Stay Ahead: Deliver Flexible and Sustainable IT Lifecycle Execution

Businesses are constantly seeking ways to push IT performance boundaries and improve operations. The more efficient the business can operate, the more productivity the organization can achieve. To accelerate growth, organizations look to information technology to improve performance.

According to IDC research, 59% of organizations are focused on reducing the time and effort to manage technology investments.¹ Prioritization is placed on digital transformation to deliver the most business value and growth.

Technology challenges

Operating older infrastructure can be very challenging. IT administrators spend most of their time managing day-to-day operational patches and fixes, and mitigating security concerns. Not all equipment is going to function optimally. Symptoms can include crashes, slower-than-normal performance or random shut down of applications. The problem increases exponentially as hardware ages further into the lifecycle. System issues also lead to financial challenges. Downtime and productivity loss cuts into revenue.

IDC research has found that the average life span of technology is between 3.4 to 4 years for servers, storage and client devices.¹ Organizations must continually inject cash to procure new hardware every few years to achieve efficiencies and agility. The high cost of the outright purchase of new hardware can prohibit scalability and limit the ability to proactively keep pace with business demands.

Cost savings and efficiencies

Technology Rotation* is a business strategy enabling organizations to simplify the procurement process, maintain liquidity, take advantage of current-state technology and contribute to the circular economy.** This eases cash flow, streamlines hardware acquisition and improves operational efficiency. Equipment can be rotated out before it becomes obsolete and replaced with the latest technology delivering high performance capability that is scalable. Companies can accelerate and enhance digital transformation with a planned refresh of assets, thus optimizing productivity and overcoming challenges throughout the technology lifecycle. Technology acquisition is no longer a massive capital outlay.

The financial benefit is the savings on total cost of usage (TCU) of IT assets, providing operations the ability to better meet future infrastructure goals. According to an IDC interview, Dell customers have found they are achieving 26% server savings, 60% storage savings and 27% client device savings over a six year period, compared to ownership, by utilizing Technology Rotation.¹ This allows for ease of adoption of new technologies and platforms. Modern equipment enables organizations to operate with agility and efficiency. Security risks associated with IT assets are reduced. IT management can therefore focus on strategic initiatives.

Revenue growth

40% of companies reported that revenue acceleration is attributed directly to Technology Rotation’s IT asset refresh.¹ Customers can run multiple projects simultaneously with better performing equipment that costs less. Savings from lower operating and asset acquisition costs allows for reinvestment in strategic business projects that delivers ROI growth.

Increase reliability and employee satisfaction

Operating with new equipment ensures that everything is reliable and compatible with the latest standards. This helps reduce the number of issues organizations have to face while saving on maintenance and upgrade cost.

Customers have found employee productivity loss dropped by 97%. There was a reduction of 36% staff time required to patch and update, 40% to decommission, 29% to support and 37% to deploy IT assets.¹ Employees with access to better equipment and the latest tools have lower downtime and improved employee satisfaction.

Contributes to the circular economy

As part of sustainability initiatives, IT leadership will need to implement circular economy programs into their IT planning. A circular economy gives IT managers the tools to tackle resource use, climate change and biodiversity loss while addressing important social needs. Technology Rotation supports organizations in meeting sustainability goals by replacing outdated equipment that is no longer operating at peak performance and replacing it with new technology that creates a positive impact on the environment. Old hardware is refurbished, remarketed or recycled in a secure and transparent manner.

Dell is a single source provider for payment solutions for hardware, software, peripherals and support. There is no need for multiple payment providers. At the end of the equipment lifecycle, there is peace of mind, knowing that assets are properly disposed of through sustainable means. Partner with Dell to accelerate the circular economy.

¹ Source: IDC Infobrief, sponsored by Dell Technologies, “The Business Value of Dell’s Technology Rotation Program,” October 2021.

*All websites referenced in this article are intended for readers located in the United States only. Readers outside of the United States may access their county’s website by selecting their location from the location menu. Products and offers may not be available or may vary by country.

**Payment solutions provided and serviced by Dell Financial Services L.L.C. or its affiliate or designee (“DFS”) for qualified customers. Offers may not be available or may vary in certain countries. Where available offers may be changed without notice and are subject to product availability, applicable law, credit approval, documentation provided by and acceptable to DFS and may be subject to minimum transaction size. Offers not available for personal, family or household use. Dell Technologies and the Dell Technologies logo are trademarks of Dell Inc. Restrictions and additional requirements may apply to transactions with governmental or public entities. FAIR MARKET VALUE (“FMV”) LEASE: At the end of the initial FMV Lease term, lessee may 1) purchase the equipment for the then FMV, 2) renew the lease or 3) return the equipment to DFS.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Be a Superhero with Multi-cloud Management

There was a time when all superheroes belonged to two camps, either DC or Marvel. Batman, Hulk, Superman, Thor, and Spider-man, to name a few, all belonged to the comic universe of these two publishers.

A similar scenario played out in the IT world in the past decade. There was the private cloud crew versus the public cloud disruptors. IT professionals quickly divided between advocates of control and customization in private clouds versus developers looking for the standardization and flexibility of a shared environment in public clouds.

A common perception was that the hyperscalers would host all the applications, and local data centers and private clouds were doomed. Customer experience and support from developers tired of the tyranny of rigid operations took the lead in the public cloud adoption. The hyperscalers started to expand globally to comply with local residency and labor regulations. They incorporated new technologies such as containers and functions, developed multiple managed services, and enrolled partners to achieve the massive application migration to their platforms.

However, performance, governance, and cost issues made many organizations reconsider private clouds and even migrate back workloads from hyperscalers to local datacenters.

Hyperscalers incorporated on-premises and edge solutions to get closer to the action and avoid the latency. At the same time, the private cloud manufacturers and software platforms started their ‘as-a-service’ offerings and ‘everywhere’ mantra, reaching agreements with the hyperscalers to be the glue or crossover of the future. Everyone claimed that your investment would be preserved and protected from obsolescence if you used their product. You will be able to use it on-premises, the edge, or the public cloud.

Wouldn’t it be possible to get the best of both worlds? It could be like having Hulk native muscles with Batman’s armor and weapon pipelines. Reality demanded a hybrid model to coexist peacefully with its pros and cons as the mainframe and mid-range systems were doing on the data center.

What was needed was to find a way to orchestrate hyperscalers, private clouds, and infrastructure to collaborate freely to deliver outcomes without design constraints.

If a mission calls for the talents of specific superheroes, it can happen, but it requires establishing proper governance and autonomy. We also need to make sure additional partners can join later without any lock-in and painful separation. A multi-cloud solution provides the freedom to mix and match technologies, including VMware, Nutanix, OpenStack, or hyperscalers, to meet business needs.

But the task of combining all the multi-cloud requirements: continuous delivery, provisioning, security, compliance, automation, standardization, and self-service while keeping budget under control, is daunting for many. It is costly and risky to try to do multi-cloud yourself, pick the best solution for each requirement and implement it for every application, hoping that all of them will fit together. The answer is to use a cloud management platform (CMP) to minimize integration risks and track costs without losing your mind in the effort.

The key to picking the right CMP is agnosticism. In most cases, you cannot ask Captain America to treat Green Lantern the same way he would do with Wolverine. Or even worse, admitting his limitations of working solo and resisting the temptation to save the world by himself. You need someone independent to save the day.

You need an intelligent and independent CMP to achieve a world where anything is possible, even the collaboration between the superheroes of DC and Marvel universes. Dell Multi-cloud Management with Morpheus is the cloud and automation agnostic platform that can achieve this. The solution scale DevSecOps tasks to modernize applications and keep operations efficient with hyper-convergent systems. It includes true multi-tenancy and enables service providers to offer managed services for multiple customers. The solution has more codeless integration points than any other CMP and lets you use your favorite automation framework.

You won’t need to choose a specific hyperscaler or private cloud platform and choose between innovation and business agility vs. security and control. Get Dell Multi-cloud Management with Morpheus to speed up your digital transformation now and achieve amazing results with the combined skills of all superheroes.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Cache in with PowerEdge and AMD EPYC

With the amount of data being produced and collected, critical product design and digital manufacturing are increasingly more granular. At McLaren racing, the difference between finishing a race in the top five positions could be as little as 0.15%. The competition is so fierce that the disparity between the fastest and slowest cars is as small as 4%. To fine tune the car’s product design, McLaren collects 100,000 data points per second and runs billions of simulations per year.

The speed and granularity of these HPC workloads is dependent on CPU cache and number of nodes. As the number of nodes increases, the complexity of communication between nodes also increases, making cache per socket extremely important. This relationship is important for both CPU cache and memory cache.

To improve the performance of these HPC workloads, the Dell PowerEdge team is proud to announce the support for the new 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors with AMD 3D V-Cache™ technology. By tripling the L3 cache to 768MB and optimizing data latency, PowerEdge with AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors with AMD 3D V-Cache can improve HPC performance, specifically for technical computing.

Technical workloads running on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology can see performance increases of a max 61% for CFD on Ansys® CFX® and up to 56% max for FEA on Altair Radioss™ compared to AMD EPYC 7003 processors without 3D V-Cache. Keeping the data close to the processor is also important for workloads such as SAP. The PowerEdge R7525 with AMD EPYC 7773X CPU set a new world record and ran 86,000 users on the SAP SD benchmark. This is a 14% improvement over the previous world record.

The increased L3 cache also supports digital manufacturing workloads by improving memory latency and bandwidth. Because the amount of L3 cache is tripling compared to AMD EPYC processors without 3D V-Cache, applications that require high memory bandwidth can benefit significantly. Applications such as computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis can benefit the most. Dell has also seen a reduction on memory latency of approximately 25-35%. This reduction will benefit RTL simulations and even has implications for HPC in the financial industry.

Rack space is incredibly important for these HPC workloads. Customers wanting to hit the sweet spot between performance, power and cooling and licensing costs will be excited about our 1-socket options (R6515 and R7515) paired with the 32 and 64 core processors. The complete stack of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology are great for the 2-socket platforms.

Even though these processors are positioned for very specific applications and workloads, there are long-term implications for AMD innovations. The improved memory latency comes for an innovation made in the CPU design, and it could benefit Dell and AMD customers going forward.

We are excited to support these new features and want to be with our customers every step of their digital transformation journey. Stay tuned at Dell.com to keep up to date will all of Dell PowerEdge with AMD EPYC innovations.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

A Giant Leap Forward for Digital Manufacturing

Digital manufacturing workloads, such as computer-aided engineering (CAE), can require serious compute power. Dell Validated Designs for HPC Digital Manufacturing, powered by AMD EPYC™ processors, are already designed to deliver fast performance and easy scaling with modular building blocks. Now, new technologies from AMD promise to accelerate these compute-hungry workloads.

AMD recently announced the release of AMD EPYC 7003 Series Processors with AMD 3D V‑Cache™ technology. Built on the AMD 3D Chiplet architecture, these new processors are designed to deliver significant benefits for demanding digital manufacturing CAE workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA) and more.

New technology with a significant performance impact

By employing stacking based on a copper-to-copper hybrid bonding “bumpless” chip-on-wafer process, AMD is able to deliver interconnect densities over 200X compared to 2D interconnects, and over 15X compared to other stacking technologies using solder bumps. This helps lower latency, boost bandwidth and enhance power and thermal efficiencies. As a result, Dell Validated Designs for HPC Digital Manufacturing based on PowerEdge servers with AMD EPYC 7003 Processors with AMD 3D V‑Cache technology can accelerate CAE workloads, by as much as 56%, while helping reduce energy consumption.

The impact of this increased compute power is significant. For example, AMD benchmark testing found that servers using AMD EPYC 7003 Series Processors with AMD 3D V-Cache can solve up to ~59% more CFD problems per day and complete up to ~56% more FEA explicit solver jobs per day than standard 3rd Gen EPYC processor based servers.

For digital manufacturing, where server density is incredibly important, the combination of Dell PowerEdge R6515 and R6525 servers and AMD EPYC processors is ideal for boosting the performance per rack for some digital manufacturing applications. Dell Validated Designs based on these combinations provide a balanced ecosystem that helps businesses achieve faster and more competitive results.

Real-world digital manufacturing results

Dell Validated Designs for HPC Digital Manufacturing are already making an impact. For example, UK-based Wirth Research is dedicated to the belief that life can be more enjoyable and more sustainable, designing technologies that are very energy efficient. The company worked with Verne Global and Dell Technologies to find solutions that could reduce the energy demands of their HPC workloads by up to 70%, using Dell PowerEdge servers based on AMD EPYC processors.

To further advance sustainability, Wirth Research moved their new HPC environment to a Verne Global data center, which is powered by 100% renewable energy. Verne Global provides robust server and storage infrastructure to support the HPC needs of some of the world’s most innovative industries and, like Wirth Research, holds sustainability at the heart of its value proposition.

A technology partnership that pushes boundaries

Dell Technologies collaborates with AMD to push workload boundaries with tailored IT and business solutions that enable better business outcomes. We’re excited about our expanding partnership with AMD and are pleased to announce support for 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V‑Cache technology across our Dell PowerEdge server rack portfolio.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Rethinking Recycling

Did you know the estimated amount of worldwide e-waste in 2021 outweighed the Great Wall of China? Alarming statistic, right? These are the types of data points that inspire me to continue to create programs that move people from passive concern to taking action to improve our planet.

What motivates people to make recycling an important part of owning technology? To find out, we regularly conduct research, host focus groups and proactively seek out input from our business customers. What they consistently tell us is that recycling needs to be easier and fit into their regular routines, and for businesses, data security is one of their top concerns. We use these insights to improve our services to take back technology with the goal of extending the life of those products and materials through repair, reuse and recycling.

Since 2007, Dell has recovered more than 2.5 billion pounds (1.1 billion kilograms) of used electronics, but we know we must be even more aggressive to deliver the positive environmental impact that will result from reusing and recycling one product for every one sold by 2030. To achieve this ambitious goal, we are building on our more than 25 years of experience in global recycling services to rethink and redesign our approach.

Here are a few recent examples of how we are using insights and testing out new ideas to ultimately increase recycling:

◉ Commercial customers represent the most significant opportunity to scale taking back out-of-use and legacy equipment. This month we’re expanding our Asset Recovery Service to 36 countries globally. With this service, Dell manages the pickup logistics of any brand of leased or owned hardware, sanitizes used devices to ensure data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, resells devices to give value back to the customer or recycles the equipment responsibly and provides a comprehensive report of the process, including the ability to manage and follow the entire process through our online TechDirect portal.

◉ To get consumers to send in out-of-use technology, we are giving them something back. With Dell Trade In, U.S. consumers can register eligible personal electronics – of any brand, in any condition – for instant credit. A completely free service, consumers simply enter the details of their eligible device online, receive a quote for the credit they will receive and drop it off at a FedEx location or drop box. As soon as the box is scanned, the value is instantly emailed to the customer in a virtual pre-paid debit card that can be used to purchase Dell products and services.

◉ Last month, Dell Technologies was excited to join Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft to launch a year-long, city-wide collect-from-your-door electronics recycling pilot for consumers in Denver, Colorado. A technology industry-first collaboration developed in partnership with recycling start-up Retrievr, this pilot will collect insights to better understand the most critical factors affecting consumer behavior and apply them to improve processes for recycling electronic waste. Denver residents can find out more about how to use this service here.

If we want to make a dent in that Great Wall of China sized mountain of e-waste, we have to dramatically scale recycling. This is why, for the month of April leading up to Earth Day, Dell Technologies will launch an awareness campaign to get people to participate in a “Global Recycling Drive for the Planet.” Designed to share the impact of e-waste and inspire action, we aim to mobilize our global community of team members, consumers, customers and partners to move the needle on extending the life of out-of-use technology – not only in the lead up to Earth Day – but year-round. Together we can dramatically decrease e-waste and protect the planet for the future. To learn and participate today, please visit DellTechnologies.com/Recycle.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

AI and Machine Learning: The Present and the Future

We have heard the adage “data is the new oil.” Data has become one of the most critical assets to enterprises globally. Digitalization of organizations has opened up a new horizon in customer outreach, customer services and customer interactions. Every interaction with a customer is now a data footprint – with massive potential to be harnessed when viewed and analyzed in totality.

The collection and processing of data is facilitated by new technologies such as 5G mobile networks and edge computing (In an a previous blog I spoke about how edge is ushering in a business transformation – read here). The time then is ripe for enterprises to tap into the transformative effects of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Early forays into AI were inhibited by a lack of computing and processing power, but today that barrier has largely been lifted due to progress in both IT infrastructure and software spaces. Artificial intelligence has also evolved greatly as myriad industries recognize its ability to help businesses stay relevant, improve operations, gain competitive advantage and pursue new business directions. The AI space is growing exponentially. Gartner has predicted that the business value of AI will reach $5.1 billion by 2025. 

Smarter manufacturing 

For the digitally connected consumer, examples of AI are commonplace. Commonly used applications with AI at their core include Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and navigation applications such as Waze and Google Maps that recommend best routes to take based on current traffic conditions.  

What’s perhaps lesser known is how AI and ML have been applied to great transformative effect in a variety of use-cases today. With the vast number of data endpoints today, the convergence of AI and the internet of things (IoT), which is about sensors installed in machines that stream information to be processed and analyzed, has been greatly beneficial to industries.  

AI plays an instrumental role in the manufacturing industry, assisting in matters ranging from demand forecasting to quality assurance to predictive maintenance and, of course, cost savings. A McKinsey report revealed 64% of respondents in the manufacturing sector who adopted some form of AI enjoyed cost savings of at least 10%, with 37% of respondents reporting cost savings of more than 20%. 

A large global food manufacturer used machine learning to improve planning coordination across its marketing, sales, account management and supply chain, which resulted in a 20% reduction in forecast errors, a 30% reduction in lost sales, a 30% reduction in product obsolescence and a 50% reduction in demand planners’ workload.  

A premier automobile manufacturer, meanwhile, used automated image recognition, which uses AI to evaluate component images during production and compares them in milliseconds to hundreds of other images of the same sequence to determine deviations from the standard in real-time. The AI application also checks whether all required parts have been mounted and if they have been mounted in the right place. It’s also deployed in other parts of the manufacturing process, such as dust particle analysis at its paint shop, where vehicle surfaces are painted and dust particle content on the surfaces needs to be eradicated. There, AI algorithms compare real-time data from dust particle sensors in the path booths and dryers with a comprehensive database that was developed for dust particle analysis. The result – highly sensitive manufacturing systems benefited from even greater precision during the production process. 

Healthcare and digital cities 

Over in Japan, Konica Minolta, an imaging technology firm, embedded AI and ML into its Dynamic Digital Radiography (DDR) healthcare solution. Backed by IT infrastructure from Dell Technologies capable of processing up to 300 images in a single scan and animating those images in mere minutes, DDR enabled medical practitioners to make better predictions concerning lung ventilation and perfusion (oxygen and blood flow) in X rays, so a patient’s treatment plan could be more easily determined.  

Governments’ focus on smart cities too, has given AI an opportunity to shine in many ways. From a citizen security standpoint, AI-backed security camera footage can be analyzed in real time to detect criminal behavior so it can be instantly reported and dealt with. Automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR), a technology that uses optical character recognition on images to read vehicle registration plates from camera footage, can be used to great effect for traffic management and to predict traffic for planning purposes. AI is also used to assist with predictive maintenance for public infrastructure, pollution control and waste management (where AI powered robots can sort through rubbish and clean lakes and rivers). 

AI for the future 

The future for artificial intelligence and machine learning will be unbelievably exciting. The potential is immense, and we have just scratched the tip of the iceberg. As Gartner puts it, there are four trends driving the AI industry – responsible AI, small and wide data, operationalization of AI platforms and efficient use of resources.  

As we have seen with some of the customers quoted above, Dell Technologies continues to invest and work in this space, collaborating with our customers and our partners to fully harness the power of these evolving technologies. In times to come, we will see more analytics driven transformative business outcomes. Fasten your seat belts – this is taking off. 

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Accelerating Open RAN Performance

Achieving performance parity with Open RAN

The industry generally agrees that today’s traditional RAN systems need to evolve. With the exponential increase in wireless traffic and edge computing application expected with 5G, building out scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient radio networks will be critical to the future success of communication service providers (CSPs). Unfortunately, today’s traditional RAN systems tend to be architecturally inflexible and create vendor lock-in.

This realization has led to the development of virtualized RAN (vRAN) systems and, beyond that, open RAN systems that allow CSPs to mix and match vRAN software and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers for a more flexible and standards-based best-of-breed approach. Intuitively, Open RAN makes a lot of sense. Yet Open RAN solutions have so far struggled to match the cost and performance of traditional RAN solutions.

To succeed fully, Open RAN must achieve cost/performance parity with traditional RAN systems. One of the main challenges to achieving this has been the virtualized distributed unit (vDU) performance when running on a COTS server. The vDUs, which are responsible for upper layer 1 and layer 2 functions, so far do not perform at the same level as traditional RAN systems, where these are done in a highly optimized proprietary broadband base unit (BBU). In fact, in early Open RAN projects, we found that especially the Layer 1 performance is critical for the vDU to achieve the efficiency levels of traditional RAN BBUs.

Today, Dell is proud to announce the industry’s first layer 1 inline RAN accelerator card for vRAN and Open RAN solutions, developed in collaboration with Marvell Technology. The Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card is essential in addressing the vDU performance gap in Open RAN deployments, lowering costs while achieving vDU performance parity in Open RAN systems. The Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card will connect to a standard PCI Express (PCIe) slot, enabling it to run on Dell PowerEdge or any other x86-based server.

Marvell and Dell: Accelerating the future

Dell’s Open RAN Accelerator Card features the OCTEON Fusion CNF95xx chipset from Marvell — the same chipset used in traditional RAN solutions offered by vendors today. The Marvell chipset includes a mix of digital signal processors (DSPs) and advanced RISC machine (ARM) cores uniquely suited to layer 1 computations. Moving layer 1 processes to the accelerator card allows the server central processing unit (CPU) to focus on what it does best: layer 2 and layer 3 computations. The Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card improves the server’s performance, reducing power consumption and overall costs. The result is an open, best-of-breed RAN solution that offers performance in parity with traditional RAN systems.

Beyond Marvell’s industry-leading chipset technology, the Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card includes essential features, including a built-in GNNS timing module, embedded MACsec encryption, and integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) technology. Until now, vRAN and Open RAN solutions required a separate timing module, which added to the cost and complexity of next-generation RAN systems. Adding the timing module into the Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card enables all timing requirements — from precision time protocol (PTP) to SynchronousEthernet (SyncE) – to be handled right out of the box with no need for additional hardware. The iDRAC is designed for secure local and remote server management and helps administrators deploy, update, and monitor Dell EMC PowerEdge servers anywhere, anytime. This is essential for a geographically dispersed RAN infrastructure where physical access to servers may be a challenge.

An Open RAN solution that opens the door to more choices

Dell plans to release the Open RAN Accelerator Card later this year to integrate application software for a complete layer 1 solution. This will allow CSPs to have full flexibility in building out their next-generation Open RAN network. For example, they can choose the layer 1 software from another vendor and integrate it with the Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card. When deployed in a Dell PowerEdge server, they can take advantage of Dell’s value-added features such as iDRAC and Dell’s BIOS software. CSPs will also have the option to choose between x86 or ARM-based servers for their Open RAN hardware.

In brief, the efficiency boost brought by the Dell Open RAN Accelerator Card will allow CSPs to flexibly and affordably build and scale their Open RAN network, creating an open canvas for them to “paint” their own RAN masterpiece. This has been the goal of Open RAN from the beginning and represents one of many Open RAN initiatives that Dell has planned for the future. If Open RAN is in your future, we encourage you to reach out to us and schedule a proof of concept in our Open Telecommunications Ecosystem Lab (OTEL).

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Service Delivery in a Framework

Helping the customer by maintaining and optimizing IT infrastructure is not a heroic act of a single trusted advisor. Although in a unique relationship, this might seem the case, the services delivered are often based upon a set of customer experiences.

To ensure best practices are duplicable, companies gather them into a library and reshape them into general procedures for practices such as Problem or Service Continuity Management.

Service Value Chain – What is ADF

Within the Account Management Delivery Framework (ADF), we have related a dozen key practices into our Service Value Chain (SVC). ADF is based on successful customer experiences, servicing customer’s needs and progress improving their solutions. These key practices are divided into five pillars: demand, engage, deliver, serve and value.

Demand: With customer relationships, we can understand the business objectives and IT requirements of complex solutions. We establish and maintain key contacts at the right level in the organization and define and improve support services deliverables and tools automation.

Engage: With collaboration, we proactively identify gaps between customer’s IT needs and Dell Technologies offerings. We determine common objectives for practice alignment.

Deliver: With prevention, we deliver to progress operations efficiency and automate system maintenance, leading improvement activities within customer’s environments. We review our performance of best practices adoption and delivery.

Serve: We support to serve our customers through a single point of accountability for Dell Support Services and report on the deliverables by reviewing ProSupport Plus best practices, ensuring proactive support services and field operations. 

Value: We make our customers happy.

For example, as an outcome of patching a hard drive for different customers having the very same incidents, a trend analysis is initiated. Another department can investigate the root cause of this behavior trend and conclude that the fault originated from a certain production batch. To avoid further issues, a pro-active field replacement would be a permanent corrective action for potential affected IT infrastructure solutions containing drives of this batch. By replacing those, potential issues can be prevented.

Combining the above-described practices, incident, problem management, change control and field operations into a chain creates additional value towards Dell Technologies’ customers.

In comparison with the ITIL4© Service Value Chain, the elements of “demand” and “value” have been integrated so that certain practices around onboarding and customer satisfaction are integrated elements within our account management services.

Differing approaches based upon the complexity

Depending on the complexity of the customer relationship, different practices are used to manage the customer. For some customers a simple review could be appropriate. For others a deeper discussion on a particular practice would better fit.  To ensure the right approach for each customer our key practices have been categorized into three lanes – base, core and advanced.

Certain key practices, valid for all types of customers, are categorized in the base lane. Other practices, mainly used for deepening the relationship, are in the core lane. The advance lane is a set of deliverables which can be used to grow the relationship.

Together with the key practices pillars we have a 2-dimensional SVC in place, embedded in a kind of matrix.

Scaling by tools and resources – what are technical layers

Defining and categorizing procedures is good and when in- and outputs are linking the procedures, value can be created repeatedly. However, tools and resources are required to scale-out. To ensure an end-to-end service account management towards customers, best-practices should not only be valid for a certain IT line of business (LOB).

Especially within larger companies, Dell Technologies products include client and enterprise solutions. Laptops, workstations, servers, switches and storage devices are all covered by service management. Based upon the technology demand, different tools and resources are required for the same practice. System-maintenance for clients might be far more automated, as this is the case for complex storage clusters. Think about your monthly auto-patches on your laptop versus planned data center maintenance windows.

To ensure that the five-pillared SVC is capable to support different offerings and LOB’s, technical layers are included:

◉ Organizational practices

◉ Technical management practices and

◉ Infrastructure and platform management

Organizational practices structure different offerings and roles, the two others are around tools and resources. The latter one contains the external customer facing tools for the different practices, such as TechDirect, SupprtAssist for Clients, Dell Command Suite, MyService360 or CloudIQ.

By bolstering the SVC with different layers, the framework is now emphasizing value, complexity and technology.

Focus on areas by value pathways

In addition to those dimensions, certain focus areas need to be ensured as well. Operational excellence, customer sentiment and advanced planning are just some of them. To amplify hereupon, certain practices are combined into pathways within the framework.

The customer sentiment pathway, for example, is all about asking questions and listening to the customer. What is the customer saying with the feedback in the survey? Do I understand what was said and could I propose suggestions to overcome customer’s current challenge? Or should I ask for more information?

To help create the added value required, elements have been added to the toolkit to enable a Service Account Manager or Technical Account Manager to ask and listen again and again. Demand is evolving over time and what was valid for the customer a few years ago might be out of date today.

What’s in it for me/customer/company?

By embedding these pathways within the framework, value can be created. When answering the question “What’s in it for me?”, value can be added for stakeholders. By extending the same question to customer and to company, all three perspectives can be reflected, and a triple win is achieved.

In a nutshell, framing our deliverables and backing these up with tools and resources, a framework has been created for Dell Technologies ProSupport Plus customers. By adding value pathways and checking what is in them, service delivery is not only based upon the experiences of the past, but is also progressing towards new requirements of the customer.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Driving Digital Inclusion Through Technology, Empathy and Partnerships

Empathy must be the thread that connects innovation and technology. The strength of an organization or society is reflected in the opportunities it creates for the underserved, those who are overlooked and can easily be excluded. It was this idea which led to a Dell Technologies program to support 1,000 visually impaired government schoolteachers across the state of Tamil Nadu, India.

Education is a key focus area for Dell Technologies’ Progress Made Real ambitious goal to use our technology and scale to advance health, education and economic opportunity initiatives to deliver enduring results for one billion people by 2030.

In 2019, we hosted one of our Dell Technologies Policy Hacks in India with the goal of creating a platform for educators to address the biggest challenges they face every day and explore how technology can help solve for them. The winning idea was presented by our longstanding non-profit partner HOPE foundation with K. Suresh, a visually impaired schoolteacher. Suresh put forward a digital inclusion program for teachers with visual impairment to address the challenges they face in teaching by providing access to level-based curriculum and digital literacy content. As a next step, we engaged with The State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), which resulted in expanding the program from what was initially planned to be just the capital city, Chennai, to one which covered all 38 districts of the state.

The program now includes the use of assistive screen reader software to translate visual information verbally. Supported by our partner Microsoft’s recommendation to collaborate with ‘Vision Empower’, curated videos are now available to these teachers. In addition, the Department of Inclusive Education deputed more than 300 Special Educators who have been trained to work with visually impaired schoolteachers. Further, accessing the Education Department’s TN-EMIS and Diksha websites (that were previously utilized primarily by sighted teachers), will now enable these teachers to reach nearly 50,000 students, learn from curated audio tutorials, browse websites, use audio/video conferencing tools etc.

Technology can truly be an enabler of human progress and aiding progress for these educators, has been a rewarding effort.

Samundeshwari, a visually impaired teacher from Thiruvannamalai district was introduced to the project during a needs assessment survey. “I was very happy to know the ICT skills training for visually challenged teachers. I was overjoyed to know that our long-awaited dreams have come true. The training helped me understand the concept of using a smartphone with the support of assistive technology for professional and personal use. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Dell Technologies, the SCERT, SSA and HOPE foundation for an initiative that will allow us to come on par with the sighted teachers.”

Ramu, who holds a Master’s in Education degree is a visually impaired teacher at the Government Senior Secondary School, Palikaranai. He says, “Being visually impaired I have gone through a lot in life, but that did not discourage me from having a dream. The interesting part of my life is I’m hungry for knowledge and the skills to be competitive. I was eager to understand how computers can help a visually challenged person like me. It was a dream come true when HOPE foundation, with support from Dell Technologies, set up a smart class and provided my school with a well-equipped assistive technology lab. I am now able to conduct classes and assist students with online assessments and am confident of teaching other visually challenged teachers.”

This partnership reinforces my belief that we are all part of a jigsaw puzzle and that when we come together and the pieces fit, we become whole, for we are one.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Finding Our DevOps North Star

This is a continuation of a series of blogs about how Dell IT is Cracking the Code for a World-class Developer Experience.

Being able to develop, deploy and maintain high-quality and secure software at the speed that business demands is essential to today’s modern IT operations. As part of a three-year DevOps enablement push, Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization, has created a streamlined, fully automated solution that does just that.

Optimizing our DevOps approach to software development is a key pillar of Dell Digital’s ongoing digital transformation, moving us away from fragmented and manual development processes to an agile, flexible, automated IT operation to meet fast-changing user needs.

Our focus was defining key process improvements to maximize developer experience and efficiency. This included creating a standardized CI/CD pipeline that has removed all manual intervention between code creation and production deployment and support. The pipeline gives developers a way to manage their application lifecycle autonomously. They can automatically provision infrastructure; perform functional, performance and security validations; quality check their code; and deploy to production with integrated monitoring and application tracing.

This means developers who were previously bogged down in operation tasks can now spend more time writing code and better serving our business users and customers.

This transformation takes time and commitment, but it’s critical in today’s fast-moving IT marketplace.

Mapping out a plan

So where did we start? After creating a DevOps Enablement team, consisting largely of engineers and architects, we began by auditing our current processes to identify the bottlenecks that were most slowing us down. We discovered major areas that required attention: the way we managed, tracked and deployed code; the fragmentation of our testing and manual reporting; an overall lack of integration with our security scanning tools; infrastructure provisioning and more. Our change and release process had gaps and lacked automation. Developers did not have the tools or access needed to be accountable for their applications after deployment to production.

From there, we defined our mission—our North Star for DevOps. We took a very methodical approach, first determining what metrics we wanted to target and then specifically defining our transformation goals.

We needed to standardize solutions and processes to address the fact that we had code in different repositories, across various solutions, each with their own set of processes, including CI/CD. Choosing the appropriate tools for code management and CI/CD was essential.

We landed on a specific tools stack, featuring an open-sourced Git-based approach to code management, leveraging and building upon industry standards. Over the next three months or so, with the help of some in-house developed utilities, we migrated all code from the various locations into a single repository.

Building the pipeline

The next step was building our pipeline. We decided that we wanted to build reusable pipeline definitions, called blueprints, that were both flexible and easy to consume. These blueprints would be technology-specific definitions for pipelines that would include all necessary working stages for each automated job. Engineers could reuse existing pipelines, or they could create a new pipeline by pulling elements from existing ones, negating the need to create one from scratch each time.

When consuming a blueprint, the developer need only enter their application-specific information because the blueprints already have the integration jobs built in. For example, security scanning is a required step for all pipelines and as such, the blueprints contain the required security scanning job definition. This means developers only need to define parameters that are specific to their project, paths, names, endpoints and the like.

And to make this selection even easier, we created a CI/CD Marketplace from which the developer can search and discover the most appropriate pipeline jobs from a centralized location.  This is a no-code solution that significantly simplifies the creation and maintenance of the pipelines and improves the developer experience.

The result is that developers can now fully manage their code end to end without dependencies on other teams to do it for them, resulting in greater ownership and support for their application throughout its lifetime.

Advice on driving DevOps

If you are looking to transform your traditional IT operation to a DevOps and CI/CD model, there are several things you should keep in mind.

First, it needs to be supported and mandated by leadership, with a dedicated budget and CI/CD maturity targets. This was a vital foundation for us as we brought industry-leading tools and processes in house and integrated them within the Dell ecosystem.  This also helped cover the cost of software licensing and the effort needed to establish DevOps in each of the product teams.

At the outset, you need to take a methodical approach to defining what DevOps is for your organization. Set priorities up-front, whether they are cycle-time reduction, incident reduction, increased deployment frequency, etc. Then track your progress in meeting those priorities with specific metrics.

We established a multi-factor maturity score based on metrics for software development standards, security, automation, and more. The CI/CD Maturity Score calculates a percentage representing how well each project is utilizing available automation. This scoring system is, by the way, also a fully automated process that scans the actual project logs looking for the existence of automation in the pipelines, with zero manual intervention and is free of subjectivity.

From a starting point of 35% in early 2021, we expect to reach a maturity score goal of 90% across our organization by the end of this year.

And finally, training is a necessary process that is critical to reaching your DevOps goals. Throughout our transformation, we provided constant training on every aspect of DevOps. The enablement team, made up of subject matter experts (SMEs), paired with many of the development teams to go through their specific use cases and technology stack.

We continue to provide ongoing training as we add new capabilities to our offering. To date, we’ve successfully trained more than 5,000 developers, product managers and engineering leaders on our DevOps offerings.

All this work is challenging but clearly a worthwhile investment where the return will be quickly realized if implemented correctly. We are now managing more than 30,0000 application projects with approximately 17,000 users in our DevOps platform and are currently expanding to organizations outside of Dell Digital. More importantly, our developers appreciate having less manual work so they can focus on what they do best, and our internal customers appreciate that all our digital transformation work means we can meet their needs faster and more flexibly. Here’s where you can learn more on how we’re transforming the developer experience, and keep an eye out for future blog posts in this series.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

5G Core: Your Best Bet for the Future

Digital transformation is a popular buzzword that has entered the lexicon of the telecommunications industry, but what does it really mean for communications service providers (CSPs)? What we’re seeing in the industry isn’t so much a single transformation as a series of transformational trends around convergence, diversification and densification.

For example, CSPs are converging their LTE/4G, 5G, wireline and other networks into a single, unified network architecture based on the cloud. At the same time, they’re diversifying their network investments across multiple vendor platforms to build a best-of-breed network instead of locking into the 5G vision of a single vendor. And they’re densifying network resources by moving them where they make the most sense: far edge, near edge, centralized, in public clouds and on bare metal cloud servers.

It starts with a unified cloud infrastructure

As of the writing of this blog, there are more than 18 mobile core vendors alone in the telco market.

In order for CSPs to converge, diversify and densify their networks, they first need to demystify the selection, integration and deployment of their cloud-native core networks. Building a cloud-native architecture often requires additional guidance and services from experienced partners and vendors. Unfortunately, bringing these parties together can be problematic. Traditional network equipment vendors, many of whom sell proprietary solutions, lack the motivation to bring in partners and managing the integration process is often overwhelming for all but the largest telco operators.

Dell Technologies 5G Core Validated Design with Oracle Communications and VMware

Recognizing the need for an accelerated, validated path to a unified telco cloud infrastructure, Dell Technologies has partnered with Oracle Communications and VMware to create a validated 5G core solution design for CSPs. The 5G core design features Dell’s telco-grade hardware and infrastructure automation tools, VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform™ and a suite of cloud-native 5G core network functions from Oracle Communications. Together, these integrated components offer a fully validated design for 5G core solutions that can be extended across the entire telco infrastructure.

VMware Telco Cloud Platform is built specifically for CSPs to provide a cloud-native foundation for telco services including core, edge and RAN. The platform delivers a highly scalable, flexible and reliable cloud environment that enables CSPs to quickly deploy new cloud resources through automation, reduce operating costs through simplified management, deliver new services using cloud-based containers and enforce service level agreements with residential and enterprise customers.

Oracle Communications Cloud-Native Core Solution delivers a full suite of integrated cloud-native network functions (CNFs) for a cloud native 5G mobile core including the network slice selection function (NSSF), network repository function (NRF), policy control function (PCF), service communication proxy (SCP) and binding support function (BSF). Additional 5G core components can be added to create a fully customized 5G core solution.

Dell’s telco-grade servers deliver high-performance hardware for a variety of mobile applications including core, RAN and edge server/storage needs. These servers are designed for both rack-mounted and ruggedized environments and feature Dell’s iDRAC technology to centralize and automate the management of both Dell and non-Dell infrastructure.

Get more from your core

A validated 5G mobile core solution offers a host of benefits to CSPs. It eliminates the need to integrate, test and validate multivendor components in the CSP’s hosted test environment. It supports the rapid deployment of 5G services in the core and at the edge. More than that, the joint 5G core solution from Dell, Oracle Communications and VMware brings additional value into the core network including built-in security, real-time orchestration, automated lifecycle management, dynamic network slicing and KPI monitoring for network optimization.

The reality is that the single, monolithic core of the past is just that, part of the past. The future of mobile services is multiple cores, flexible RAN resources and an ever-evolving network edge. It’s a future that, frankly, is too big and too important for any single vendor to handle. CSPs need to be able to tap into a trusted ecosystem of partners to build the right network for their customers. Dell is committed to fostering that ecosystem by delivering integrated, validated 5G solutions with the world’s leading technology partners.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Break Down Silos at the Edge

Today, the rise of 5G, smart devices, Internet of things (IoT) and high‑speed connectivity are creating a data deluge. Many industries such as manufacturing, retail and oil and gas are learning to harness that deluge by using edge computing to help them act on data near its point of creation to generate immediate value.

However, within these industry verticals, IT organizations are drowning in complexity at the edge. Vendors, analysts and solution providers have typically addressed use cases for operational technology (OT) groups individually, installing dedicated, siloed devices and controllers for each application or use case.

This situation doesn’t just create silos and complexity for IT by creating an environment with disparate management and support needs. It doesn’t just impede the free flow of information throughout the organization by trapping data in discrete systems. It doesn’t just endanger security by expanding and splintering the attack surface for cybercriminals. It also hurts OT, because by running these operations on separate stacks, they are giving up performance and efficiency gains that could be achieved by running on a modern, consolidated infrastructure that provides more performance and reliability than single systems alone can muster.

For OT, that means looking beyond their own functional responsibilities and realizing that unifying the underlying infrastructure provides better performance, reliability, security and scalability than going it alone. For IT, that means understanding that OT has very real concerns and needs around their individual activities, and these can be recognized and better served by using years of IT experience and best practices to simplify the edge and provide universal access to consolidated IT resources.

Adopting a modern, consolidated infrastructure breaks through data silos and gives you a common platform from edge to core to cloud. This helps you:

◉ Do more with less. Breaking down infrastructure silos means that you can actually do more with less by consolidating applications onto less infrastructure that is more efficient to administer. It also enables high availability and higher performance at a lower total cost. The result is a better platform for all applications.

◉ Simplify management. The proliferation of vertically integrated, purpose-built solutions can create a management nightmare that requires dealing with multiple vendors for support. The consistency of a unified infrastructure simplifies management and reduces operational costs. Simplifying and standardizing IT with a building-block approach and unified management tools will also allow you to scale more easily as you grow and add different use cases while maintaining the same management experience across the entire infrastructure.

◉ Reduce security risks. Distributed data and infrastructure expand the cyberattack surface and increase complexity, making security a challenge. Consolidating infrastructure enables stronger end-to-end security by enabling IT to secure a reduced infrastructure landscape in a consistent manner.

If you’re ready to standardize and consolidate infrastructure into a powerful system that can deliver benefits across your organization, be sure to look for the right partner. One with an end‑to‑end‑to‑edge vision backed by proven expertise, a complete portfolio of solutions, and a rich, open partner ecosystem to help you unlock value for your diverse use cases.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Is Your Industry Ready for Edge?

In my role as an advisor on Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities, I often get asked “What trends will shape my industry in the next five years?” The answer is applicable to every industry — data and your ability to create a competitive edge from that data.

We live in the data era, characterized by an explosion of data sources and the race to collect data — both from us and about us — and innovations in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) that help us extract more value from data. One of the hottest topics we discuss with customers in this context is the edge. Although there are many definitions of edge, I prefer a simple one that describes edge as any place where data is acted on near its point of creation to generate immediate, essential value.

The ultimate goal is to generate new business insights and move toward becoming a data-driven organization. Edge will be an important factor in making this happen. IDC predicts that by 2024, due to an explosion of edge data, 65% of the G2000 will embed edge-first data stewardship, security and network practices into data protection plans to integrate edge data into relevant processes. This is very significant as it means a shift of focus on many fronts. Your organization will have to consider what data to capture at its edge locations — such as branches for banks and stores for retailers. You will have to think about what infrastructure will host the data, where that infrastructure will run, what applications are needed to analyze the data and, most importantly, how to manage and secure these remote edge locations.

A key discussion we often have with customers is about what business insights their data can provide. The answer is dependent on the industry, the use case and the individual company’s needs and capabilities. We often refer to specific use cases in each industry to show customers the potential of data, but what we end up with might be a completely new scenario that is very specific to that customer’s environment. The following are just a few examples.

The retail edge

In retail, the use of video analytics and computer vision has made it feasible to collect insights on customer behavior at the retail store level. This data, collected at the edge, can inform many departments within the retailer. Marketing can understand customer demographics in relation to the time of day, the weather or local events and deliver targeted content accordingly. Operations can use computer vision to detect unusual customer behavior and inform the store manager in real time. The customer experience department can analyze information on total store foot traffic, link it to actual sales and possibly change a store layout in response. Analyzing video data at the edge is key for these use cases because it’s not practical or cost effective to transport video data to a central location for analysis.

The healthcare edge

Healthcare is another vertical where edge use cases are gaining traction. Hospitals are looking for real‑time tracking of people and assets and combining it with other sources of data to generate meaningful insights. A use case we worked on recently started as patient and staff tracking but turned out to be extremely useful for compliance. By combining edge data on staff and patient location with sanitizing station events, the hospital was able to confirm, with data, that the staff has performed the sanitization protocol before attending to the patient. In another use case, advances in AI along with digital pathology are enabling pathologists to speed their image analysis, all while reducing human error. This analysis requires powerful GPU-enabled servers that are sitting at the edge, where the images are produced.

The manufacturing edge

In the manufacturing industry, where margins are tight and competition is fierce, many manufacturers are looking for ways to optimize their operations, minimize waste and create a better workforce experience. Data is leading them to deep operational insights driven by edge analytics. By collecting real-time data from programmable logic controllers (PLCs), edge analytics is enabling the monitoring of manufacturing process quality and providing early warning should something go wrong on the production line. For example, a steel factory we recently engaged with plans to deploy edge analytics to minimize irregularities in the steel beams it produces, which will result in significant savings in cost and time.

The edge is for every industry

Whatever industry you are in, you can bet edge will play a role today, and in the future, to drive efficiency and innovation through data. Be sure to start looking at what data you have and what insights you could generate, to stay competitive in the new data era.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Container Adoption Trends: Why, How and Where

Application containerization—packaging software to create a lightweight, portable, consistent executable—delivers technical and business advantages over conventional delivery methods. Containerized apps are quickly deployable for easy scaling, run in diverse environments and offer security advantages thanks to their isolation from other software. In combination with orchestration software such as Kubernetes, containers can also be centrally dispatched, managed and scaled for IT agility.

In September 2021, Dell commissioned Aberdeen Strategy and Research (ASR) to survey hundreds of IT decision makers with experience in choosing or deploying containers. The goal was simple, to better understand how and why containers and Kubernetes are being deployed at mid-size as well as larger enterprises, assess container-related performance advantages and uncover challenges associated with Kubernetes and container environments. The survey found that on average over 50% of applications are containerized.

Among the use cases for container adoption highlighted in the results are the expected drivers of application development and testing. Other interesting drivers include server consolidation, multi-cloud capability and automating the pipelines from application code to production environments. Interestingly, the survey highlighted the fact that the deployment of third-party applications and services is cited as a driver more frequently than the in-house development of custom applications. Even for organizations that do little more than tie together existing applications with lightweight scripts or use off-the-shelf applications, containerization offers logistical benefits.

It should be no surprise that security, time-to-market, improved deployment capabilities and driving efficiencies are cited as key drivers by respondents to this survey. Also, some common inhibitors to adoption were cited including enabling technology that is too complex to justify the effort, uncertainty around security capabilities, lack of internal know-how and fear of spiraling costs.

Application deployment trends found by the survey show that while container adoption is widespread, virtual machines continue to lead as the deployment mechanism for applications. This points to the need for a pragmatic approach to enterprise architectures that assumes the co-existence of VMs and containers for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, organizations cited the strong need for support for both public cloud and private cloud deployment options with a hybrid approach being pursued by over two-thirds of surveyed organizations.

Original research like this is a great way to benchmark how your IT strategy aligns with industry trends.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Transforming Dell’s Digital Spaces to Better Serve Humans

Whether customers are buying a single personal PC or upgrading to storage-as-a-service across their IT organization, a modern, clean digital design, consistent look and feel and easy navigation are essential to how they feel about the experience, the product and your company. At Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization, we are in the middle of an evolution to better connect our products to the humans who use them.

Our effort began with a simple mandate—unify our digital experience ecosystem and reduce confusion for our customers.

Like many longstanding companies, Dell has grown and matured its business over the years from being primarily a hardware company that allowed great customization and flexibility to a leader in software services and infrastructure. Because of that, we have thousands of digital experiences out there across different URLs and domains that we own as a company which do not reflect who we are today.

We started by building a modern design practice that would standardize our digital experience—the look and feel, basic interaction patterns, palette and colors that reflect our brand. Our efforts to institutionalize our design have led to a broader mission that is still underway to create a unified customer experience across Dell.

Three years into the process, we’ve built a design system that is reusable, measurable and delightful. We’ve increased customer engagement and improved our navigation structure. We’ve baked accessibility into our design system and are working to integrate it seamlessly into our developer experience. Our customer satisfaction (CSAT) reached an all-time high across all experiences. And our transformation is continuing.

First part of the puzzle 

We initiated the process by focusing on evolving our design language system, which contains the core design and code components that our company uses to build our digital experiences. Dell had a nascent design system in place which provided a foundation. We built a new platform, the Dell Design System, on Dell products and using a complete Dell infrastructure and latest technologies to host an evolved experience.

The Dell Design System is the first part of the puzzle toward creating a unified customer journey but it’s not the whole puzzle. It defines key digital elements, like buttons, modal windows, carousels, page headers and footers. It also standardizes topography and font for consistency.

Those components make up the larger patterns for our digital ecosystem. Designers and engineers can access the components via a repository of code and design elements that also support UI and dev kits at delldesignsystem.com. They can also use micro front ends (MFEs), webpage components, building blocks that can be plugged into a page, or unplugged, to quickly construct the consistent look and feel for the customer experiences we want. MFEs use the Dell Design System and are stored in a UX marketplace.

An important part of the Dell Design System is its focus on inclusive design to ensure we are building products for people of all abilities using the World Wide Web Consortium international guidelines. We have an accessibility team review all components before they are added to the design system for compliance. I’ll talk more about this in a future blog post.

Among the reasons for institutionalizing design systems is the need to tackle common software development challenges. With standardized, repeatable code, developers and engineers don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they need to include a common feature. After all, nobody needs to create the same three address fields over and over. Using our design system, developers can build best-in-class, consistent designs like mastheads and footers fast. They can turn Dell blue to Dell purple in an instant.

The Design System not only creates consistency, but it also accelerates time-to-market. We are all aligned in a beautiful, consistent experience.

And, of course, a single design system means we can give the many sites across the company a unified, recognizable look and feel and a more user-friendly, modern design. We are transforming the aging experiences that don’t reflect the current impetus of the company or provide the information that customers are coming to find into those that do.

Dell has always had great industrial designers, as reflected in our products. We are now extending that excellence to our digital spaces.

We launched the first generation of our design language system two years ago, focusing on how to put the building blocks together. We then started to evolve it to define where we want to go for our recently launched second generation and beyond.

Because the Design System reflects what’s happening in the products themselves, we work closely with product teams to meet their needs. It’s a true collaboration model that encourages users to contribute back into it.

Among the challenges we face is how to achieve commonality in a company that uses multiple solutions across multiple platforms. One way is to provide generic versions of the cascading style sheets and JavaScript. Another is by building kits for developers and designers to help them implement this into the actual applications they use to either code or design. 

Building a design culture

A crucial part of our design transformation is to add more designers into the development process and clearly define their roles. This is part of what we call the Dell Digital Way—a balanced team made up of design, engineering and product management.

When my team began its design transformation effort, Dell was already using an agile development methodology to create software via microservices rather than the traditional monolithic approach to development. Small balanced teams worked with business users to frame, write and test human-centered solutions and iterate on them based on real-time feedback. However, designers were either brought in at the end of the process or had more of a consultant role, rather than being on the team.

We had a small collection of good designers who were used more as consultants. So, we started with identifying and creating job descriptions for designers and placing them in appropriate product teams.

Together with engineers and product managers, designers help identify the problems humans may have, research behavioral drivers, identify and research the competitive landscape and articulate the measures of success. Having designers on development teams from the start has resulted in measurable improvements in customer usability, as indicated by such metrics as higher scores in customer satisfaction, customer effort, time to interact, churn rate and customer loyalty.

We have expanded our designer ranks four-fold over the past three years and are still striving to add designers to every product team.

We are also working to expand the use of our design language system in our products, a crucial part of our modern design transformation over time.

Understanding our users

Design is much more than visual. Without understanding the motivations and needs of the humans using your products, you’re never going to design the best user experience. We use a variety of measurements as well as behavioral science to gain that understanding.

We are also striving to achieve unified customer experience that goes beyond creating standardized design and easy to use websites for users. That means accommodating the various roles and different journeys customers take in their digital experience with Dell.

What it boils down to is connecting products to the humans who use them. Design is the bridge to helping understand how customers are emotionally connected with the way they access and use products, which translates into lifetime value and loyalty.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading