TechTalk Dell and Insight Partnering to Enhance Client Experience and Address Supply Shortages
By Insight Editor / 28 Oct 2021 / Topics: Featured Customer experience Procurement
By Insight Editor / 28 Oct 2021 / Topics: Featured Customer experience Procurement
Client experience can be influenced by any number of variables, but within the current industry climate there is none more top-of-mind than supply. In this TechTalk, John Dathan, Insight Canada’s Senior Vice-President & General Manager, is joined by Jeffrey Denberg, Vice-President of Enterprise Accounts to discuss how Dell Technologies is leveraging its partnership with Insight to address the supply chain challenges that have swept the worldwide technology landscape.
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Transcript of audio:
Published October 28, 2021
JOHN
Hello, and welcome to another Insight's TechTalks. My name is John Dathan and I have the absolute privilege to lead Insight Canada. And today my special guest is Jeffrey Denberg, who is the vice president of enterprise accounts with Dell Technologies here in Canada. Welcome.
JEFFREY
Hey, thanks a lot for having me, John. Looking forward to this.
JOHN
No, it's a pleasure. Now, normally we do this and it's often a deeper dive into technology, but there's so much going on right now around the client experience. And I thought it would be great to leverage your background and how you're dealing with things and kind of what this all means for Dell as a corporation. And I think when I think of the client experience, there's so many aspects of it, but really the elephant in the room right now is supply. You know, we're all suffering from supply. Love to get your perspective on that and any insights pardon the pun as the winter went in.
JEFFREY
Absolutely. And John, it's a great, great place to start because it is the elephant in the room. I mean, it's a question that I am asked every day. It's an issue that comes up every day in dealing with our customers. I mean, this is a board level imperative that they're trying to figure out now, both on the customer side, but also on the vendor side too. So, you know, there's a worldwide supply shortage of chips or components needed to deliver all technology products. It's not just in our client devices, you know, our laptops and desktops, but it's in everything, right. And the supply chain issue is real. And it's going to take months if not years, to catch up. And it's not just in the availability of those chips, but it's the logistics, it's the shipping containers. It's the issues in logistics paths. It's everything, it's this confluence, if you will, of these massive variables that are causing issues in customers getting their end product, right. The good news though, and almost the silver lining here is that Dell has been a Master of Supply Chain since the beginning, right. We have industry leading scale. We have differentiated supply chain capabilities. We have a great cost position and speed and continuity of supply, which, you know, more often than not will benefit our customers because of the position we have to try and accelerate, you know, deals and opportunities to hit our supply chains so that we can help accelerate our customer's needs, right. We are in a really, really good position to help with delivering the technology that our customers need in a just in time basis.
JOHN
Any suggestions forth that you share with clients today?
JEFFREY
Well, I mean time is really the value point here. And as things, you know, kind of get more pronounced as you move out, ordering early in re-architecting early and bringing forward opportunities that are time sensitive is the key here, because time is the killer to all of this. And we don't know what's going to happen going into, you know, calendar year, 2022, our next fiscal year. I mean, again, these are industry wide dynamics that are causing issues. So, you know, for a customer, the ability to try and advance things and take advantage of, you know, our mastery and the industry pull forward is really, really cheap.
JEFFREY
Right. Well, and to your point, nobody does that better than Dell so.
JEFFREY
Yeah, that's true.
JOHN
We'll continue to work together on that. Maybe I'll shift a little bit because there's so much going on in technology as we've, you know, been through now, 18, 19, almost 20 months of the pandemic. And it's hybrid both from the client experience. So the end user, but also when we think of hybrid IT, whether it's, you know, kind of multi-cloud. What are your thoughts around, how does that the hybrid, and maybe we'll use the work from home example for the individual. How does that impact that client experience?
JEFFREY
Well absolutely. And I mean that's a broad question that really cuts across a lot of different areas. And so, you know, the way I like to address that, is just to backup for a second and that, you know, digital transformation has accelerated wholeheartedly over the last year. The pandemic has put a focus on customer's opportunities, you know, to advance and benefit all of their constituents, their employees, their supply chain, their customers in a way that we've never seen before, right. So really focused on embracing that change and that transformation of customers through four areas, one, you just hit on, the multi-cloud infrastructure side, right. How we look at the mix of private, public and colo workloads giving the ultimate flexibility, right. Digital workspace, right. So the ability to deal with the fact that let's face it, we're not going back to the office or at least not in the same way we were 18, you know, 18, 24 months ago, right. So the ability to be productive from everywhere and harness the technology that is available to drive fantastic employee experiences is really, really key. The next area that we're focused on is that application and data area, right. So modernizing legacy applications, right. But also writing new cloud native applications, right. And then, we're going to get really, really excited about is using analytics in areas like the edge to generate faster insights from your data. And we could talk about that, you know, further. The edge is an area that really needs to be exposed for our joint customers because of the immense amount of value there is in having that data and commute power, compute power, excuse me, be really, really close to the end user and then the insights that that's going to generate. And then obviously the fourth thing that's really, really important is the wrapper of security that we put around everything. And I mean, let's face it, right. With people working at home, with the supply chain disruptions that we've seen, with just the variables that have changed the dynamic of technology over the last 24 months, threats are increasing, right. The bad guys are becoming more pronounced. They found new areas to really inject risks into our customer's businesses. So it's important for us that we look at a complete edge to core to cloud, security strategy that puts a very, very resilient and tight wrapper around all of those areas to provide that complete platform of security around everything we do with our customers. So if you kind of look at those areas, you know, those are simply the four transformative areas that we focus on with customers. Again, looking at the best place for workloads to sit and you hit on it earlier, John. There really is no kind of hybrid cloud. It is, it's multi-cloud now. It is where is the workload going to sit in the best place in the right cloud at the right time and the right cost, right. And then the adjunct to that is the on-prem experience that our customers want. You need to have a full view of how you modernize, automate, and transform so that you can eliminate essentially all the tech debt that's just not necessary anymore. So very strong view that we take, you know, in combination with an organization like Insight, to not only educate customers on how those workloads should be placed, but also providing some very, very efficient and effective platforms to allow for that true portability and true security around workloads.
JOHN
And, you know, the breadth of your portfolio is really, it's a unique position in the marketplace, right. When you mentioned the security, for example, everything that you've done in terms of, you know, the recent acquisitions has just strengthened that portfolio so.
JEFFREY
It really has, it really has. I mean, on that note, you know, our portfolio has, I like to call this kind of, you know, extensibility to it too. And if you look at the areas that we are investing in with our customers right now, areas such as, you know, 5G and how that's going to impress upon or provide value for our customers. Edge, we talked about right. Analytics and data management, AI, and machine learning, right. And then obviously cyber resiliency. If you look at the platforms that we're selling today, the extensibility around those platforms providing the foundations for all of those burgeoning and almost latent areas of immense value to our customers are really, really key. And to your point, you know, the fact that Dell Technologies provides different technology solutions in all these different areas, gives our customers a lot of leverage that they can, you know, extend their investment with us, provide both architectural linkages in their technology design, but also economic leverages as they work with us. It's a very, very, very powerful proposition that we partner with our customers on. We provide thought leadership in a lot of these new areas. But we're also keeping them ensuring that they've got a strong foundation for efficient running of their business as it, as it exists, excuse me, today.
JOHN
And we're going to time out unfortunately, but I do want to get a little bit of an update from you 'cause I think this changes the client experience when you think of all of that technology coming as a service. So maybe you could, you know, talk to us a little bit about how Dell sees that, sort of, evolving marketplace.
JEFFREY
Really, really important topic. I mean, I've been in this industry for a while. Like you, not to, not to age ourselves there, John. But we've seen a lot. And the constant theme that we've heard from customers over the years is help me mitigate risks, right. I'm investing with you. I want you to be a true partner in my business and help me manage that risk equation. And that's truly what as a service offering such as Dell's APACs offers, right. It allows you that you can manage your business, you can manage your technology in your data center, at an edge location through a colo provider operated by you, managed by you, scaled when needed, you know, through self-service and pay per use. So commitments and risks is managed by the fact that you can turn up and turn down that technology as your business dictates, right. The days of large burdensome capital outlays are gone, primarily because the speed of change and the pace of change in technology is happening so fast, that business needs to react at the speed of light, which is what as a service it allows you to do, right. Again, the scale is really, really important. Being able to burst where necessary, allowing to automate certain functions and to make the procurements of whether it's storage or compute or whatever. And this cuts across every, you know, product we have, including PCs and desktops, really allow you that full flexibility and agility that your business can react to things that are important to react such as global pandemics and such as other business imperatives that might come and strike you where you weren't, you know, necessarily aware or didn't necessarily see it coming, right. So it really gives that full flexibility. And we're excited as we rolled that out into Canada, we're seeing a lot of customers really start to dig in to how this is going to be a true imperative and a valuable imperative for their business. And it's not only again about the data center, it's any technology as a service, right. Very, very powerful.
JOHN
Well, and to your point that this also helps to mitigate against that supply problem, right. When we've got some capacity that's built-in that can scale for clients. So Insight, we, we're a big believer in this marketplace. In fact, many things you're talking about earlier, the importance of the edge and 5G and all these, sort of pieces, plays well to our strengths as well, which is really the services wrapper that we can put around that technology.
JEFFREY
Absolutely. I think that's an important point because it's not just about the hardware and software, right. It's not just about the physical space. It's about, you know, making sure that you have an architecture that really is, you know, endemic to your business. But it's also very much a cultural change too. And the services that your organization can provide in terms of, you know, benefits around working from home. Again, think about the cultural change of working from home, right. We were always a leader at that. For the last 10, 15 years, Dell Technologies has offered a work from home, you know, imperative to our employees. The cultural change behind that is really, really important. The trust as a leader, you know, be able to empower your team to think of work as an outcome and not necessarily a place or a time. Really, really powerful. And working with organizations like Insight, the ability for you to go and help a customer understand the dynamic that they need to then deploy in their business and the leadership that they need to provide with their employees and all of their constituents is really, really key. So it's really good that we partner with someone like you in order to provide that thought leadership and acumen as we look at deployment strategies, such as we're talking about right now.
JOHN
Yeah, well, terrific. Well, we're going to wrap up and we try to keep this, you know, this kind of impactful for our clients. So thanks so much
JEFFREY
for spending time with us today, sharing, you know, your personal views, but as well as those of Dell Technologies. And we appreciate your partnership and we're excited to continue to take your solutions to our clients here in Canada. Thank you.
JEFFREY
Thanks John really appreciate it. Thank you and the Insight team.
Senior Vice-President & General Manager, Insight Canada
In 2018, John joined Insight with more than 30 years of sales and business management experience in IT. John fosters deep partner relationships and meaningful connections with clients. He guides Insight Canada’s overall strategy to meet their needs through unique processes, tools and services provided via Insight Intelligent Technology Solutions™ in supply chain optimization, connected workforce, cloud and data centre transformation, and digital innovation.
Vice-President, Enterprise Sales, Dell Technologies
Jeffrey Denberg oversees the day-to-day management of Dell Technologies Canada’s Enterprise Division including taking overall responsibility for setting strategy and executing a high-growth business plan that encompasses Dell Technologies entire portfolio in the largest organizations across the country. With Dell EMC since 2008, Jeff is a well-spoken leader in the Canadian market and has led Dell Technologies charge in Telco, Financial Services and Retail Digital Transformation.
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