Dell Technologies World: There are five big challenges that customers are grappling with, according to Dell Technologies’ co-COO, Chuck Whitten (pictured above, speaking to the crowd).

Whitten was addressing customers and partners at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas on Monday.

“Over the last year, I’ve spoken with hundreds of customers and partners around the world. There are five challenges that I hear over and over,” he said.

The Future of Work

“At the start of the pandemic, we quickly deployed disparate devices, applications and collaboration tools, as we all pivoted to working remote. We all became part of the greatest reimagination of work since World War II. Today companies are having rich conversations about the future. Where does hybrid work go from here? And how can technology enable the next evolution? And the next, and the next?”

Whitten said the dynamics of work “are forever changed. The remote and hybrid working patterns of the pandemic, combined with years of technology innovation, have fundamentally changed people’s expectations of work. And companies are struggling with where it goes from here.

“The answer is there’s not one answer. There is no one size fits all. Every company has to decide what works for their culture and in their competitive environment. But more importantly, there is no one size fits all for work inside a company.”

Multicloud

Last year, Whitten talked about delivering “the innovations and ecosystem to change the game” around multicloud. Today he said partners and customers have “affirmed and reaffirmed that we have the right strategy.”

He told them: “You are deploying sophisticated hybrid and multicloud strategies. You want the feature velocity and innovation of the public clouds, but you don’t want to be locked up in a single public cloud.

“So, you’re smartly putting the right workloads in the right places, which means you have clouds everywhere. On-premises, across multiple public clouds, at the edge and colocation facilities. You’re increasingly using FinOps to understand trade-offs between speed, cost and quality in your cloud architecture and investment decisions. And as you optimize, you’re going after the real price, extracting value from the explosion of data sprawl across your multicloud estate.

“What you need is somebody to make it all work better together to make it multicloud by design, not by default.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

CEO Michael Dell had spoken at an earlier Dell Technologies World session and described AI as being able to “transform industries and the way we live and work.”

Whitten merely told attendees: “What I know you’re feeling is pressure. Pressure to move faster to apply generative AI to your private datasets, and to do it all smartly, securely and ethically.”

Edge Computing

“How about the edge or as I like to call it the real world?” asked Whitten. “The perfect storm of data and technology and competition is accelerating innovation at the edge. The problem? The edge is everywhere. And it’s hard to operate edge infrastructure at scale. Existing models don’t solve the challenges of running multiple critical and disparate OT workloads operating in remote and harsh environments operating without skill local IT managing distributed infrastructure and applications and doing it all securely.”

Security

Finally, Whitten described a “fragmented” and “broken” security industry facing huge cyberthreats.

“Distributed work, distributed data, multicloud, the edge: the attack surface has never been bigger. Unfortunately, the security industry has never been more fragmented or more broken,” he said.

“You’ve been clear: don’t give us more security products. Embed greater security and resiliency into Dells core solutions. Basically, don’t get into the security industry – change the security of the technology industry.”