Lessons From our SaaS Journey to HCM: Collaborate, Communicate and Never Blink

Choosing the right Software-as-a-Service application to consolidate and modernize your company’s Human Resource platform is a significant challenge under most circumstances. Making that transition to unite HR operations of two, newly merged high-tech heavy hitters (Dell & EMC) with approximately 160,000 employees around the globe is a downright monumental task.

After heading up a 90+ member core IT team that worked across IT and the business to successfully bring together legacy EMC and Dell HR systems onto one common HR platform in 16 months, I can offer insights on how to find the right SaaS providers for your HR transformation.

I can also tell you that selecting the right tools and technologies are only part of the process to forge a system that is so critical and fundamental to creating a happy and motivated workforce. Bringing the key players together to communicate and collaborate to define requirements to take care of the needs of your company’s human resources is even more important.

After all, the ultimate table stakes in any HR application modernization program is ensuring employee paychecks are accurate and on time.

Hopefully underscoring that reality, along with some other strategies we learned in the course of this project, will help you in your pursuit of creating a more efficient, cloud-based HR platform.

Agreeing on the Future State

At the time of the merger that created Dell Technologies, Dell and EMC were using different legacy HR vendor tools, applications and processes. We literally had two of everything from an HR and vendor management applications perspective.

The first step in creating a new HR platform was to bring the various business stakeholders together to define what the end state of a unified HR application would look like regardless of which SaaS applications were chosen. Central to that effort was a strong partnership between IT and business leadership. HR and IT worked with teams from each BU to look at everything from job codes to recruitment to payroll—all the processes across the whole HR ecosystem—to determine what we wanted the new “digital” HR experience to be.

These business teams were joined at the hip with IT, working to define IT requirements for how the new platform would interface with the many applications from both legacy companies.

Once the HR team defined a set of operating principles for the new company, the next step was for HR and IT to join forces to evaluate each prospective SaaS provider. There were several large SaaS providers that could serve our objectives. We finally chose a provider based on how they scored on meeting our requirements laid out by both business and IT.

Our IT requirements focused on performance, scalability, and how easy it would be to integrate with the different applications across the company with the chosen SaaS solution. We had more than 275 direct integrations into these SaaS applications, so they would have to scale across the whole IT ecosystem as well as from on-premises to the cloud.

One of the things that I think played a huge role in the success of the program is that this wasn’t a matter of legacy-Dell’s app being pushed on legacy-EMC. Both companies were coming into the process with a blank canvas and team members focused on a unified vision for the new company. That became the key factor in determining the right SaaS providers. While there were debates, it didn’t become confrontational. We kept things focused on making logical decisions to meet our goals.

At the end of the review process, we arrived at unanimous choices for three SaaS providers—one for our overall HR platform, another for an HR portal and a third to provide our vendor management process.

We then set out to integrate the many applications, migrate files, and take the data from each legacy company and restructure it to match the new HR world going forward. We repeatedly ran conversions for some four million records until we achieved 99.5 percent accuracy, and ran extensive system integration and user acceptance testing.

After 16 months, we launched our new HR platform—called My HR—as scheduled.  The big bang launch—in which we deployed our HR platform, the portal, data analytics, and vendor management application in a 7-day span—went off without a hitch.

Lessons Learned

While a single blog can’t begin to cover the many facets of this project, there are some key pieces of advice you may find helpful.

1. Get business groups aligned to speak with one voice on the requirements for your future HR platform before considering SaaS providers.

2. Ensure that the Business and IT project leads work together towards a common goal and not separate agendas.

3. Set a project completion (go-live) date, get everybody rowing in that direction and don’t blink.

4. Communicate constantly with all stakeholders, across all aspects of the business. You can never communicate too much.

5. Make sure team leaders “walk the walk” by being constantly involved in every aspect of the project.

6. Limit the amount of history you include in your new HR system and archive the rest.

7. You can never start too early to define the launch orchestration sequence, which needs to be precise to accommodate the many interdependencies of business and HR functions.

8. Get feedback from other companies, similar in size, that have migrated to HCM SAAS cloud solutions.

Certainly implementing the right SaaS applications were important to our HR transformation, but the IT/business partnership and the collaboration of hundreds of people both in our core teams and across the company were what really made this project a groundbreaking success.

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Tap into the Ever-Growing Interest in Artificial Intelligence

Introduce customers to advanced server technology that’s ideally suited to transformational workloads

When Dell acquired EMC in September 2016, it didn’t just gain the industry’s leading enterprise storage vendor. Suddenly, Dell was also able to tap into a rich vein of Machine Learning expertise in EMC. This capability now sees Dell EMC adopting a leading position in the fast-growing Artificial Intelligence market, offering technologies and services that span the edge to the core to the cloud.

Thanks to the inherent product optimization and consultancy expertise offered by the combined company, Dell EMC partners are now ideally placed to benefit from customers’ ever-growing interest in the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver business growth.

Industry analyst Moor Insights & Strategy reports that worldwide demand for AI technologies is surging, with organizations of all sizes identifying possible application benefits in terms of productivity, revenues and product improvements1. In fact, IDC forecasts that total spending on AI will ramp up to tens of billions of dollars by the early 2020s.2

Tap into the interest in AI initiatives

AI is a transformative technology that has the power to change the way organizations interact and add intelligence to many products and services through new insights that were previously hidden in vast pools of data. The breadth of AI applications continues to grow, as progressive companies continue to advance and explore the capabilities of the underlying technologies of Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

AI is a branch of computer science that deals with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers and the capability of a machine to imitate human intelligence. It can cover everything from characterizing something as ‘simple’ as recognizing an object in an image to applying reason and ethical values in problem solving – something far beyond current capabilities within the field.

Machine Learning uses statistical analysis modeling for use cases such as resource allocation, predictive analytics, predictive maintenance, text classification, bioinformatics, trend discovery, forecasting, face detection and pricing. These ‘classical’ statistical approaches are generally well suited for uncovering trends and categories in numerical data, and do not require massive training datasets or hardware accelerators.

Deep Learning, meanwhile, is all about discovering and modeling complex unstructured data for perception and recognition purposes. It’s now widely used for computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, social network processing, autonomous driving, image processing and classification, and financial market modeling.

A Smart approach to driving insights and improvements

In its report on the subject1, Moor suggests that interest in the potential of AI is primarily driven by two key motivations:

1. To improve operational efficiencies – what it refers to as ‘Smart Operations’; and

2. To enhance products and services through data-driven insights and use of unstructured data types, such as voice and images, to enhance human-machine interaction – what it calls ‘Smart Products and Services’.

Smart Operations includes everything from e-commerce product recommendation engines to cyber security, customer sales and support chatbots, financial trading, fraud detection, enhanced public safety services and supply chain optimization.

Smart Products and Services can be found in the fields of medical diagnosis and treatment, drug discovery, hospital clinical care management, autonomous vehicles, drones, consumer electronics, and threat intelligence and prevention.

Over the next decade, AI is predicted to have an impact on virtually every product and business process. This means there’s more than likely something that your customers are currently doing that could benefit from AI input to enhance efficiencies and/or outcomes.

AI requires modernized compute with optimized server technology

Across all business sizes and sectors, it’s widely acknowledged that modernizing a company’s compute infrastructure is an essential first step towards implementing AI initiatives. Because AI requires specialized and optimized compute.

Organizations wishing to implement AI initiatives are finding that they need to invest in the advanced level of computational horsepower that Machine Learning, especially Deep Learning, demands – as well as high-bandwidth, low-latency networking and storage capabilities.

While modernization does require some investment, a recent Forrester Consulting research study3 reported that an infrastructure upgrade will pay off not only in financial ROI terms, but also in additional business value, such as improved customer experience and IT operational efficiency.

There’s no denying that AI costs are significant, but so are the returns. Despite hesitations around the upfront cost, 51% of companies in the Forrester study reported that they’re expecting an ample return of between 2x and 5x in terms of their AI investments and the additional business value.

The inefficiencies of outdated infrastructure

The Forrester survey found that the largest challenge to AI in the data center was antiquated infrastructure that made it difficult for the IT organization to support the business in an agile manner. Enterprises especially called out the inefficiencies due to a lack of server and workload automation, as well as insufficient security and legacy software that could not be upgraded.

The latest Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, powered by next-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, are the bedrock of the modern data center – with scalable business architecture, intelligent automation and integrated security built in at every step.

As a Dell EMC partner, you’re ideally placed to promote servers such as the brand new Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa (optimized to run AI and machine learning workloads) and the Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 (ideal for turbocharged in-database analytics), which will help your customers to maximize performance and optimize efficiency right across the business – with no compromises.

We’ve also recently developed pre-configured ‘Ready Bundles’ for Machine Learning and Deep Learning at scale. These are designed to simplify the configuration process, lower costs and speed deployment of distributed multi-node Machine Learning/Deep Learning clusters – to make life easier for AI practitioners at every stage of their implementation.

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Demystifying VMware and the Modern Appliance

When you hear the word “appliance”, what do you picture? For most people, the first images that spring to mind are home appliances, like the washing machine or dishwasher.

The question is, how does the word “appliance” translate in the business world? Interestingly, while the usage is obviously very different, the broad definition is the same. It’s a self-contained solution that performs a specific purpose, delivering better performance with less complexity than what you could achieve using standard hardware and software. In short, there are horses for courses – going back to the kitchen analogy, none of us would think of putting our coffee cups in the washing machine or our jeans in the dishwasher!

Faster routing with a task-focused user interface

In the IT world, a developer might design, for example, a modified and specialized Linux kernel and surrounding software to make traffic routing decisions faster than a standard operating system (OS) installation.

Typically, the appliance has a simplified and task-focused user interface that restricts the configuration choices available compared to a traditional OS install. Quite often, the appliance uses custom or uniquely configured hardware and the appliance software will only run correctly on the physical appliance, using the factory configuration and approved hardware. Again, we can see some parallels with the home appliance world.

Flexible packaging and redundant solutions

In terms of packaging, the solution might be assembled as a single compute element, say a traditional one or two U-rack server. In some cases, a single server might not have enough horsepower to handle the required tasks and you might need to spread the workload across multiple nodes to achieve the design goal.

Alternatively, the solution might use multi-nodes for redundancy, delivered in a multi-node converged infrastructure. This means that all inter-node communications are contained within the physical solution with the complexity hidden from the customer.

Why virtualize?

In some cases, an appliance maker will forego the hardware and instead release an encapsulated virtual machine (VM) image. This is a great way to allow a customer to test drive a software stack and see if they like the feature set. This approach also allows the appliance vendor to create a single image that can run on multiple hardware platforms.

Smooth operation

There’s another important benefit to adopting virtualization technologies on your appliance. Quite often, an appliance is made up of several very complex functions that work together in tandem to perform the workload expected of the appliance. By putting each function into its own container, boundaries can be created to ensure the smooth overall operation of the appliance.

For example, hardware resources such as number of cores, memory, and disk space can be locked to specific functions, which ensures that all other functions have the resources they need to perform their tasks. The host OS (or hypervisor) acts as a supervisor, keeping each function limited to its assigned resources. Splitting the software solution into individual functions also delivers an architecture with more clearly defined interface touch points amongst the various components or functions.

High availability

Another advantage is that if one of these functions has an issue or crashes, the effects of the crash are limited to that single component, which can be independently restarted. This means that the solution can continue to operate without any noticeable interruption. Multiple copies of the component can also run simultaneously, allowing a rapid fail-over from one component to a backup copy.

Scalability

The beauty of this design philosophy allows the solution to be spread across multiple nodes, quickly and easily scaling from a single low-end box solution to a large rack level appliance, consisting of dozens of nodes.

Consistency across platforms

Even better, the virtualization running on the hardware can abstract subtle changes between the hardware platforms to provide a consistent environment for the OS. This translates into lower development costs since large parts of the validation process conducted on one platform can be leveraged on others.

Vendors can also benefit from the work done by Dell EMC OEM and VMware.  The VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) provides details on servers, which have been validated to function consistently and properly with VMware. This frees up the appliance creators to focus on what’s important and unique about their solution.

A hybrid approach

So, what’s it to be – hardware solution or virtualization? Interestingly, I’m now seeing a growing trend in the appliance industry, where vendors are adopting a hybrid approach to these delivery methods.  Many are still using the physical machine approach or cluster of nodes, but are also adopting virtualization technologies as a software foundation that runs on the appliance.

Additional security and simplified lifecycle management

For example, VMware on Dell EMC OEM appliances allows your solution to run multiple operating systems on one physical machine. It adds fault and security isolation at the hardware level, and makes it easy to move and copy virtual machines. It also simplifies lifecycle management as there is an easier transition between hardware generation changes. In addition to helping your solution to become cloud ready, VMware also has solutions that can make containers and virtual machines work together with minimal effort.

Better together

In my view, this hybrid approach delivers the best of both worlds. Vendors can completely control the hardware and know exactly how it’s configured and what its capabilities are, but at the same time, they are free to treat the platform as an environment that “just works.”

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Use Real-World Data to Drive Effective IT Decisions

Gather insights to accurately assess customers’ IT infrastructure needs

In today’s fast-moving digital economy, organizations need to modernize and transform their IT to stay competitive. But customers are likely to be reluctant to make the required purchasing decisions without having a clear and comprehensive view of their current IT environment and workloads to hand – especially when budgets are limited.

In the past, this has presented a significant problem – because the research and evaluation phase of a typical IT purchase cycle can last 4-9 months. Now, Dell EMC Live Optics changes everything.

With Live Optics, you can present your customers with real-world data quickly and easily. It not only helps to drive effective IT decisions but also enables you to better match recommended solutions to specific workloads and desired business outcomes, in an impressive turnaround time.

Delivering advanced insights about server performance across all workloads and other infrastructure elements, Dell EMC Live Optics allows you to collect and analyze data about a customer’s IT infrastructure.

The easy way to assess existing infrastructure

Live Optics is free, online software that all Dell EMC partners can use to quickly and easily collect, visualize and share data about their customers’ IT environments and workloads.

This sophisticated profiling tool takes all the legwork out of researching a customer’s current infrastructure and putting together proposals for server refresh and other optimized IT solutions.

Spanning server, virtualization, storage, data protection, workloads and trends, it’s also an easy way to introduce organizations to the performance and efficiency benefits of embracing IT transformation – starting by modernizing their infrastructure.

Visually explore workload performance

In the past, customers may have found that aggregating and analyzing data from individual servers and data centers to make purchasing decisions lead to overspending. That’s because particular aspects of the IT infrastructure were assessed in isolation. To modernize their infrastructure – the first step towards IT transformation – customers need to understand how their organization’s workloads have an impact on each other in a shared environment over time.

Dell EMC Live Optics creates transparency, so you and your customers can accurately see and diagnose their unique IT needs. It means that you can recommend solutions that are optimized to meet the demands of specific workloads and business outcomes, while they can better control the buying process.

This free, lightweight, remote and agentless software streams workload data from your customers’ systems to an online analytics engine, then measures, analyzes and blends workload characteristics.

The Live Optics dashboard shows the results as a visual summary of individual and group server performance across all workloads. This enables you to identify areas where the entire infrastructure can operate more efficiently as a whole – at potentially lower cost for your customers.

Transform IT and deliver real business results

The ability to gain a clear, accurate view of an IT environment and workload characteristics in the Live Optics dashboard gives your customers optimal control over their spending and enables them to make data-driven decisions.

It also enables you, as their trusted IT provider, to better map your recommended solutions to their specific business needs. Whether that’s upgrading to the latest Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, featuring next-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, or focusing on optimal integration in another area of the IT stack. With deep insights into server and wider infrastructure performance, workload simulations, utilization and support, you’ll have all the information you need to accurately document requirements and tailor unique solutions for your customers.

Better still, you can use Live Optics to guide your customers towards consideration of the all the benefits of IT transformation in a matter of hours, rather than weeks or even months.

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Dell and Basel Action Network Team up to Track E-Waste

Having worked in tech for the last 25 years, I have geeked out on my fair share of new devices. But nothing gets me more excited than the opportunity to deploy tech in ways that can solve real challenges.

This week in partnership with the Basel Action Network (BAN), I’m thrilled to introduce a new pilot program that will use global tracking technology utilized by BAN to provide greater transparency into our own US electronics recycling programs. As part of BAN’s new EarthEye tracking service, the trackers will be placed on non-working electronics that enter our consumer takeback programs and follow the equipment over the next 12 months to ensure the materials are recycled responsibly.

It’s no secret that the growing appetite for new gadgets is causing a growing e-waste challenge. According to Earth911, the US produces approximately 9.4 million tons of e-waste every year, and less than 15 percent is responsibly recycled. We as consumers and producers must do better.

As Ben Von Wong so beautifully conveys in the below video, recycling electronics has far-reaching benefits including the opportunity to recover precious materials for reuse in things like jewelry and new Dell products. It also saves energy: recycling one million laptops saves the energy equivalent to the electricity used by 3,657 U.S. homes in a year, according to the EPA.

For decades Dell has put our muscle behind addressing this issue: we have the world’s largest technology recycling program offering services to customer in more than 75 countries and territories.  We were first to ban the export of e-waste, advocate for infrastructure in developing countries and we turn e-waste into a valuable resource that can go back into the economy. To date, we’ve put more than 20 million pounds of e-waste plastics in more than 90 new Dell products since 2013. But there’s always more to do.

The project with BAN provides us with greater visibility into our downstream processes and could potentially add an extra layer of transparency to our existing electronics disposition partner audit program. We are open to the fact that we may find some gaps, and we’re fully committed to putting an action plan in place if we do. The important thing is that we’re finding new, hopefully better ways to ensure responsible recycling practices, and in doing so, we set a higher bar for the entire industry.

We look forward to reporting out on the results of our pilot with BAN in the next 12 months. In the meantime, please consider taking time this summer to clear out your pile of vintage devices in your closet and recycle them with Dell.

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Banks as Role Models

Let’s go on a fantastic journey today, a trip into one of the endless parallel worlds described by quantum mechanics (you’re familiar with the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead). Many things in this world remain the same, yet many others are quite different. It could be that the sidewalks are pink and we keep squirrels as pets.

Now imagine that banks in this parallel world are the role models of customer communication. They prepare a dashboard for you. It delivers more than just information on your bank transactions. It can also display your prospects of success in investment scenarios and affordable peer-to-peer loans. If you want, you can even set up the dashboard to warn you before you make spontaneous, unnecessary purchases (like an 8K television or a handbag and matching shoes, for example).

In this parallel world, your bank provides you with recommendations such as changing your Internet provider to a more affordable competitor that offers better services for less each month. It can suggest subscribing to Netflix, for example, because you enjoy going to the movies and your bank account balance allows for it. Or it recommends adding the Hi-fi service by Spotify because you just purchased a high-quality stereo system. The bank will immediately provide an explanation of any fees or service charges that you question.

And your insurance company won’t seem stiff and formal in this parallel world. An intelligent chatbot will contact you immediately in the event of an incident and arrange for a quick payment once the details have been clear up. Gone are the days that you have to spend months chasing down your insurance payout. Your insurance company can automatically apply the brakes of the car if you’re behind the wheel and your smartwatch registers heart palpations and other disquieting values, because your insurance company fears you might pass out. It just prevented serious damage that could have cost a lot of money, and worse yet, loss to human life. It can alert the police as someone attempts to break in to your home. And if the humidity or temperature in your home rises, it can inform a repair company to check in on your home.

Banks and insurance companies are your friends and helpers in this parallel world. And everyone benefits from this relationship. You receive better services, enjoy excellent communication, and benefit from affordable rates, and the service providers cut costs, improve customer loyalty, and expand their offering.

This scenario seems quite fanciful from today’s perspective, yet the technology we have available today would enable all of these innovations. There is nothing standing in the way of banks and insurance companies becoming better service providers. We already have technologies such as artifical intelligence (AI), big data, Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain, robotics, machine learning, and many, many others and we can implement them at any time. Just as an aside, Dell uses all of these technologies and offers numerous products and solutions based on them.

Of course, we don’t need to implement everything just because we can. Providers should take careful steps to consider which data they need to use based on their business ethics. Protection of personal data has absolute priority and it is the measure of all things. Nevertheless, many banks and insurance companies are already using innovation solutions provided by Dell EMC in order to cut costs, streamline processes, automate evaluations, improve sales of products, get to know customers better, or simply become more agile, just like Credit Agricole, the Bank of Ireland UK, and China Citic Bank are doing.

Granted, transformation is not always that easy, and some companies experience fatigue along the way. It’s not only the IT that needs to implement the changes; the security, the organization, and even the culture of the institution need to change. What’s more, there are many people involved, like the CEO, CIO, the various departments, the IT team, and many internal users and external customers and partners. And there are other factors to consider, like transparency, scalability, maintenance aspects, customer orientation, and absolute flexibility in order to ensure that all bases are covered.

Transformation in our parallel world is easy; however, in the real world the banks and insurance companies need a strong partner. But don’t worry, we’re here for you.

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Why a Strong CFO-CIO Relationship is the Key to Success in the Digital World

Why a strong CFO-CIO relationship is the key to success in the digital world

For the last 32 years, I have carried out financial roles within the field of technology. In other words, I’ve been juggling figures and analyzing bottom lines in a fast-changing world. Among the many trends and hype curves I’ve encountered, there is one thing that is irreplaceable: a frank and open chat at the coffee machine. As a CFO, I heartily recommend entertaining that tradition with your CIO colleagues. Let me explain …

CFO and CIO, bound for a win-win

In many ways, the digital age has made it easier for me to fulfill my duties. I am amazed at the way all my devices can sync to deliver the latest reports at my fingertips, allowing me to make important decisions in near real-time. That’s another reason you can find a natural ally in your CIO. He/she is the go-to person if you want to leverage new technologies and, more specifically, to make figures speak out in a rapidly evolving business context, anytime and anywhere. Now more than ever, CFO and CIO need to combine technical acumen with business expertise. For the CFO, the most obvious way to understand how a company can adapt to the new digital world is to get briefed by the CIO. And the CIO needs the buy-in of the CFO to realize  IT transformation.

The time of working apart together is over. And luckily so, most CFOs and CIOs are aware of that. As a recent survey on IT Transformation conducted by Forbes Insights and Dell EMC indicates 96% of the C-suite see close CIO/CFO collaboration as being important or even critical to business success. Though this partnership has improved in recent years (to the extent that it is now described as excellent by 36 percent of CFOs), a large majority of respondents (89 percent) acknowledge that significant barriers still exist: conflicts arising over traditional reporting structure, CIO’s lack of business expertise and outdated attitudes from the CFO about the primary role of the CIO make up the top three spot of the Forbes survey.

In my experience in working with different customers and partners, I feel that the traditional stereotypes have not yet completely disappeared. The CFO continues to see the CIO as someone who has no good control of cost and spends lots of money on fancy new toys with no clear return on investment. On the other side, the CIO still tends to consider the CFO a risk-averse individual, blocking any attempt to innovate. By the way, let us not forget that in most companies, the CIO still reports to the CFO, and they are not exactly on a peer level, although this is becoming less true in companies that have set forth on a digital journey heavily investing in IT assets. But even in these more digitally-driven organizations, there is enough room for improving the partnership or each party to benefit from one another’s strengths.

Start from the same page

In fact, the entire executive team needs to operate as one if they want their company to succeed on their digital journey. But I am convinced that CFO and CIO have a special responsibility within that mission. If they are not on the same page, the CFO will not necessarily approve what the CIO advises to spend, and the propensity for a breakdown will increase.

So how do you avoid this?

The first step is to define what business value actually is before aligning with CFO and CIO. As a (digital) business, what is the ultimate goal we want to reach? Where do we want to go in terms of technology? Do we take all the bells and whistles at once, or do we want more of a phased approach over a longer period? All of these key questions will generate trade-offs at the start that will be conditions for success in the long run.

As a CFO in a tech-savvy environment, I invite my peers to contribute to a definition of business value that is not purely built around cost control. In other words, every new technology should not be looked at as a luxury item, but from the point of view of its long-term ROI.

The ability to start from common ground will also largely depend on the combination of short and long-term metrics. CIO and CFO should sit together to answer a few basic questions like:

◈ Do we have enough Capex budget for this year?

◈ Do we have an expense problem for this year?

◈ Do we need to buy new technology with free maintenance period?

This will help to build a common framework for the year to come that makes sense to both. Goals aligned from the start, based on a clear allocated Capex budget and a cohesive strategy, will facilitate practical day to day decisions for both a CFO who needs trustworthy reporting (P&L and Capex metrics in a given timeframe) and a CIO who wants to roll-out projects as soon as possible.

If this synchronization does not happen (with the backing of the whole management team, led by the CEO), the collaboration between CFO and CIO may still look fair, but the major risk is that the CFO will not really buy into the CIO’s plans and drip feed the required approvals, which will, of course, slow down the roll-out and, in the end, lead to runaway expenses, making both unhappy.  This going off the track happens quite frequently.

My 5 tips for the CFO:

1. Take the first step to overcome barriers. Given that he/she is often the more senior of the two, this honor usually falls to the CFO to reach out to the CIO. Otherwise, he/she will be left behind in a rapidly changing marketplace.

2. Have a regular chat with your CIO at the coffee machine, at least once a fortnight. Do not hesitate to ask “silly” questions.

3. Initiate discussions with customers and partners about their technological challenges and opportunities.

4. Take part in (external) conferences around emerging technologies, such as AI, IoT and robotics. There are formats aimed at non-technical people, showing you how to leverage technology and to grasp the concepts. Afterwards, the CIO will be able to help you implement these new technologies.

5. Read. There are some good books out there, including some that explain “digital transformation” and new technologies clearly and concisely. For example, I am currently reading “Big Data Demystified”, by David Stephenson (FT Publishing). I highly recommend it for any CFO.

Following the above steps and reaching out to the CIO will certainly help to keep the CFO abreast of new technologies. The modern CFO does not need super powers, he/she just needs to surround himself/herself with the right people and technologies if he/she wants to be a gatekeeper who is open to innovations, as well as a driver for growth.

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Introducing the Data Continuum: Driving Force of IT Transformation

Meeting frequently with customers, partners and industry analysts, I engage in some terrific conversations. We discuss what Dell EMC customers care about today. That is, what’s motivating IT professionals now compared with just a year or two ago, and what do they want Dell EMC to help them accomplish, from an infrastructure and services perspective?

This leads always to the topic of transformation—how, in 2018, people in IT are far less concerned with product features and price points than they are with using technology to deliver business outcomes, like creating new business models, expanding revenue streams and ensuring exceptional customer experience.

This shift all comes down to data—the evolving role it plays in the world and in the enterprise. We can think about the role of data as having five stages that I refer to as the data continuum. The digitally transformed organization must think through technology and infrastructure decisions across all of these stages:

1. Creation of data: It used to be that traditional applications were the primary source of data. Today, with cloud-native applications, edge computing, IOT/sensor data, the volume and variety of data types are growing significantly

2. Storage of data: With the massive increase in data sources and types, storage of data has had to evolve as well. Software-defined architectures, which allow for multi-dimensional scaling while supporting both traditional and modern applications, are in high demand. Data Storage is no longer focused primarily on compliance and regulation but on managing, protecting and securing data as the high-value asset that it is.

3. Analysis of Data: Data analytics have always existed, even before the arrival of digital data we speak of today. With support from technologies like Hadoop and open source tools, analytics applications that once focused primarily on structured data now encompass unstructured formats as well, like text and multi-media content.

4. Learning from Data: A natural extension of widespread analysis of structured and unstructured data is the ability to learn from data. This is where Machine Learning comes in, and where the right combination of infrastructure, tools and frameworks allow systems themselves to learn from the analysis data.

5. Acting on Data: This is where systems can substitute for human intelligence by leveraging the patterns in analysis they have performed, extracting insights from data, making decisions and taking action on that data, with or without human intervention.

Making the continuum real

These five stages of the data continuum align closely to the ways we at Dell EMC approach IT transformation and make it real for you. At every phase in the continuum, our products and solutions are there, making the data-driven business possible for you:

Dell EMC servers and platforms for traditional and cloud-native applications, workstations and edge gateways for IoT solutions— all are sources of data creation. VxRack SDDC with VMware Cloud Foundation, Pivotal Ready Architecture, Virtustream Enterprise Cloud Platform, Dell EMC Cloud on Azure Stack and, of course, PowerEdge Servers are examples of our offerings in this space.

For storage of data, we offer the broadest portfolio of next-generation products, across entry, midrange, high-end and unstructured data storage, meeting the performance, capacity or data services requirements for pretty much every application in your data center. We also offer consumption choices, from converged and hyper-converged infrastructure to cloud services. And, since an asset as valuable as data also needs to be carefully protected, we offer industry-leading data protection solutions as well.

To support analysis of data, we offer Ready Solutions for SAP, Splunk and Hadoop. In addition, we have HDFS natively integrated into our storage platforms to help you do in-place analytics.

To help you learn from data, we offer servers and Ready Solutions for Machine Learning and Deep Learning, they include the infrastructure, frameworks, software and tools you need to train your applications and help them become more and more intelligent.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are not just something our platforms help others to achieve. We apply both within our own products, directly benefitting you with systems like the PowerMax array, that learns from and acts on your data, making up to 6 billion decisions a day, simplifying management experience and maximizing performance with no overhead. Using solutions like CloudIQ, Dell EMC solutions continuously learn from and act on your data with proactive monitoring and predictive analytics.

What’s your continuum story? Are you using data in ways that help you achieve maximum business outcomes? With a portfolio of solutions and services that make the data continuum real, Dell EMC can help you become a more strategic business influencer, using the power of data to build new revenue models and deliver outstanding customer experiences. 

For more context on this topic, view my May 2018 CUBE conversation below. You can also check out Dell EMC’s commitment to AI and ML technologies

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A Perfect Blend of Power Efficiency and Cooling

Introduce your customers to the advantages of innovative PowerEdge cooling systems

As well as operating as efficiently as possible, the best-suited servers in this instance will offer built-in automation features and resilient system design to ensure continued, optimal performance even when power or thermal conditions in the data center change.

Perfect blend of power efficiency, automation and resiliency

The latest Dell EMC PowerEdge servers are built to perform using the least possible energy, to offer high server/rack density, and to be optimized to suit your customers’ specific operating environments.

Leading system design combines with embedded Dell EMC OpenManage software and the Integrated Dell EMC Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) – which monitor operations, automate routine maintenance and let IT policy drive actions – to ensure ongoing operations and simplified IT management in all circumstances.

An essential aspect of modern IT infrastructure

To help your customers to modernize their IT while also reducing costs, it makes sense to suggest that they take a closer look at ways to operate their data center servers as efficiently as possible.

Powered by next-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers incorporate efficiency at every stage of system design. The immediate operational benefits are further enhanced by intelligent built-in automation and innovative internal cooling systems that leave competitor products feeling the heat.

Did you know that Dell EMC reports each PCIe slot’s cooling capacity? The industry-leading thermal and mechanical designs across the entire portfolio of next-generation Dell EMC PowerEdge servers support greater density, extreme environments, higher power CPUs, NVMe, NVDIMMs, GPUs and FPGAs – all while delivering maximum performance and uptime.

Built-in efficiency advantages

With their inherently efficient system design, new PowerEdge servers allow more airflow, while Multi Vector Cooling automatically calculates and delivers the proper airflow needed for optimal cooling. Customers can also use Dell EMC OpenManage Power Center to optimize their servers’ power consumption, with power capping functionality ensuring the greatest possible density.

A wide range of power supplies suits every need and size of workload, and the option of Direct Contact Liquid Cooling is also available. Using liquid to dissipate heat from PowerEdge servers typically delivers:

◈ Higher server performance and reliability;

◈ Greater density;

◈ Decreased operating expenses.

PowerEdge thermal architecture, control algorithms, embedded iDRAC and OpenManage tools are all designed to ensure that component reliability and workload availability are the top priorities at all times.

Predictability and protection in changing operating conditions

Robust engineering and advanced Dell EMC PowerEdge power and cooling technology prepares your customers’ data centers for the unexpected.

With PowerEdge servers, customers can benefit from peace of mind that workloads will keep running and data will be kept safe in the event of demanding power or thermal conditions.

Power efficiency, by design – reliable performance that enables effective scalability in all data centers:

◈ Leading system design;

◈ Optimized power management;

◈ Scalable management.

Intelligent automation that maintains key workloads at desired performance levels:

◈ Putting power where needed, automatically;

◈ Optimizing performance in response to changes in operating conditions;

◈ Increasing density with automated management of power/thermal demands.

Resiliency that protects IT operations and secures business continuity:

◈ Infrastructure safety, despite thermal or power events.

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How Simplicity and Focus Create a Winning Strategy

In my 30+ years at Dell, I’ve had an opportunity to see virtually every element of product design, ideation and innovation come together.  I’ve seen some of the best products and concepts…and of course, there’s been a few dogs – but that’s what innovation is all about – taking risks and being bold.  Some of the most amazing inventions are born from big ideas and rolling the dice – you have to be fearless, believe and make it happen.

So as I consider what fuels innovation, more often than not, I come back to these five key pillars that, in my experience, deliver world-class products and innovation.

Customer-First

Always start with the customer – what they need to deliver and meet their requirements and demands. The customer has been at the very core of Dell since its inception and today remains at the heart of our culture.  Innovation is only as amazing as it is useful…features and functionality need to deliver a benefit – whether it’s improving the user experience, driving productivity or achieving better business outcomes.

Innovation with the customer in mind – a true purpose – will also ensure you’re only bringing to market the best possible technologies and solutions.  Quality of innovation is critical, and as the saying goes, you only have one chance to make a first impression – it simply has to work and work well.  It has to move the needle for your customer.

Simplicity

Customers want simplicity in the products and services they invest in, particularly as their IT universe expands in scope with increasing demands on their infrastructure (Cloud, SaaS, analytics, security – the list is long) and on their resources.  IT is now a part of the very fabric of modern business – so IT solutions have to be easy to purchase, integrate and use.  When there are too many products in a portfolio that overlap – that’s where the confusion lies.

We at Dell are working hard to ensure our customers have the BEST set of products across our broad portfolio that all work together, seamlessly integrate and achieve their business objectives.   And when we simplify – everybody wins…there is more time spent on innovation internally, which leads to better, faster products that get to market even faster for our customers.

Differentiation

We ask ourselves everyday “why should a customer buy from Dell Technologies?”  The answer? Well, there are a few.  First – we are focused on driving value through differentiated products that set us apart from the competition – an incredible by-product of simplifying our processes and our portfolio.  We do this across our CSG and ISG businesses, and apply this thinking to our supply chain.

Case in point: our end-to-end NVMe in PowerMax with a multi-controller architecture that ensures our customers get the best performance and speed in our new Enterprise storage solution.  Further, we innovate based on industry-standard, enabling a quicker path to Storage Class Memory, and allows us to leverage the full scale of Dell’s supply chain.

And, we do this across our portfolio, ensuring that storage along with our servers, data protection, cloud and networking offerings are NVMe and NVMe-over-fabrics ready for a true holistic Modern Data Center solution.

Second – no other company in the world can advance innovation for a holistic end-to-end IT infrastructure the way that we can with the full weight of the Dell Technologies family.  We can take advantage of each other’s strengths to deliver the best solutions the market has to offer – like delivering VxRail on VSAN, and Data Domain on VMware running on AWS for a hybrid-cloud solution.

Bold-Yet-Calculated Risks

I mentioned earlier that risks are important in innovation – but those risks need to be informed and really solid educated guesses on what’s going to be a success.  And they need to be fostered by the deep belief that it’s OK to break out of mold and think differently to solve a challenge.  In fact, it’s break the mold or die in today’s fast moving industry.

We as a leader in hardware have fully-embraced, if not tackled, the software-defined evolution – systems need to be agile, flexible and cloud-like to deliver all the advantages of today’s emerging capabilities born from data, AI and Machine Learning.  And we’re innovating to ensure our customers can manage and analyze data insights in the cloud as a service through CloudIQ.

Bold moves also need to be driven by data and insights.  And in a world that is digitally transforming with the massive amounts of data hitting our systems every day, there’s never been a better time for innovation.

Get input from customers, analyze data, listen to influencers and industry peers…and because I’m a numbers guy I’ll tell you that numbers don’t lie.  Data is power.  We harness it through our infrastructure solutions to drive better business outcomes for our customers – and we use it to improve our own products and solutions by integrating intelligent automation and machine learning across our portfolio.

For example – the PowerMax operating system makes six billion decisions a day on where and how to store massive amounts of data – all built on the insights and data we’ve accumulated in our 30+ years of being a leader in storage.  And we’re using AI in our ProSupport Plus service offering to predict failures and proactively service our products and reduce downtime.  And all of this data leads to new insights and even more innovation – it’s an amazing cycle of feedback that is changing the way we design and deliver products, and even in how we do business.

Focus

Focus is incredibly important – it’s the foundation for innovation and overall, leadership in your industry.

You have to remain focused on customers and what they need to be successful – that’s what we do. There’s a lot of mud-slinging and FUD when it comes to comparing portfolios and strategy.  Some think that’s part of the game…FUDders gonna FUD – but we don’t play that game and it’s not what we do.  We know that a commitment to focus drives great results – and improving growth in our markets just happens to be a great key performance indicator.  Customers are telling us they believe in what we do.

Remember when I said the numbers don’t lie? Well a few numbers I’m really excited about right now are those released by IDC demonstrating that in our Storage business, we gained 5.8 percentage points of share year-over-year (YoY) in the first calendar quarter of 2018.  That’s a really big deal.  

AND, we’re proud that Dell EMC is the undisputed leader in x86 servers in the world for both revenue and units, according to IDC.

Combine that with 21 consecutive quarters of growth in our PC business, our #1 position in CI and HCI solutions, Workstations, Displays – and you’ve got a winning end-to-end portfolio that is driven by the aforementioned pillars for innovation success.

I am so incredibly proud of what we’ve built here at Dell Technologies – we continue to come from a position of strength, and we’re only getting stronger through a team committed to our customers and committed to innovation.  And with the technology and macro global trends in front of us, it’s never been a better time to seize the innovation opportunity at hand.  And that’s what we’ll go do all day every day.

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Position Yourself as the Go-To Technology Partner for IT Transformation

Dell EMC Partners: Introduce customers to all the benefits of modernizing and automating their IT—and provide expert guidance and support at every step.

In today’s increasingly digitally driven world, businesses need to embrace IT Transformation and evolve to stay competitive—sometimes to even survive.

IT Transformation is a fundamental and essential requirement for organizations of all sizes, in all sectors. Because unless they transform their IT, businesses simply cannot deal with the sheer amount of data and digital economy change that their operations are currently facing. All of which presents a fantastic business opportunity for you …

Reap the rewards of becoming a trusted advisor

It’s time to open your customers’ eyes to all the benefits of IT Transformation.

We’ve created an exciting new campaign to help you guide and advise your customers as they start to modernize and automate their IT—an initial strategic step on their journey towards embracing wider Digital Transformation.

With our carefully designed IT Transformation campaign, you can become a trusted advisor, armed with all the resources you need to inform, enable and support them at every stage of their consideration and eventual decision-making process.

It’s time for your customers to transform their IT

Many businesses have already realised the increasingly undeniable need to make the fundamental move of modernizing and automating their IT—but they need expert guidance and support. A recently published ESG survey reveals that 81 percent of execs admit that they know they need to take action to transform their IT with some urgency if their company is to remain competitive.*

C-suite decision makers clearly need to sit up and pay attention—and you’re ideally placed to help them understand the business case for IT Transformation, driving both that agenda and their companies forward.

Develop ongoing consultancy and sales opportunities

Responding to requests from Dell EMC partners, we’ve created a single over-arching campaign that positions the strategic value of the Dell EMC ISG portfolio in its entirety. Each of the comprehensive range of resources and dedicated marketing assets available within the campaign is aligned to a specific step of the buyer journey: Explore > Discover > Learn > Decide.

Our pioneering products and seamless integrations deliver transformational benefits from edge to core to cloud. This new campaign helps you communicate how the overall concept and business benefits of IT Transformation connect down to individual solutions that span everything from Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI), Storage and Server upgrades to Networking, Cloud and Data Protection strategies.

Position yourself as the go-to technology partner

You can use our new IT Transformation campaign to:

◈ Demonstrate holistic expertise and nurture long-term, strategic partnerships with customers.

◈ Drive the IT agenda with customers and assume ongoing consultant status.

◈ Help achieve higher margins by selling end-to-end enterprise solutions.

◈ Further boost profitability by attaching your own business services.

A brand new Portal Page is dedicated to delivering all the information and resources you need to help make IT Transformation real for your customers. These include:

◈ Influential reports from leading industry analysts ESG and IDC to help you demonstrate the value of IT Transformation and start to build the business case for customers.

◈ IDC conversation guides to support you in starting the conversation with customers about the need to modernize and automate IT.

◈ Help with honing your pitch—watch a great webinar from Adeel Omer, Dell EMC’s Head of Global Campaigns & Messaging, which brings the Dell EMC IT Transformation story to life.

◈ A comprehensive Sales Activation Kit, containing everything from a customer presentation and elevator pitch to a sales card and call plan.

◈ Expert marketing campaign assets to support you in planning and developing your bespoke marketing activity and executing your IT Transformation campaign.

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Cyberattackers are Knocking; Secure the Front Door with BIOS Verification

As Advanced Persistent Threats Rise, Dell’s BIOS Verification Approach Is the Secure Way Forward

Everyone can relate to the experience of booting up a computer – hitting the power button, hearing the startup sound, and ultimately seeing the home screen appear. But even some tech professionals may not be aware of what’s happening under the surface.

When the CPU is booted up, the first thing it does is communicate with the flash memory on the motherboard to fetch a piece of code called the Basic Input Output System (BIOS). The BIOS’s job is to initialize the motherboard components, chipset and other hardware in the system. The BIOS on modern systems is based on the UEFI specification, however, for the purposes of this post, we will use the more general term BIOS to refer to this system firmware.

This piece of code is highly privileged and trusted by the computer. It’s the first link in the chain of trust that extends from system reset to your applications, e-commerce transactions and everything else you do on your machine. For cybercriminals, this privileged role makes it an enticing target.

If a cybercriminal is able to leverage a vulnerability that allows them access to BIOS-level privilege, it could target your motherboard and potentially cause your OS and hardware components to malfunction.  If an attacker gets this level of privilege it could be difficult to remediate by traditional methods, as the BIOS sits beneath the OS layer. BIOS malware has been shown to persist across hard drive wipes, OS reinstalls and other usual means of eradication.

For these reasons, the BIOS serves as the foundation of other security layers, and protecting it is a vital part of a defense-in-depth strategy. OEMs, security vendors and IT pros employ a variety of methods to protect the BIOS. And as Cylance Principal Research Scientist Alex Matrosov discussed in a recent Black Hat presentation, Dell’s strategy is among the most comprehensive, including BIOS Lock Enable (BLE), SMM BIOS Write Protection (SMM_WP) and numerous other methods of BIOS protection that our competitors either don’t offer at all or don’t offer to the level of sophistication that Dell does.

Another technology that sets us apart from other OEMs is our BIOS verification approach.

BIOS verification tests the integrity of the BIOS before it executes, and can restore a known good copy when necessary. The difference from other vendors is that we use a secure cloud environment to compare and test an individual BIOS image against the official measurements held in the Dell BIOS lab. By conducting this test on an off-device environment, users can be assured that the post-boot image is not compromised as the testing takes place in a secure cloud platform and not on a potentially infected device.

Some OEMs have tried to take a self-contained approach to verification by including a shadow copy of the BIOS on the motherboard and pre-boot code that checks the BIOS against the shadow copy. The problem with this method is that the “known good” BIOS copy lives on the potentially compromised hardware. So, if cybercriminals have tampered with the copy to match the compromised BIOS, it will make it difficult to see that an attack has even happened.

Dell’s approach addresses these challenges in a more reliable way, employing a level of security that will detect modification to the BIOS even if a cyberattacker has gained physical control of the motherboard.

The combination of data encryption and advanced threat prevention in one security suite with the added security of off-host BIOS verification provides a three-tier approach for securing data and ensuring overall system security and integrity both above and below the OS. This feature is available on all Dell commercial PCs running Intel 6th generation processors or higher with a Dell Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise license.

The only thing evolving as quickly as today’s workforce are the cyber threats it faces. BIOS is the foundation for your most precious data and cyberattackers are knocking – will you be protected? 

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