My thoughts on the first day of Dell World 2012

Those of you who have read my posts in the past know that I’ve blogged about Dell making a transition from being just a hardware provider to an end–to–end solutions provider.  All of  the acquisitions we’ve made over the last several years are helping us make that transition, but beyond acquisitions, we’ve worked to bring server, storage and networking hardware together to make unique solutions focused on solving business problems that impact our customers every day. A recent example would be our Active Infrastructure solution.

These solutions can get pretty complex in a hurry and that’s a big reason why Dell World exists: it allows us to showcase the current state of our solutions to thousands of customers who attend,  and more importantly, to discuss trends and challenges that can shape future solutions or help us iterate current solutions.

Today we had a Dell World Influencer Panel and Q&A where Michael Dell was joined by Steve Felice, Marius Haas, Jeff Clarke, Suresh Vaswani and John Swainson. Below is the highlight video that summarizes session. You can check out the discussion in its entirety here.

After that session, I got to be part of the Enabling Innovation in IT Social Think Tank session, where I was surrounded by people who were a lot smarter than me.  The session was moderated by @alexwilliams from TechCrunch, and he kept a lively discussion moving by anchoring it around three main topics: 1) People 2) Processes and 3) Technology. You can see some of the discussion that resulted from the Think Tank by checking out the #innoIT  hashtag. Lots of good folks to follow in that stream.

Thanks to each and every one of you who took part in the discussion. Here’s a picture from today’s Think Tank session:

Enabling Innovation it IT - Dell World 2012 Think Tank

Click on the image above to see a larger version. To see more pictures, check out Flickr sets of the Dell World Influencer Panel and the Social Think Tank via the previous links. And like I’ve mentioned before, you can see the latest Dell World-related blog posts here.

Things really kick in to full gear starting tomorrow. For those of you who aren’t able to attend Dell World in person, you can check out the keynote sessions  like the opening keynote with Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell and President Bill Clinton starts tomorrow at 11am CT. Beyond the keynotes, many of the sessions that happen over the next couple of days will be streamed live or archived on demand via Dell TV so you can listen to them later.

It’s great to see so many customers here this year. Thank you to the thousands of you who taking time to attend Dell World 2012!

About the Author: Lionel Menchaca