Early starts and late nights might become a theme for the next couple of days at Dell Technologies World!
Lost in the Venetian!
So Day 2 of DTW didn’t start quite how I intended. I had a 7am breakfast meeting to start the day. I turned up 28 minutes late – not because I was late arriving at the hotel, but because I became well and truly lost trying to navigate my way through The Venetian Hotel and The Palazo. Do you know what the worst part was … when I finally found the meeting location, it was ~100m from where I was dropped off! On the plus side, I got a 2.5km walk in!
Meetings and Networking
A common theme for DTW is the huge opportunity to meet and network. I was fortunate to meet with the PowerEdge leadership team, the PowerEdge Automation team, as well as some senior executive meetings.
A common discussion point with all of the meetings was the interest and feedback on how Kyndryl is differentiating itself and evolving from our IBM heritage. Along with this came discussions on partnership opportunities, as well as the chance to provide feedback directly into the heart of the product teams for the platforms and services that we consume. Also of huge interest was the opportunity to be briefed on emerging innovation that Dell is engaging in… clearly I can’t talk about it, but VERY cool!
Day 2 Keynote
Day 2’s Keynote speech was hosted by Jeff Clarke – Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Operating Officer for Dell Technologies. The Keynote was a showcase of innovation and technology.
Jeff introduced us to “The Workshop” – a virtual garage which facilitated new announcements in PC, Gaming, PowerMax, PowerStore, and PowerFlex. A key theme throughout the announcements was putting Zero Trust into all products and technologies – the data and security theme continuing from yesterday!
Next to the stage was Jen Felch, Chief Digital Officer and CIO. Jen described Dell’s journey for improving the developer experience, switching technical teams from spending 25% of their time writing software the rest on non-develOpenTable tasks, to spending 75% of their time on technical tasks.
Jen’s presentation leveraged “CIO Central” as the backdrop to discuss their transformation, making Dell “Customer 0” for many innovations, building their own internal cloud to enable rapid deployment of services for Dell employees.
Jen invited to the stage Caitlin Gordon – Vice President for Product Management. Caitlin talked through Project Alpine – bringing block, file, and storage software to all major public clouds to enable operational consistency, greater efficient, and data mobility.
Next to the stage was Clarke Patterson – Head of Product Marketing for Snowflake. Clarke announced a new collaboration with Dell that brings on-prem datasets to the cloud, allowing data to remain on-prem while performing analytics in the cloud.
Jeff closed the session showing a video from Boeing with particular focus on high-performance compute while also reflecting on the value of sustainability- using digital twins to test designs thousands of times virtually before them fabricating in the real-world.
Flo Rida!
Dell’s Partner appreciation event was headlined by no-other than Flo Rida! And what a concert. There was HUGE excitement with a packed crowd outside on the at the Tau Beach Club. Making it extra special, was the opportunity to “Meet and Greet” Flo Rida as part of a VIP experience. Very very cool!
Original Post
This post was originally authored on this blog, you can also see the corresponding LinkedIn Article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dell-technologies-world-day-2-andrew-barnes/