Dell Technologies has product breadth to deliver on superpowers with ‘disruptive scale,’ VMware CEO says
LAS VEGAS–VMware’s vision, according to CEO Pat Gelsinger, remains connecting any device to any application running in any cloud. With the combined offerings of the companies that sit under Dell Technologies, including VMware, and 5G set to usher in a further dependence on multi-cloud environments serving new latency- and throughput-dependent applications, Gelsinger sees the company ready to deliver on the four superpowers of technology.
“I call this the superpowers era,” Gelsinger said during a keynote presentation at Dell Technologies World. “We used to think of superpowers as nation states; now they’re technology states. Cloud–this unimaginable scale. Your mobile device now has access to 60% of the planet. AI–this idea of intelligence everywhere. Finally, IoT–this ability to connect the digital and physical worlds as never before. These superpowers coming together…are unlocking game-changing opportunities.”
He explained that companies taking on the IT transformation needed to capture value from these tech superpowers, requires a hybrid-cloud strategy based on considerations around physics, economics and land.
“If you need low latency, guess what?…It needs to be close. If I’m taking every picture of your cat to the cloud, that’s a whole lot of network bandwidth. There needs to be intelligence at the edge.” If the requirement is for on-prem, public clouds won’t work. So a multi-cloud approach “is the right architecture for today and tomorrow,” Gelsinger said.
Given its work with both client devices and cloud infrastructure that’s being pushed out to the network edge, Dell Technologies takes a multi-faceted view of the edge. Company executives added some color during a media and analyst presentation.
“The edge is broad,” Sam Burd, president of Dell’s Client Solutions Group said. “I would call us on the far-edge when you go and look at what we’re doing with client. I think about the edge and all the transformation discussion we’ve had, to me the thing that’s cool about the stuff we’re doing in the PC space, it’s kind of the hidden advantage companies can have.”
Dell EMC SVP and GM of Networking, Service Provider and Enterprise Infrastructure Tom Burns said people often think of the edge as a product or a place. But, “The edge includes the connected people that are part of our companies and our environments,” he said. “It’s a multitude of locations and projects depending on what you’re trying to connect, how you connect. Traditional networking is not going to work.”