Dell standardizes IT landscape for companies and businesses

MANILA, Philippines - Dell has successfully completed its global transformation and has repositioned itself to become a meaningful player in the highly competitive global solutions market.

The company’s efficient strategy enables customers to free critical IT dollars for innovation and create solutions that are open, standards-based and scalable, allowing businesses to take advantage of the most pioneering, breakthrough enterprise technologies as they hit the marketplace.

Opening its Dell Solutions Tour 2013, Dell announced recently that more and more customers worldwide rely on its technology solutions and services since the company embarked on its transformation over four years ago. 

Dell supports millions of customers in 180 countries around the globe, including 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies, governments, educators, healthcare organizations and consumers. More than 10 million small and medium businesses rely on Dell solutions and services to grow their businesses and serve their customers.

“Dell is a company who was a hardware provider in the past. That’s what everybody knows. Dell has great PCs and we always continue to do that. But now, we are looking at end-to-end solutions. Naturally, that includes software and services added to our enterprise businesses. We, too, are becoming a customer with a comprehensive solution,” said Justin Mennen, Dell’s chief information officer for the Asia-Pacific and Japan.

“Myself, internally, I focus on how we run the Dell operation, specifically as we have a very large company, a $60-billion company, and how, in the region, can investments be aligned in all teams for success of our future models… internal aspects taking our products and using them internally… and making sure that we focus on our people and our business partners as well,” Mennen said.

“I think it’s both the industry and the company. So in the past, IT, globally, was really seen as an operational team. IT teams, or developers go off on the back corner among themselves to make sure that operations really start. That was really it. Over the years, we started looking and seeing that IT is in a unique position in the company,” he said. 

“IT can actually see end-to-end because we work on sales projects, marketing, finance, supply chain. We are one of the few organizations within the company, and businesses across all companies. IT sees end-to-end that is why we moved into how we can help minimize business processes, how we can help the business change. So that was where people shifted,” he added.

Delivering results

Rather than locking customers into a single path requiring new hardware, Dell helps customers deliver results today by working with what they already have, both Dell and non-Dell.

The IT industry is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/big data world of the third platform much more quickly than many realize. From 2013 to 2020, these technologies will drive around 90 percent of all growth in the IT market.

“We added responsibility to IT for it to be a change agent in the company. From there to where the industry is shifting, and from where we are shifting at Dell, that’s the more strategic IT — where IT not only handles technology but also helps with our business strategy,” Mennen said. 

“They help the company drive innovation and at the end of the day, improve it. It has shifted much closer to our business where the line between transactional business and IT is now blurred. IT embraces this new role where the industry is looking. IT is expected to be more strategic because of many reasons, but one of them is that technology affects all of our lives,” he said.

“Whatever device they have, whatever user experience they want to bring to their door, they expect that the IT team can implement things quickly and be cost-effective and really help drive productivity. In the past, the workforce was not as inclined to understand this. Now, everybody knows about Cloud, everybody knows BYOD. It’s not just an IT thing anymore,” he said.

“That is where expectations on IT have shifted. It’s not just coming up with some technology for us but it’s how we can use technology to drive productivity in the company, and drive results for the company. So here in Dell, we noticed that shift. That’s so much a part of our business architecture now. We took the best practices that we have used to transform IT at Dell and ensure that customers will do the same,” he said.

“Companies lose time and momentum when systems stop working and technology should be delivered quickly and ready to work. This is where Dell comes in — by creating open, practical and innovative solutions that enable organizations everywhere to spend less on managing the status quo in their IT environments and invest. Technology should ease mundane business tasks and increase productivity,” he added.

For his part, Dell Philippines president Richard Teo said, “Most businesses are IT enthusiasts, not IT experts. They are looking for technology providers to be more than just vendors. They want and need trustworthy advice and direct access to unparalleled resources to guide IT investment decisions. To thrive, companies must adapt to innovation and seek expert guidance on adopting next-generation technologies with peace of mind. Dell offers customers the choice of interaction by phone or online as well as face-face interactions.”

Total solutions provider

After a number of well-placed acquisitions, Dell has successfully transformed itself from a computer company into a total solutions provider of a global scale. Industry forces like the cloud, social network, mobile technology and data influx will be critical for any company’s long-term success and are highly important trends for the rest of this decade and beyond. And Dell has the arsenal to meet all that these various technologies demand.

“If you were my business partner, and log in to your system and it’s down for half a day, are you going to trust me to simply talk about what we can do in the future? You won’t care about that, you just want your system to run. That’s the basics. I call that table stakes or ticket to entry for IT. You need to be operationally excellent so that systems are up and running,” Mennen said. 

“Infrastructure needs to be up. If you pick up your computer and you cannot log in, that’s a problem. So that’s the basics. But outside of that, what we can do is first help you set up a strategy, where you want to be in three to five years as a company. Not only where you want to be, but also how to get there. So from that, we then look at all of our applications that you can use. Every company needs a lot of applications,” he said.