On Record n
Bryan Jones
Director, Global Data Center Marketing & Strategy, Dell, talks about the company’s data center vision By Radhika Nallayam
20
Onrecord.indd 20
The industry had made an interesting observation about Dell — that it’s a glorified box pusher and that its positioning in the high-end data center space when comparing to IBM and HP has never been so great. Has the situation changed after the launch of Virtual Integrated System? What exactly is your strategy for data centers? Jones: As the director of data center marketing and strategy, I have been working on a transformation process for the last two years. The first manifestation of this is the introduction of the VIS system. But you’re actually right. The traditional view of Dell is as a hardware provider. However, we believe that hardware is important as it gives us the mid-point in the data center space and that’s where our entire value proposition has been traditionally focused in terms of how to get the right products, the cost points and the time and resources to deploy it. But that’s really the mid-point and our VIS solution is designed well beyond that now. So, what are those new elements that you’re talking about? Jones: VIS solution is designed to start with the hardware box because our legacy lies there. It addresses issues like how you deliver workloads and applications to businesses in a more streamlined fashion. So, this second half of the solution is the continuum that customers have traditionally not heard from Dell. We have taken the key learnings
from the fist half, which is the hardware part, and applied it to the second half, the application stack. We help enterprises to collapse the individual systems that are in place. So we are not moving away from our hardware heritage, but we are extending it further into the application side. But how is this different from the similar converged offerings of your competitors? Jones: Dell’s data center story is different. If you look at some of the solutions from our peers in the industry, it requires you to buy their storage, server and networking. Dell does not lock customers. A customer can buy the application stack of VIS from Dell and still decide not o buy a single piece of hardware from us. They can run every bit of it on a non-Dell brand. So, we don’t want to lock the customer into our stack. Our solution is designed to work with Dell and non-Dell products, physical and virtual environments, multiple hypervisors and the infrastructure that a customer currently has rather than replacing it with new. Dell does not have all the necessary components to offer a competing stack like other vendors. So, what else can you push other than the open mantra? Jones: It’s not because of the non-availability of something internally that we have come up with something like VIS. It’s a chosen path. In most of such solutions, the intent is to build a lock-in with a particular vendor. The
Indian Channelworld february 2011
2/15/2011 10:29:49 AM
Bryan Jones | On Record n hardware has always existed from multiple vendors, which is why we want to give our customers the freedom to choose the hardware they want. It also allows them to continue using the existing heterogeneous hardware infrastructure, without really knocking anything down. Besides, we are convinced that an integrated architecture is what the customer demands are going to be centered around. There have been a lot of talks and launches around the converged infrastructure space in the last six months. We started to see a support and demand for the model that we are promoting because the reality of a single-vendor stack is not really appealing for an enterprise. Through this model, he is eventually going to get into a point of ‘no-return’ where he will have to depend completely on that vendor for his end-toend requirement. One of the things we say in our ‘intelligent infrastructure’ is, do you really need a seven-layer, super complex, singlevendor Cisco networking solution or should you have the best-of-breed. And, the customers seem to be clear about what they want. We are trying to kind of democratize the data center. But a lot of enterprises prefer to deal with a single vendor rather than managing multiple of them. Jones: Our value proposition really is ‘choice’. Though we do recommend a best-in-class architecture to the customer, he can choose
We are very cautiously using cloud around this, because there is a negative connotation to in lot of the traditional IT guys’ minds. which hardware he wants, and we will help him put everything together and deliver the same composite output. It’s a multivendor ecosystem that we promise to compose in an effective way. The solution also gives the customer the freedom to de-couple the architecture if something more compelling comes up post the deployment. What we don’t believe in is the ‘bigbang’ theory. We don’t tell our customers that if you turn your sever into a VIS and all your problem will be solved. Why is Dell not using the word ‘cloud’ very extensively? All said and done, isn’t that a smart way to grab some attention these days? Jones: We are very cautiously using cloud around this, because there is a negative connotation to this in lot of the traditional IT guys’ minds. It’s a moving target as far the definition is concerned. Everyone understands public cloud and we are pretty active on that front from a hardware and infrastruc-
ture perspective. But that’s not the case with private cloud. A lot of people are confused. We have seen a lot of marketing people, who don’t know how to name their product, simply drop ‘cloud’ in front of it or behind it and you are done. That creates quite a bit of backlash from the customers. We don’t get so hung-up on that shifting definition so much as we do get focused on the attributes that the IT professionals are trying to get into, which is converged infrastructure, variable opex, self service and many more. So, we focus more on delivering all these in your own private infrastructure. Failure to acquire 3PAR, however, was unfortunate. How would it impact your cloud or data center strategy? Jones: We believe that 3PAR potentially was a key asset to some of our own internal development around our storage platforms. We did not cancel our EMC relationship and in fact we have strengthened it further. 3PAR was another technology point in our data center transformation and we will continue to make acquisitions in the data center space. 3PAR, we felt, was an interesting technology, but it quickly became a bad decision from a cost perspective. Dell is a financially conservative company and we don’t make emotional decisions in a business game. But alternatives to 3PAR’s solutions are indeed limited, in terms of maturity and market-readiness. Jones: For what that cost
at the end, we could do a lot of our own development! So, we are evaluating our options there. Do you kill the channels of the companies that you acquire, because Dell is known for its direct-tomarket approach? Jones: No. The acquisition of EqualLogic is a perfect example. We protected and kept that channel even after the acquisition and they continue to upgrade their capabilities through our partner directorial. All we did was to accelerate their conception of our products through our direct channel. We understand that there is absolutely a solid value proposition around the channel. But would you look at channels for something like VIS? Jones: Channels will definitely have a play there. There are two reasons for this. One is that a significant portion of the customers do see value in buying through channels. Secondly, it increases our capacity tremendously. in the Indian context especially, channel has a significant role to play as we would want to leverage their reach in the mid market as well as the public sector. The partners, who sell the components of VIS, will do their own services. So, there is a value proposition for channels in VIS as well, in terms of the architecture, installation and integration. So, it’s not about mere reselling. The partners who would take VIS to the market will need to have very significant data center capabilities.
february 2011
Onrecord.indd 21
INDIAN Channelworld
21
2/15/2011 10:29:49 AM