With the company's business transformation, Dell's It is also streamlined and optimized

Since 2010, Dell has acquired more than 20 companies worldwide, through mergers and acquisitions to complete the transition from a hardware product manufacturer to an End-to-end solution provider. The company purchased by Dell includes both end-user computing, enterprise-class products, and software and service providers. To address business strategy changes, Dell it has been providing it tools to support business transitions in the sales, supply chain, and marketing sectors over the years of corporate transformation.

As the helm of Dell's IT department in the Asia-Pacific region, Justin Mennen that it should be a strategic partner for the business in any company, otherwise it is easy to lose opportunities in future competition. As a CIO, all emerging technologies, such as BYOD, cloud computing, and so on, are closely watched in the company's business transition and need to keep thinking about how to incorporate emerging technologies and tools to support the business sector.

The business value reporter interviewed Dell's Asia Pacific CIO Justin in September 2013, following an edited dialogue.

Q What are the changes happening in the IT industry? What does this mean for the enterprise IT department?

A the boundaries between the IT department and the business are becoming increasingly blurred, one of the main reasons is that, compared with the past, people are more understanding of technology, employees in the daily use of a variety of equipment, they would prefer to use in the office equipment also have a good experience, I hope IT department can provide them with the corresponding solution, It also looks to the IT department to help them improve their productivity and even drive revenue growth. So the IT department has now become a strategic partner for the business, not just a business unit that has to deal with the problem.

Q. What role does it play in Dell's transition?

A the role of the IT department when Dell transforms from a hardware provider to a provider of End-to-end solutions is to provide the business unit with the infrastructure, systems, and tools to support their transformation. Over the past few years, our focus has been on providing tools for sales, marketing, and the entire supply chain to transform a new type of end-to-end solution provider with traditionally hardware-based skills.

In fact, from a hardware-focused business to an end-to-end solution provider, the system architecture is an important factor in ensuring the future direction of the enterprise, and Dell's IT department plays an important central role.

Dell has 3 teams that are critical to Dell's transition: The 1th is the Business Architecture team, which is used to analyze the needs of the entire corporate strategy, an important part of the corporate architecture team that helps the company meet its strategic needs by providing it technology.

The 2nd is the Enterprise Architecture team, the Enterprise Architecture team is mainly to set the strategy of the enterprise in the future, IT departments have been involved in the future strategy of the set. The 3rd is the management team, mainly responsible for the coordination between the various business units and management, it is also involved in the team, hoping to work with other business units to forge a closer strategic relationship, so as to promote the company to achieve strategic objectives.

Q What did the IT department do to support a better business transformation?

A We have done a lot of strategic work on the basis of ensuring the normal operation of the system and supporting the efficient operation of the business. The first is to see what the company's goals are for the next 3-5 years, and then see what it can do to make the company meet that goal.

The second is the consolidation of internal infrastructure and applications, the standardization, simplification and automation of it platforms, and the introduction of cloud computing solutions to enhance business support. 5 years ago The company has 8,000 applications, now integrated to 2,400, in the manufacture of the original use of 87, now the application to 1. Globally, Dell IT departments manage 2,400 applications, 20,000 physical servers, 12,000 virtual servers (14,000 virtual servers at the end of the year), and 19,000 databases. In Dell's IT investments, the part for it maintenance has been reduced since 2008, and Dell has now increased strategic IT spending from 20% of it budgets to 52%.

In terms of infrastructure, if you want to apply for a server now, you need to follow the virtual machine, only if the virtual machine is not available, you can apply for the physical machine. Such deployments and designs have greatly enhanced the efficiency of the entire company's IT resources utilization.

The 3rd aspect is that it is fully transparent and allows business teams to understand their IT costs, so that both sides can better collaborate to adjust it requirements through cost leverage and better support them to improve efficiency and achieve business goals. Through these efforts, we will ultimately be able to win trust and trust before we can truly forge a strategic partnership with the business sector.

Q Dell has acquired many companies in recent years, what are the experiences of it integration?

A Dell, after acquiring some companies, wants to be able to integrate their technology into our technology products and services to provide end-to-end solutions. As an IT department, one of our tasks is the consolidation of it architecture, and the second is to increase Dell's productivity by using the technology and products of these acquired companies.

About it consolidation, we specialize in an IT integration manual that guides the process of integrating IT systems; the second is to analyze how it supports mergers and acquisitions from the perspective of applications and infrastructure, and how to integrate some of the applications, infrastructure, and existing infrastructures of the merged enterprises. And the third is to consider the "retirement" of applications and infrastructure, which means that with more and more companies and more complex systems, we need to deactivate older, traditional applications or architectures.