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The need for transformation has never been greater. World Economic Forum research suggests that by 2022, a full 60 per cent of global GDP will be derived from digital sources. Organisations that lack the capacity to engage with their customers in this way will find themselves pushed right to the periphery.
And yet, digital transformation is hard, and it’s getting harder. As noted in a Harvard Business Review report: “This digital scale, scope, and learning paradigm is already difficult for even established organisations to adopt. The pandemic is only making this more challenging by adding an increasingly important fourth dimension to digital operating models: virtual work. Today, rather than digitizing the relationship between firm and customer alone, the virtual model digitizes the relationship between firm and employee.”
The stakes are high, and organisations are grappling with the need to move to complex, multi-cloud environments to achieve their transformation goals. Dell Technologies has built up a broad suite of solutions that deliver the multi-cloud experience, but the channel has never been more important in helping to make that transition than now.
“There are many choices when it comes to cloud, and different applications suit different cloud environments. A key aspect to consider when executing on a cloud strategy, is being able to operate across multiple clouds, ideally via one operating experience,” Dell Technologies Senior Director, Storage Platforms & Cloud, ANZ, Glenn McPherson, said.
“Dell Technologies Cloud Platform solution offers an on-premises private cloud solution, with a cloud management system that can also be used across clouds, on the premise, at the edge and in public cloud. This simplifies the experience, enables customers to get the most from the cloud services on offering and helps customers avoid creating complex cloud silos. This is a unique offering in the marketplace.”
Successful solutions delivery happens via the channel
The partner’s role in this is to understand and interpret the customer’s business imperatives, and ensure that they’re able to meet and exceed those needs, while also delivering fast, because in the current environment, speed to market is everything.
“Those that get to market quickly can take first market advantage,” McPherson said. “The fact that there are tools out there that make it simple for developers to create and deliver means that so can their competitors. Everything is happening faster, and demands are coming in in real time.”
“Partners have a unique understanding of their customer environments” Dell Technologies Senior Director, Channel Sales, ANZ, Shant Soghomonian, added. “The majority of these workloads sit on VMware software defined environments of some type, with the ANZ partner ecosystem driving the VMware adoption over the last 20 years. In many instances it is managed entirely by our partner community. As a result, our partners have the best understanding, insights and competencies into the customer’s environment.”
One of Dell Technologies solutions to this challenge of multi-cloud environments is VxRail, a turnkey experience that enables customers to work in a state of perpetual innovation. It’s a fully integrated, pre-configured and pre-tested VMware hyperconverged system that has been optimised for VMware vSAN or VMware Cloud Foundation. This simplifies the cloud adoption process, provides support for the most demanding workloads and applications, and creates that robust, seamless link between each of the enterprise’s cloud environments.
“The value of Dell Technologies is what we bring to the partnership in best of breed technologies,” Soghomonian said. “With regards to VxRail, the close integration and co-development of this hyper-converged platform is the point of difference that Dell Technologies partners can leverage. In addition, we bring a wide range of benefits to our partners through our programs. We make sure that whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it profitably.”
The channel’s opportunity in demystifying IT
As robust as the tools are, nonetheless, there remains the need for partners to “demystify” multi-cloud technologies. Containerisation is an example, with the likes of Kubernetes being notoriously challenging for enterprises to understand, and yet, crucial to the success of a multi-cloud approach to the IT environment. Here too, Dell Technologies has worked to provide the leading solutions in the space, but it’s up to the partner to help customers interpret it in a way that generates innovation and results. “The Dell Technologies Cloud Platform can manage virtualised applications and cloud native applications via the same management control offering customers a more complete and holistic approach. This means ITops and Devops can collaborate more easily together and to build and run an environment on a platform that’s automated and intelligent,” McPherson said.
As Soghomonian said, multi-clouds are the “new normal” for resourcing, with 75 per cent of mid-to-large organisations having a multi to hybrid-cloud strategy. To deliver results in this area, Dell Technologies knows that it needs to work closely with partners.
“It’s not just about cloud and how IT is consumed,” he said. “It’s about how you take the customer on the journey. As the vendor we would speak to customers with a vested interest, and they know that. Partners have the opportunity as an independent advisor to help the customer on their journey.
“How do we enable them to do that? We see three outcomes:
A good chunk of any workload is going to continue on-premises, out of concern for security, governance and so on. Here we need to provide our partners with the best of breed technologies that they can deliver to their customers.
However, some of that workload won’t end up on-premises. It may be on the partner’s own cloud delivered offering. We aim to provide the technology that can underpin these environments as a go-to-market for our partners through our Dell Technologies Cloud Service Provider Program.
And for workloads that are optimal in the public cloud we want to make sure the partner and customer is utilising a VMware software-defined architecture, which enables the partner to manage the entire on- and off-premises environment, so we provide solutions with that focus as well.”
For more information on Dell Technologies Partner Programs, VxRail, and delivering multi-cloud environments to customers, click here.
