The Future-ready Enterprise Simplicity, flexibility, and the art of delivering business outcomes.

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1 The Future-ready Enterprise Simplicity, flexibility, and the art of delivering business outcomes. Every day business leaders make decisions designed to move their companies toward specific outcomes. Whether their strategic goals are to grow market share, reduce costs, or improve customer loyalty, they marshal resources people, processes, capital in pursuit of these objectives. And the entire organization s success is measured by progress against these goals. Information technology is, of course, a critical factor in attaining these outcomes. In fact, the very purpose of information technology is to enable enterprises to achieve their business goals, by increasing productivity and enabling innovation. And yet for decades organizations big and small have been forced to adopt technology solutions that limit their flexibility, lock them into proprietary technology, and burden them with enormous ongoing maintenance costs. They hire armies of integrators and consultants just to keep their legacy systems running. And they endure crippling complexity. Complexity is antithetical to the objectives of information technology, it inhibits your ability to make changes, to introduce new capabilities and to pursue business opportunities. It actually reduces productivity. And we ve seen it not only slow companies down, but in some cases halt progress altogether. Organizations with this level of complexity are literally unable to evolve. They cannot adopt new technologies, like cloud, mobile, or big data. They stagnate. The lost opportunities are quantifiable. The Dell 2014 Global Technology Adoption Index, a survey of more than 2,000 global organizations, shows a direct relationship between growth and the use of cloud and big data. More than 70 percent of those organizations using cloud experienced 6 percent growth or more in the last three years. This is in sharp contrast with companies not using cloud, where just 24 percent have growth rates of 6 percent or more, and 37 percent experienced either zero or negative growth.

2 The most sophisticated and powerful IT environments in the world are based on open standards. Dr. Donald F. Ferguson, Senior Fellow, Vice President and CTO, Dell Software Group And the average three-year growth rate (14 percent) for those organizations most effective in leveraging big data is almost twice as high as that of organizations least effective in using big data (8 percent). Yet many companies hesitate to introduce these new capabilities into their operations, for fear of compounding their cost and complexity, or due to security concerns. At Dell, we believe there is a better way. We call it the future-ready enterprise, and it s based on the belief that enterprise technology regardless of the purpose of the solution or the vendor that sold it to you should not just allow for change, but encourage it. And every bit of hardware, software or service you invest in should move an organization measurably closer to its goals. That this simple notion sounds so farfetched speaks to how little we have come to expect of enterprise IT over the years. But the truth is that all of the tools we need to accomplish this vision exist today. We re not waiting for some next-generation technology to solve our integration problems. We re not waiting on a standards body to endorse a universal platform. All that s required is a commitment to long-term thinking and a disciplined approach to IT investment. And the end result is not just an IT architecture that s built for change, but a business that s ready for anything. Future-ready IT enables a future-ready business. The cost of complexity Information technology should always be in service of an organization s strategic goals. But too often we see enterprises curb their ambitions, bending to the limitations of their technology infrastructure. New ventures are abandoned. Innovation is stifled. And business users cobble together workarounds to address their unmet needs. How did it come to be this way? Over the last 40 years, as enterprise class IT has evolved and matured, many factors contributed to the complexity we see today. For one thing, technology acquisition in the enterprise tends to be additive. That is to say, when new technology is adopted, older technology is rarely phased out or eliminated. For some companies that means maintaining decades-old technology designed for a vastly different working environment that may cost more than it returns to the business. In particular, mergers and acquisitions can exacerbate this unchecked accumulation of technology. It is not unusual for a major merger to literally double the complexity of an IT environment, each company clinging to its own systems, and failing to achieve the efficiency of scale they may have hoped for. But perhaps the most damaging contributing factor to IT complexity and one of the main reasons why companies hold on to aging systems so long is the marketing of proprietary systems that lock customers into a single vendor s solution. It s no great secret that selling proprietary solutions is more profitable than selling open, standards-based solutions, says Dr. Donald F. Ferguson, Senior Fellow, Vice President and CTO, Dell Software Group. It s also well known that proprietary solutions are not always in the best interests of the customer. We believe that the most sophisticated and powerful IT environments in the world are based on open standards; that they are not just the most efficient systems, but also the most effective. In fact, open standards are a necessary condition to build innovative solutions that deliver incredible functionality and value. 2 The Future-ready Enterprise Dell Inc., 2015

3 Future-ready fundamentals There s nothing we can do to change history. But we believe that even the most convoluted IT environments can be simplified, standardized, and made future-ready. It requires a commitment to long-term thinking and a more disciplined approach to IT decision-making throughout an organization. There are many cultural and operational changes that make up this approach, and that s why it s relevant not only for IT leaders but for all leaders who are responsible for delivering business results. Below are the five fundamental actions that we recommend all organizations that aspire to be future-ready should take. 1 Invest in simplicity It might be tempting to think that pursuing a simpler IT environment means halting new investment and maintaining the status quo is a passive act. It isn t. Simplifying means actively, aggressively understanding the value of existing systems. It means conducting a comprehensive audit, and applying analytical rigor to determine the return on IT assets. And ultimately, it also means transitioning off of rigid, aging, proprietary systems that require expensive specialists to manage and maintain. Committing to simplicity is not cheap, at least not initially. But it s a lot less expensive than staying the course of complexity and offers the benefits of future flexibility. 2 Embrace open standards At its best, the IT industry is a community of innovators working together for the greater good. When we get it right, we produce powerful technologies that are based open standards. Some may argue that standards stifle innovation among IT vendors; that proprietary technology is the only way to differentiate. We disagree. We believe that technology vendors should differentiate themselves by the innovation they build on top of standards. That way, customers are assured compatibility between the solutions they buy today and tomorrow. 3 Think software first Software has revolutionized way we live and work. It has introduced us to new concepts, like continuous improvement and frequent updating. And it is software more than any other aspect of information technology that allows for flexibility and agility in IT systems. So when we think about the future-ready enterprise, an enterprise that is capable of responding to change quickly, we think about moving as much of the operations as possible into software. From applications delivered through the cloud to the software-based data center, this is the foundational thinking behind delivering IT as a service. 4 Build end-to-end security The IT security market is highly fragmented. There are dozens of best-of-breed solutions addressing narrow aspects of security from intrusion detection to application security to identity and access management. And knitting together these point solutions leaves seams of vulnerability. Future-ready enterprises need end-to-end security that is simple, efficient and connected. By tying together the splintered aspects of IT security, organizations can share, combine and analyze security insight from every system across the organization. And IT security can become an enabler of innovation, rather than an obstacle to it. 5 Modernize and automate Old programming languages and obsolete IT platforms are inherently restrictive. They limit your ability to add new capabilities to the enterprise and they require a disproportionate amount of resources to maintain. Migrating onto more modern systems reduces cost, improves agility and lays the foundation for the future. It also allows for labor-intensive processes to be automated, which saves money and reduces the potential for human error. 3 The Future-ready Enterprise Dell Inc., 2015

4 The integration imperative At times it seems the information technology industry changes so rapidly, so seismically, it would be impossible for an organization of any size to ever be fully prepared. But much of this is merely perception; a product of the relentless marketing and hype of IT vendors. The truth is that the fundamentals of this business have remained the same for more than a century. And the basic currency of the IT trade digital information is still made up of ones and zeros, just as it s always been. We are in the business of getting the right information to the right people at the right time, says Eric Clark, Vice President, Dell Services. Trends comes and go. New names are introduced. But the bottom line is always the same. Empower people with actionable information. Enable them to achieve their goals. It s really no more complicated than that. Today, the way we store, analyze, deliver, and protect our information is evolving. We keep our data in the cloud. We combine, analyze and extract insight from huge sets of information. We deliver it to mobile devices. And we don t just protect networks anymore, we secure the data itself. Cloud. Big data. Mobility. Security. These are today s terms, today s trends. They are convenient labels; they help IT vendors package and market their products and services. But they are not independent disciplines. And they should not be thought of as such. Integrated thinking, and integrated technology, are key tenets of building a future-ready enterprise. If you re thinking about your cloud strategy without considering security, or thinking about big data without considering how the insight will be delivered to end users, you re building a siloed, unintegrated IT environment, says Jai Menon, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Research Officer, Dell Research. It s never been clearer that these technologies are all integral parts of a single ecosystem. They are all in service of delivering insight across an enterprise. And it s never been more possible to architect them in concert, to build a truly integrated, seamless system of information technology, all in service to the business which needs an adaptable infrastructure that supports its need to thrive in today s fast paced, dynamic global landscape. Personal technology already delivers on this promise. Think of our consumer experiences today from Uber to Amazon that combine big data from the cloud, and deliver it securely to whatever device we happen to be using. Simple, powerful integration executed behind the scenes, and experienced by the end user through elegant, intuitive interfaces. This is where our expectations are being set. And enterprise IT has yet to deliver this experience to its users. I think it s time we stop requiring a Ph.D. to administer IT systems, says Ed Boyd, Vice President of the Experience Design Group at Dell. Some vendors have been able to build interfaces that simplify the interaction with their particular product or service. But the user experience of enterprise IT goes beyond the interaction with a single product. It s about how all of the solutions work together. How consistently they behave. It s no longer acceptable to have to manage multiple interfaces, with different look and feel, and different behavior, across solutions. From the way they integrate on the back end, to the way they are managed, these technologies must be experienced as elements of a single system. Because that s what they are. Integrated thinking, and integrated technology, are key tenets of building a futureready enterprise. 4 The Future-ready Enterprise Dell Inc., 2015

5 User experience of enterprise IT goes beyond the interaction with a single product. It s about how all of the solutions work together. Ed Boyd, Vice President of Experience Design, Dell Better technology, better business Certainly no one can predict the future. But we can predict what the future will be like. More demanding. Customercentric. Data-driven. Threats coming from places we can t imagine today. More connected. More mobile. Faster. More than ever, technology is critical to driving business results. Whether it is harnessing data to create better products and services, leveraging the cloud to rapidly address new needs or supporting a highly mobile workforce, enterprise IT is at the forefront of driving competitive advantage and creating value. That means a flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure is critical one that has the agility to keep up with an unpredictable future. Dell solutions are designed from the beginning to be future-ready. They re based on open standards, and they re modular and easily scalable to give your organization the flexibility and agility it needs to capitalize on every opportunity - even the ones that don t exist yet. And we ve done it all without locking our customers into proprietary technology. We want our customers to be successful. That means delivering open solutions that can change along with their needs and create new opportunities to help them meet their business goals. This is what we mean by building a future-ready enterprise, and we believe it is the only sustainable approach to enterprise IT. Explore the future-ready enterprise at Dell.com/futureready. 5 The Future-ready Enterprise Dell Inc., 2015