Strategy

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

• A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
• Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
• Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
• Cool products, including:
  • Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
  • He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
  • Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
• A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
  • Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
  • Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
  • Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
• Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
• Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth. 

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

I never feel like I get enough sleep … fighting to get six to seven solid hours in every night. However, my stresses are NOTHING compared to the noise and pressure IT admins, CIOs and CTOs deal with. Just look at our industry. From what I’ve read and learned so far, it seems Cisco and HP want customers to rip out their current hardware, software and solutions, and start “fresh” with their Unified Computing System (UCS) and BladeSystem Matrix offerings. Correct me if I’m wrong about that, but I still have to ask -- what’s their motivation? Think about it, why would they insist on something so disruptive especially in a time when customers are fighting to thrive with restricted budgets?

The bottom line in my opinion is this: locking your company into an infrastructure means a locked-in revenue stream for the provider and lack of choice and flexibility for you.

This is incredibly frustrating. It shouldn’t be novel to do the right thing for customer FIRST and make money second. Folks are dealing with legacy hardware and limited budgets (in most cases) with an intense desire to virtualize and do something called “the cloud,” whatever that means to them. That’s enough to digest without having to consider that everything they’ve done up to this point might have been a waste of time and money.

Dell thinks there’s another way, a way where you don’t have to eat your own young to thrive and stay competitive.

First, we’re open. We’ve figured out how to get you where you’re going, specifically with virtualization, using most of what you’ve already invested in.

Second, we’re pragmatic. (pause for smirk on overused marketing word) We give you answers to IT problems now, today, just in case you don’t feel like waiting on promises that no one has proven or deployed.

Finally, we’re end-to-end. We already offer first class products at each step of the fully virtualized solution, including servers, storage, networking, desktop and the cloud, instead of specializing in only one part of the data center and trying our hand at new businesses.

This week at VMworld, we announced two new partnerships that strengthen our open, pragmatic and end-to-end approach. Brocade expands its 10-year relationship with the Dell family to provide enhanced leadership of next-generation data center networking with 10/40/100GbE, Security, iSCSI, FCoE and Converged Enhanced DCB Ethernet. These are in addition to our Brocade FC switches.

But we’re covering more than just the networking side of investment protection. We’re also partnering with Scalent Systems to make heterogeneous, virtualized environments portable for easier disaster recovery and higher availability. Now, you’ll no longer have to redefine your physical storage and network connections each time you need to move whole hypervisors, physical applications, workloads or virtual machines (VM). All of this can be done NOW with your existing technologies and future flexibility to purchase and use what you need to customize your infrastructure.

This is just the beginning. Folks like The Register, eWeek and ChannelWeb are already talking, and we’ll hit the streets a few times this fall with more info. In the meantime, ask some hard questions. The next time you find yourself sitting in the big, leather chair being entertained by the “latest and greatest” buzz solution, make sure it doesn’t end up stinging you.

I was perusing John Willis’ list of links yesterday and I came across a cool piece done by Datamation.com entitled, 85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud.

No turning back

The article which supplies short profiles of 85 cloud players, isn’t wishy-washy about what it believes is the inevitability of the cloud model.  While it feels there will both a backlash against cloud-mania as well as a well publicized disaster the article states:

Still, the bad news won’t kill the cloud. We can’t ever go back to enclosed datacenters. The cloud is simply easier, faster and more flexible.

“Who says Dell is just a hardware firm?”

Dell comes in at number 10 on the list of the fab 85.  One of the big focuses of the Dell section is Dell’s Datacenter Solutions Group (which I am a part of):

…the company launched DCS – Data Center Solutions – to target an audience of businesses that need help configuring a cloud-based datacenter. DCS handles everything from optimization to project management to global consulting. Who says Dell is just a hardware firm? Referring to DCS, Dell CEO Michael Dell told Businessweek in 2008 that, “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers. Now it’s a several-hundred-million-dollar business, and it will be a billion-dollar business in a couple of years—it’s on a tear.”

It also keys in on some of Dell’s recent acquisitions in this space:

Dell has made a number of acquisitions to build out the software side of its cloud offering, including Everdream (desktop management software), Silverback Technologies (remote monitoring) and Message One (email management). The goal, it appears: provide one-stop shopping for businesses that want to build an automated datacenter running commodity boxes, all optimized for the cloud. That is likely a lucrative strategy.

If they think this is cool stuff, wait until they see what we have planned

Pau for now…

Agility is a good characteristic for companies to have, particularly in today’s uncertain market.  Companies that can move quickly to adapt to changing market conditions have a competitive advantage over those that can’t.

Unfortunately, agility is often perceived as a luxury.  Too often, we think of agility in terms of final-state: complete interoperability of elegant systems and processes – requiring years of work and significant investment. In reality, the optimal level of agility for your company in today’s environment may be closer than you think.

Consider the average person’s approach to physical agility and general fitness.  We all need regular exercise and a healthy diet, but many of us struggle when we think about the lifestyle change required to be in great shape.  We hear that we need 60 minutes of exercise a day, five days a week, with a mix of cardio and strength training.  We hear that we should eat only whole grains, cut out processed food, and we’re told that a “serving” of anything is about a third of the size of what most of us consider a normal portion.  If you are not following these and other guidelines, the changes you’d need to make to be in optimal health can seem overwhelming – and prohibitive.  As a result, many folks end up taking no action at all.

It’s too bad, because there is value in even 10 minutes of exercise a day, or in simply cutting out sugary drinks, or in a variety of other small changes.  Small lifestyle tweaks like these can improve how we feel and how we function day to day.   Similarly, improvement in a company’s agility need not require a massive business and technology transformation.  Many improvements can be achieved without significant cost or disruption.

The most important step is to identify the goals of your agility play.  I am a fan of Michael Hugos’ high-level approach described in this post with his formula for determining business agility -- he speaks of agility in terms of profitability.  If your company can consistently earn profits that are two to four percent higher than market average, the assumption is that your company is adapting quickly to changing customer demands and market factors.

For example, if your company plans to maximize profitability by focusing on high-margin offerings to your customers, you need to build a capability to support an ever-changing portfolio of high-margin products as the market evolves and the margins shift.  So what needs to happen in your environment in support of this capability?  You might charter a cross-functional team to identify and update constraining technology and processes, or you might spin up a project or two to reduce prohibitive complexity in the foundation of your IT environment, or you might offer streamlined collaboration tools.

While there are many options to consider, remember that not all processes will need to be rationalized, and not all technology complexity will need to be removed from your environment before your agility increases – baby steps optimized to support the relatively narrow task at hand will allow you to be agile in the way your company requires to maximize profits as the market shifts.

It’s the corporate equivalent of committing to 10 pushups a day during tank-top season.

Think about where small changes and investments can make a big difference to your corporate agility, and I’ll do the same. Let me know if you've got other suggestions that worked at your company.

Meanwhile, I’m going to lace up my walking shoes and take a few trips around the block.

On this blog, we've posted a lot on the benefits of virtualization. But, some skepticism still remains in part to the myth that blades are not as powerful as conventional servers, and therefore not a good platform for virtualization. In reality, Dell offers blade servers designed with virtualization in mind.

When blades were first introduced, they were mostly designed as low-power Web servers in a more dense form factor. They were built with low-speed, single CPU chips. Today, blades are available with all the same options as rack servers, with multiple CPUs, multicore, and lots of memory. They are now the functional clones of rack servers in terms of processors and memory configuration options.

If you are going through consolidation planning… and you have the option of choosing new server hardware, blades today offer the same CPUs, socket counts and memory as rack servers, including chips with virtualization assist.

Click here to read the entire E-Guide from which these posts were taken, and read more about virtualization on InsideIT.