DXC and Dell: Partnering for innovation

Welcome to the first in a series of three interviews conducted with leading executives from both DXC Technology and Dell Technologies, which explores some of the next-generation technologies in focus in 2024.

In this first conversation, DXC Director of Dell Technologies Alliance Patrik Strebel and Dell Global Client Executive Mike Ezratty discuss how our unique partnership enables us to excel in accommodating customers' infrastructure needs in an AI-driven world, provide end-to-end device lifecycle support in innovative ways, and more.

Harnessing GenAI to reshape the enterprise (Part 2)

Making multicloud part of your enterprise AI/GenAI strategy (Part 3)

Q: What are some of the priorities for the DXC-Dell partnership in 2024?

Patrik Strebel: Traditional global infrastructure services are our daily bread and butter— managing storage, server, network, end-user compute devices and other technology. This year, DXC and Dell are collaborating in new areas, including supporting AI/GenAI domains. DXC is standardizing on Dell and NVIDIA technology in deploying enabling infrastructure for customers who want to run AI/GenAI projects.

If you ask any CIO out there about what matters now, they will tell you in one word: AI. You need to be an AI-driven company to survive and grow. They will tell you that they need to collect the data that is generated at the edge. And this is not just in industries like manufacturing, but also in retail from in-store devices, or from banking devices in branches. 

In line with that, another priority is to continue to successfully deploy solutions together that cover the whole domain of Edge IoT (Internet of Things), to help clients gather data at the edge. And, even more importantly, we help clients analyze and process that data on site, at the edge to benefit their business objectives.

A top priority is also to support modern virtualization. By this we mean that we are working with Dell to offer our customers hypervisor options — solutions including Red Hat Openshift, Microsoft Azure and Suse. When it comes to cost containment, the market is literally screaming for alternatives like the new hypervisor solutions we have built and deployed together.

Mike Ezratty: This conversation would have been very different two or three years ago. We're seeing customers now starting to buy more around the solution, versus a product itself. So as we designed our initiatives for this year, we went beyond the traditional tech refresh or traditional hardware campaigns and into true outcome-based solutions, which are what we're going to be able to deliver together. And of course we offer all of these solution on an infrastructure-as-a-service basis.

Q: Can you give us some more insight into how else DXC and Dell are expanding their partnership to focus on true outcome-based solutions?

Patrik Strebel: A priority within the DXC Modern Workplace domain has to do with helping our customers deploy devices quickly. A featured solution in our Modern Workplace offering is the DXC UPtime™Experience Platform, an AI-powered, one-stop shop for workplace services that, among many others, includes capabilities for ordering hardware. We leverage Dell’s Lifecycle Hub, a global logistics solution: Dell stores equipment in its warehouses across the world, which can then be dispatched to customers on very short notice. So, our customers can much more precisely follow their demand curve, versus purchasing equipment incrementally and storing it on a shelf.  

We can cover both the front- and back-end of device management — when a customer has a defect on their device, they can just ship it back to the Dell Lifecycle Hub and can get a new unit delivered immediately. DXC is offering this service globally — we have about 80% coverage, the exceptions being a few countries where logistics are extremely challenging. 

Mike Ezratty: It's really an end-to-end device lifecycle offering. As Patrik said, we have the ability to pre-stage demand for devices through a global network of logistics hubs so that, when a need is identified, we can deliver very quickly. We can also do a lot of advanced up-front preparedness, such as image creation and deployment, so that when the device is delivered, it’s immediately ready to be productive in the user’s hands. Then, if anything happens to go wrong during the life of that device, it can easily be sent back for exchange or repair.

The other unique part of this is that Dell is certified to repair any brand of PC. We know that DXC customers are not always going to be Dell-exclusive. So, if DXC has customers with HP or Apple PCs, we can integrate that into the Lifecycle Hub’s repair, return and replace model, exactly the way as we would for customers using Dell technology. This way, customers don't have to be locked into any one hardware platform or have multiple support providers.

Patrik Strebel: I’d like to emphasize that there is a very strong ESG component to this work that is sometimes overlooked. For any products that come back, Dell repairs them onsite and redeploys them into production. Or if the product can no longer be used, they apply very strong environmental recycling and disposal strategies. We even include CO2 credits or savings in our value proposition to customers, as we help them achieve their carbon emissions goals. And this is just the lifecycle part, over and above the ESG benefits that Dell provides when they produce a product using recyclable components and deliver it with recyclable material for the packaging. ESG is becoming more and more important in our selling and offering activities, so this is an important point.

The same applies for the data center. In Modern Workplace, we have a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution, which is a component of our Virtual Desktop and Applications (VDA) capability, where basically the entire compute and storage resides in the data center. This provides a much more efficient way to run workloads. If you have thin-client provisioning at the end user level, they can run their device for seven years or more; they don't need to refresh every three years. At the same time you optimize the data center environment to deliver those compute and storage requirements. And it’s not only in the VDI space that there is an ESG element, but also in GenAI and virtualization. We are always thinking about how we can optimize leveraging Dell’s capability in power-effective infrastructure in the data center to reduce the carbon footprint.
 

Q: Ransomware and other cyberthreats aren’t going away. How are DXC and Dell working together today to help companies avoid the potential devastating impacts of these attacks?

Patrik Strebel: Cyber is an everlasting topic. We help our clients become cyber resilient, to protect themselves against ransomware and handle the recovery once they're hit — because it's not a matter of if, but when. We benefit greatly from Dell’s R&D and innovation capabilities in this area, among others. Dell has significantly invested in developing the DXC Data Platform Vault solution that helps our clients with an accelerated and efficient way to recover from a ransomware attack.
 

Q: Do you have specific industries in mind that you intend to focus on this year?

Patrik Strebel: Dell and DXC have such a big relationship globally. In fact, Dell is the number one OEM partnership that we have at DXC. However, certain industries are more dominant in certain regions — for example, automotive and manufacturing in Germany; healthcare, life sciences, financial services and energy in the U.S. But we don't focus exclusively on any specific industry.

Mike Ezratty: If you think about the initiatives, every industry in the world is getting affected by AI right now. Every industry and company needs a cyber security strategy, and most every company is looking for alternatives to their virtualization. So we've designed many of these initiatives to be cross-industry and applicable at a very broad scale. If you look at Edge and IoT offerings, those are more specific to manufacturing and banking, or retail-type installations, places that have a lot of different locations and need to monitor very closely at the edge device. But the goal is to make this as broadly available as possible, so that DXC has many opportunities to sell it.

Patrik Strebel: Which really creates economies of scale — build once, deliver many across multiple industries. We leave it to our colleagues who do the apps and the engineering on top to provide the industry flavor. So in the AI space, for instance, there is a lot of traction right now in life sciences, and we have a team of experts that leads that for us and transforms a horizontal AI-enablement platform into something that is recognizable to life science industry leaders.
 

Q: What makes this partnership different, special and beneficial for our clients?

Patrik Strebel:  There are a few things worth mentioning. First, it's a very trusted and transparent relationship, all the way from the executive level down to the delivery leader. For instance, sometimes the customer has a preference for another OEM, and we communicate that openly to Dell so that we're not wasting each other's time. So it's a very symbiotic, trusted relationship.

I also want to mention that it's sometimes hard for customers to tell the difference between team members from DXC and Dell, because of how we work together. We have a lot of joint client activities where the local account team from Dell works with our account team. So, understanding each other's priorities and capabilities, and seamlessly representing that in front of the client, is a huge value add.

The third pillar I’d like to mention is the ecosystem play. As I mentioned, in the GenAI field, we're partnering with Dell and NVIDIA, a recognized leader in that space, that not only provides GPUs to Dell, but also a lot of the software management components. And in the Edge world we're partnering with AWS and Azure, because we know there is a multi-cloud world out there. Bringing those different companies together in an integrated fashion in front of the customer is of huge value. And Dell is extremely collaborative in doing so because they have relationships with these IT companies, as well.

There is another important topic, given our strategy at DXC: you hear our CEO Raul Fernandez and Chris Drumgoole, our general manager, Cloud Infrastructure & ITO, talk about transforming service delivery into an “asset light” model. DXC is not a bank, and we’ve had a number of executive calls with the Dell team about how Dell can help us to finance large deals. Dell has a solution called APEX, which provides an as-a-service consumption of infrastructure. DXC is engaged in a number of these APEX deals, and our financial executives are extremely happy with the flexibility from Dell to accommodate our “asset light” strategy.

Mike Ezratty: I want to add to Patrik’s comments about the strength of our partnership, and how it works both ways. As a Titanium Black partner of Dell's, DXC has early visibility into Dell’s product roadmap before our broader customer base does. So DXC sees what's coming. There’s a feedback loop. As we evolve our products, we take what DXC is hearing in the field and bring that back to our engineering teams. So, DXC plays a role in the design and functionality that we go to market with.

Dell has an annual event called “Access the Future,” which gives a view into what’s coming from the world of Dell. No more than 200 people across our entire customer base are allowed access. It's typically a two-day event, and DXC gets to send two people to that every year. It's an extremely exclusive event and gives DXC visibility into what's coming so that it can design for these solutions and get a competitive edge against those who don't have that visibility.

Patrik Strebel: And likewise, the other way around, right? We're part of the Dell Partner Advisory Board (PAB) cadence, where two DXC representatives from each region attend PAB events, and we feed back what we learn at these events to Dell — what we see in the market, what our customers need — and help engineers reprioritize their road map. So, as Mike says, it's a two-way street.
 

Q: Tell us more about the NVIDIA relationship.

Mike Ezratty: The Dell and NVIDIA relationship is extremely strong. There is actually a video of NVIDEA CEO Jensen Huang at GTC 2024 standing on stage and touting the benefits of working with Dell. That video is spreading pretty quickly among those that follow Dell! Dell was a leader in releasing validated design architectures for Generative AI using NVIDIA. So we have the ability to pre-install, pre-engineer and deliver AI servers direct from the factory that include NVIDIA hardware; customers can procure these directly from Dell and it will be delivered to their doorstep, ready to load their language models or whatever they choose to do with it. So we're building out those architectures. We could also provide the end-to-end operation of the infrastructure for storage and backup needs, because AI progresses well beyond the server itself; it touches every aspect of the data, which has to be protected. We can provide that to DXC and to the end customers.

Patrik Strebel: And from what I'm hearing, Jensen Huang will be on stage at Dell Technologies World with Michael Dell.

Mike Ezratty: Yes, both Jensen and Bill McDermott of ServiceNow are going to be with Michael at our keynote address, talking about the AI progress that we’re making.

Q: To summarize, what are your goals for the partner relationship this year?

Patrik Strebel: If I had to summarize it in one paragraph, it's to continue our trusted and transparent relationship based on innovation and doing what's right for the client. We will co-engineer, co-solution, co-sell, co-deliver and co-celebrate together.

Mike Ezratty: I think we are positioning the partnership to take advantage of the market opportunities and to allow us to grow together and look beyond the now and into the future, to ensure that we are properly set up for success.