Up and down the escalator they go. High heels, sensible flats, Oxfords and tennis shoes. Suits, khakis, skirts and blue jeans. Digital natives and those who remember punch cards. European, American, Asian, Latin American. These representatives from fast-growth businesses and global enterprises speak a variety of different languages with their fellow travelers on the moving staircase.
But all are unified by the blue lanyard name badges that hang around their neck. They are the more than 8,000 people who attended Dell World 2015 this week in Austin, TX.
“I love this, because this is when I get to be with more customers in the same place at the same time than anywhere else,” said Michael Dell.
And, they all seemed to enjoy it when he used the phrase “go big or go home baby” in his opening keynote.
The conference is designed to bring together technology and business professionals who are crafting a vision for the future of their organization. It’s a chance for us to hear directly from them in our enterprise and software user forums about the challenges they face and our opportunity to share ways that we can help. The event included more than 1,000 channel partners who heard about our major investments in their business.
“Together, with all of you, we are going to build the world’s infrastructure for the next 20, 30 years,” Dell told the crowd.
And we made a few announcements at the event about new ways we’ll do that. In addition to media representatives from 40 different countries gathered in the room, more than 2,000 global viewers tuned into the press conference live stream to hear about them.
Key themes some of them relayed include:
- Dell and Microsoft’s continued partnership, reaffirmed in the event’s opening general session and through the announcement of a joint Dell and Microsoft hybrid cloud solution, and spurring stories in Business Insider, PCWorld and Venture Beat;
- Tech Radar discussed Dell’s efforts to digitally transform the world and support entrepreneurs as part of our vision for the future of technology;
- Dell’s leading innovations in the “IT of tomorrow” – such topics as Internet of Things, big data and scalable data centers – with ITWire highlighting the new Dell Edge Gateway 5000 series and InfoTech Lead covering our new analytics offerings; and
- Our commitment to the PC business was called out by Fortune, with ARN noting Michael Dell’s pledge to ensure Dell remains among the top PC providers in the market’s consolidation.
ARN also shared what they heard our customers say about the benefits of working with a company that has the breadth of solutions Dell currently offers, and plans to expand:
“Global supply chain and logistics company Owens and Minor has worked with Dell for 17 years, focused on IT services. It has flipped its agenda from simple tactical operations to strategic solutions around its ecommerce and supply chain, utilising the Cloud to build better efficiencies and leverage its scale into new markets,” they noted.
But you don’t have to be a worldwide organization to benefit. Also present at Dell World this week was the American NASCAR racing team of Richard Childress. Joyce Mullen shared some of their story yesterday in relation to the Internet of Things, but I find it personally satisfying to see how they truly illustrate what we mean when we say Dell offers end-to-end solutions. From the servers in their data center to the ruggedized tablets in the pits and the software that crunches the data they collect and store, they can rely on one vendor to provide it all.
The possibilities of such an innovative and inclusive approach is something we hope other customers who attended Dell World took away from the event. If you weren’t able to join us, you can still catch many sessions and highlights on www.dellworld.com. And if you want to know what innovation we see on horizon, check out this session on transformative technologies:
