell’s automation capabilities, this modular strategy will work reduce the environmental impact of clouds, and our Data Centre much more cost-effectively and efficiently as we build out new Solutions team has developed more than 19 different hardware modular capacity in line with growth in demand. platforms, which already are used by some of the largest cloud computing providers in the world. Q The cloud announcement has huge long-term implications. In the short term, what are the issues Dell is seeking to Dell is making this investment in the cloud as we want to address in EMEA at the present time? provide our customers with differentiated, efficiency driven technology and the new facilities are designed to take advantage A BJ As I mentioned earlier, the concept of the cloud is of modular, hyper-scale and high-density principles which very regionally influenced and very specific to the challenges will dramatically lower costs, reduce latency and simplify today’s IT professional is trying to solve for in their unique management. The result of this is highly scalable centres with environment. There are certainly commonalities like capacity on the “right-size” capacity. The modular structure will also let demand requirements, moving to variable OPEX models, and us quickly expand as demand increases, providing end users creating self service models that collapse the time to market for with the flexibility and scalability needed to make the cloud a new functionalities and business models – but how a customer successful IT model. approaches these concepts and what they prioritise is unique 34 MAY | 2011 WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM BRYAN JONES I 1-2-1 to them. This announcement around enhancing our capabilities performance, highly optimised file system to provide affordable here is really designed to address both points – make cloud a scale-up NAS functionality for smaller scale, high availability reality here regionally and deliver on the business concepts that deployments.

Load more

  4

Copy Link