Simplifying IT

For the past 12 months under the returning Michael Dell, the company that bears his name has been on a mission to simplify IT. It’s a major challenge, but after listening to its customers and analyzing industry research, Dell recognized that both small/medium-sized business CIOs as well as CIOs of global companies were crying out for a new approach to IT management – one that cuts through the complexity and provides a simplified view of technology operations.

As Jeff Kimbell, Vice President of Dell’s Commercial Marketing explains, there are a number of key drivers behind this increasing complexity. “The first is that as companies have extended the lifecycle of their IT equipment, they’ve started to use technology for new workloads and new usages, which has resulted in an IT infrastructure that is very diverse in terms of equipment,” he says. “Some of it’s very old, some of it’s very new, and so you really have this mishmash of infrastructure components.”

Another big driver is that the number of devices people are using to access networks has really increased in the last few years, while the explosion of data being created has never been greater. “It’s largely due to the innovation that’s occurring out there – think of all the videos that are being streamed by YouTube, or all of the different ways that different customers are using technology to collect information,” says Kimbell. “Some of our customers report that they’re collecting and generating as much as two terabytes of data that must be stored and managed every day.”

Add this to the fact that CIOs are currently under more pressure than ever to align their IT spend to the business priorities of their company, as opposed to just keeping the lights on, and a clear message emerges: complexity rules.

Fortunately, Dell has a plan. “We have three pillars to our IT simplification strategy: Get it Faster, Run it Better and Grow it Smarter,” explains Kimbell. “Get it Faster means helping our customers procure, plan, buy and deploy IT technology as quickly, as seamlessly and as easily as possible. For instance, we have a service that we call custom factory integration whereby we can preload and pretest any hardware/software applications that customers are using in their company, so that they can be deployed directly into their organization. We can do it in the factory when we build their machine, saving them the time, cost and energy of doing it themselves.”

The Run it Better set of initiatives is all about systems management and infrastructure efficiency. “We’re doing a lot of work with our suite of systems management products to move towards a vision where customers can ultimately use a single console to manage client and enterprise products, hardware and software,” he says. “And while that vision sounds simple, it’s technically very complex to do.” Dell is investing a lot in its own systems management tools in an attempt to influence the industry and help it move forward. “It’s what customers tell us they want, and it will help them run their whole infrastructure much better and more cost-effectively. In this regard, we’re also developing products and solutions that enable customers to virtualize as much of their infrastructure as they can. It just provides tremendous cost and efficiency benefits.”

Finally, the Grow it Smarter initiatives are about trying to innovate around industry-standard technology – something Dell’s been a proponent of for a long time – so that customers can scale their operations in a cost-effective way, future-proofing as they go.

To meet the aims of this three-pronged strategy, Dell has announced a number of new solutions and services it will be rolling out over the next 12 months. One example is an alternate way to set up a virtualization project. Currently, companies must buy hardware from one vendor, virtualization software from another, the operating system and all the applications that go on it from yet another source – and then still procure the services to help install and manage the virtualized environment. Dell promises a simpler way of doing things. “What you’ll see from us is a very integrated solution that makes it much easier and much more cost-effective for a customer to do a virtualization project,” says Kimbell. “It’s actually a solution that was designed specifically to reduce complexity in an area where there’s a lot of complexity today.”

He also promises that product releases will be much more solution-oriented. “For example, we recently launched a product called the MD3000i, which is a storage area network product that was designed specifically for small and medium businesses,” he says. “It has hardware that helps them get the benefits of centralized storage, but it also has a lot of things built into the product, such as being able to provision and configure that storage device much faster than they ever could with alternate technology. So you’ll see that we are building in more services and software into our products as we update them to make the solutions easier to manage, easier to deploy and more cost-effective to use.”

As Kimbell is keen to point out, it’s all about cutting through an increasingly cluttered IT environment. Certainly, the proliferation of mobile computing and homeworking, along with the growing trend for users to integrate consumer technologies into their working practices has, in terms of managing, integrating and securing disparate systems, posed a whole new set of challenges for corporate IT departments. “People use a lot more technology in their daily lives than they used to, and trying to hold that back would be the wrong thing to do – it’s going to happen anyway, regardless of corporate policy,” he insists. “There are more and more demands on corporate IT departments that are resulting from the technology people are using in their homes, and so there’s a real crossover happening there. We think the best way to manage it is by making sure that you have as much industry-standard technology as possible so that it can all communicate with each other seamlessly and cost-effectively. Industry-standard operating systems and hardware and applications and collaboration software – the more standard you can make that, the easier job you’re going to have managing it all.”

Having said that, he also believes consideration of alternative technologies will be critical going forward, and one of the things that Dell has launched in the US to meet these needs is something called on-demand desktop computing. “It’s a different way of thinking about what a desktop is,” explains Kimbell. “It’s not the old thin client technology, but it builds on that idea. We’ve taken the hard disk out of the desktop and put it into a storage area network in the data center. We then stream the OS and the applications to the end-user, but leave the graphics processor and the microprocessor in the desktop to provide an end-user experience that, from a graphics and a performance point of view, is exactly the same as having a standalone desktop. It’s so much better than a traditional thin client user experience. And as the IT guy, you get the benefit of being able to manage your data centrally, so that data security, data backup, update and management issues become easier because you’re doing it in a centralized fashion.”

And of course, with IT departments dealing with less complex, more streamlined systems, they are then free to spend more time looking at how to innovate to drive the business forward. “Once you free-up the budget, people and resources that were being used to just keep the lights on, then the job of a CIO becomes much more interesting,” he concludes. “IT departments can then start thinking about ways to use technology to help business innovation. It very much depends on what industry and what business the customer is in. But there are just so many ways that they could use IT to help their own businesses innovate if they just had the resources to work on it.”