Data Management

TAKEAWAY: DATA MANAGEMENT   

DELL:
If you think about a business today, the role of data and information is really increasing, and businesses are getting inundated with more and more data and information. And they're starting to realize that this is really like gold inside their business. How do you use this data to now make better decisions and improve your products and services and outcomes in whatever you’re doing using the data? You hear different descriptions of this—the digital transformation, the Internet of Things, all the discussion around new computer science, like the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, all those kinds of things. The fuel for those things is the data. And big companies that have been around a long time—they have tons of data. So they're trying to figure out how do they make use of all this so they can improve the outcomes? That's a big area for us.

Another big area is how do you automate the infrastructure to run the applications and the data? Sometimes this is called clouds and next-generation automated infrastructure.

The third piece of it is the whole workforce. The people in your company—the thing that they experience is the device in front of them. We've actually seen companies now making a pretty big pivot back to the PC, because they've figured out that, oh, this is actually important for productivity. We like really big screens. We want super-thin light notebooks. And by the way, if we don't have the right tools, we can't retain our people. We can't attract the new people. They don't want to work in the company. So how do we build an environment that is really embracing technology and the tools of the modern world?

The other—fourth area for us—is security. As you go into this age of smart machines and everything becomes intelligent, everything's connected, you have to really think through the whole challenge of securing all this, because every business is based in some level around trust and assurance. If there's some reduction in that because there's some exposure or breach, it really can bring the whole business into serious question. We've seen some giant companies that have had real problems there. So, we think a lot about how do we secure the infrastructure, protect against the enormous number of threats that are out there? That's a challenging problem that all of our customers face.