At ESTI, we have made a tradition out of attending EMC World. We invite our clients to the conference and help them to get conference passes so that they can attend. We hold a customer appreciation dinner on the Tuesday evening of the conference which is a 'thank you' to our clients from ESTI and also a networking opportunity for those clients. Although this year was the launch of the Dell EMC World conference, the first show following the acquisition of EMC by Dell, ESTI maintained our traditions with a strong showing at Dell EMC World.
One difference between the new conference and the old EMC conference is that Dell EMC had a variety of business people in attendance. In the past, EMC positioned the conference as strictly technical, pure of any influence from the sales organization. This change is a very positive one as it means that yours truly, ESTI's VP of Sales gets to go to Las Vegas!
A conference highlight for the VP of Sales was the daily get-together at the Canada House hospitality suite. Canadian Dell EMC staff mingled with clients and partners such as ESTI over a beverage and watched the NHL playoffs. We took the opportunity to get to know one another better in a social setting.
As a sales executive, I tried to take away an understanding of the general themes of the technology at the conference. The overriding message of the conference is the integration of Dell and EMC technologies to produce superior products. One example of this type of integration is the integration of legacy Dell's server products into all kinds of legacy EMC appliances (think VxRail, VxRack, RecoverPoint, etc). At a business level, Dell EMC can produce category-leading appliances while driving additional value for clients by leveraging what is arguably the world's best IT supply chain.
An even more interesting example of the Dell EMC integration involves partnerships. Dell EMC has a natural partnership with VMware due to holding a large ownership position. However, the legacy Dell organization has a long-standing partnership with Microsoft, a VMware rival in the data center. There was plenty of evidence at the conference that Dell EMC is planning on continuing both partnerships in the pursuit of one of Dell's ideals, 'customer choice'. Some examples of these partnerships at the show bring me to the next important theme of the show
Questions abound about the role of 'cloud' in enterprise IT. Public cloud is growing at a great rate and is getting most of the press, but, realistically, it is still a tiny portion of the enterprise IT footprint globally. Enterprise IT clients are trying to decide if they need to use public cloud services or if they can recreate some of the benefits of those services in their own data center.
Dell EMC has taken the position that Enterprise IT clients should not make a simple 'yes/no' decision on using public cloud services. I support this position ' it seems clear to us at ESTI that, for the foreseeable future, Enterprise IT clients will continue to have workloads running in their own data centers. It is also clear, however, that Enterprise IT will identify opportunities where public cloud is a better choice. In our mind, anyone in that position is doing 'Hybrid Cloud' ' some here and some there.
Dell EMC is making use of some old partnerships and some new partnerships as part of their hybrid fully engineered solution that allows clients to experience the Microsoft public cloud functionality with a premised solution. This solution leans on the legacy Dell relationship with Microsoft.
Dell EMC also continues to leverage its natural partnership with VMware to provide solutions in the hybrid cloud space. The legacy EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) solution involves a full premised deployment of the VMware virtualization stack (server, storage, and network are included) along with the operations and automation toolsets. However, some new announcements have given this solution an interesting twist. VMware has announced a partnership in which it will provide public cloud services based on VMware's server, storage, and network virtualization software running on infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. The implications for the EHC solution are profound.
The variety of hybrid solutions showcased at the event is simply too varied to write about. Some examples include:
· Cloud Disaster Recovery using Avamar, Data Domain, and Amazon Web Services
· Tiering of data to public cloud from a wide variety of storage and data protection solutions
· Virtustream, Dell EMC's enterprise grade public cloud integrated with cloud tier products
· Hybrid deployments of Pivotal Cloud Foundry ' PaaS to promote digital transformation
The ESTI team will be contacting our Enterprise IT clients over the next few weeks to provide updates on the technology showcased at Dell EMC World. Anyone with questions about the new announcements should contact me, Simon Gadd, or their ESTI account manager:
Simon Gadd, simon.gadd@esti.ca
Evan Olynuk, evan.olynuk@esti.ca
Gord Ermel, gord.ermel@esti.ca
Brady Finch, brady.finch@esti.ca
Gary Harasymchuk, gary.harasymchuk@esti.ca
Constant pressure to support a remote workforce, and the increased inability to meet with customers face-to-face, is driving organizations to reassess their manual business processes and embrace digital transformation. This is especially true for business processes that require original signatures for acceptance, authorization, or approval. This can be a tedious and time-consuming process yielding minimal overall value.
Working from home is now easier than ever.
First hand highlights of AWS' re:invent conference in Las Vegas in December 2019.
First hand highlights of AWS' re:invent conference in Las Vegas in December 2019.
_5ce4583728a9b0_58099909.png)
The Tire Stewardship of Saskatchewan made the move to the AWS Cloud to cut inefficient processes and ensure that the right information is accessible to their program partners.
ESTI is excited to announce that Brennan Martin has been invited to be a delegate for Gestalt IT's Mobility Field Day 2! Gestalt IT puts together multiple Tech Field Day events each year, focusing on networking, storage, big data, mobility, and cloud. Del
