With the Microsoft Azure HCI Stack, Dell and Orange make cloud, connectivity and cybersecurity easy to consume, letting enterprises focus on doing what they do best
The vision of Industry 4.0 is important and clear. It’s about making industries smarter—using technology to become more operationally efficient, to make better products faster, to cultivate more dynamic, resilient supply chains, and to hit environmental and sustainability goals. Even though the ‘why?’ is clear, the ‘how?’ is much more difficult. In partnership with Microsoft, Dell Technologies and Orange Business are collaborating to make the ‘how?’ easy, so that the vision of ‘why?’ can scale quickly and globally.
As Orange Business Chief Products and Marketing Officer Usman Javaid explained to RCR Wireless News during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, “If you think about the modern business, they are all tech businesses.” And those tech businesses, he said, require cloud, connectivity and cybersecurity. The partnership between Dell Technologies, Orange Business and Microsoft, Javaid said, “is how those three Cs come together. The industries which are really transforming at pace are the ones who have really built this scalable digital infrastructure.”
Javaid described a “customer-led approach to partnership,” that’s all about delivering outcomes and enabling innovation. His colleague from Dell Technologies, Senior Director of Product Management Philip Burt echoed this: “At Dell, what we really value is having strong partnerships and being able to bring together ecosystems to address the business outcomes that our customers are looking to achieve. With the integration of solutions like Dell NativeEdge, we’re enhancing our ability to harness data generated at the edge — data that’s crucial for our customers to derive business value from as swiftly as possible. This is where our deep understanding of connectivity, in collaboration with partners like Orange Business, becomes pivotal.”
For the full video interview, click here or watch below.
Zooming in on the cloud piece, hybrid cloud–seamlessly blending together on-prem private cloud, edge cloud and public or any combination thereof—is crucial for global enterprises as they develop and execute digital transformation strategies. But for many enterprises, hybrid cloud, then layering in connectivity and cybersecurity in a way that operational technology teams can actually use, is difficult. And in addition to being difficult, it detracts from the core mission of any enterprise. Dell, Microsoft and Orange Business are working to remove that friction and let their customers do what they do best, but better.
It’s not scale or customization. It’s scale and customization made possible with strong partnerships
Burt described Orange Business’ heritage in connectivity and global managed services which, when combined with Dell’s edge IT capabilities, hybrid cloud expertise and collaboration with Microsoft, means customers can extend cloud ecosystems all the way to the edge and into OT environments. “This is where we see a lot of value, a lot of opportunity. and that strong partnership is key to making that happen.”
Bringing this into the real world—those OT environments like factory floors and warehouses—and in the context of hybrid cloud, Javaid gave the example of a customer that needs low latency for a use case, which means they’ll need local compute at the edge. Alternatively, a different type of customer may need edge computing for the purposes of data sovereignty, but also centralized computing to run more horizontal business workloads, which means a full-on hybrid approach. The key point is to meet customers where they are.
“Customers try to benefit from the agility, the performance and the innovation of the cloud,” Javaid said. “Now, in the cloud space, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, right?…The customers are trying to balance the cost, the performance and the innovation aspects, as well as compliance.” With its Dell partnership, he said, Orange Business is working collaboratively to deliver “repeatability and scale” with hybrid cloud while also delivering the customizations demanded by various verticals. “What we really want to do with Dell is to package our service and connectivity capabilities, together with innovation from Dell to create a scalable set of products that we bring to the industry so we can help them to move faster.”
So where is this partnership going long-term given the desire for Industry 4.0 reinvention and with the advent of highly-performant generative AI systems? Why do strong partnerships and marrying the speed of cloud with the reality of heavy industry genuinely make a difference? “I expect additional and continued innovation on both the infrastructure side and the platforms that we provide,” Burt said. “Dell has this fantastic portfolio of platforms all the way from the hardware underneath to the higher level platforms…And this is exciting to us, extending that partnership, continuing to build successful customers that can take advantage of new things such as new advancements in AI and being able to push AI inference further out into the edge, get value from the data that our customers have and conduct whatever businesses they’re in more effectively, more efficiently.”
Final thoughts from Javaid: “At the end of the day, what we really want for our customers is that they focus on their business outcomes…and leave it with us to manage their infrastructure, building their infrastructure and bringing the best of innovation from our partners in their transformation.”
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