THE INTERVIEW
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There are a lot of technologies I’m passionate
about—AI, Edge, 5G, take your pick.
What’s most exciting, though, is the platform
we have as Dell Technologies. CTOs are all
about predicting the future, but also helping
to make it happen. It’s very hard to make it
happen if you don’t have a platform.
But if you’re Dell Technologies, a roughly
$90 billion company with global reach and
trusted customer relationships, what we say
matters, our platform matters, and our point
of view matters. In this time of massive transformation,
we have a huge opportunity to put
our fingerprints on the industry and help move
it—and the world—forward.
What keeps you up at night?
There are so many things changing so rapidly
in the industry that if we don’t navigate any
one of them properly, it could create a disadvantage
for us. So, we need to be agile. We
need to move fast to be ahead of the curve.
We have a huge capability to do that, but we
also have a lot going on. So, what keeps me up
at night is making sure that we know not just
what to do, but what not to do.
Some technologies are buzz words and
will remain buzz words for a long time.
Quantum computing is a great example. We
should be aware of it, but if we took all of
our engineering capability and tried to build a
quantum computer, we’d go out of business.
I have the responsibility of making sure we
pick the right battles and focus our energy
Find examples of how AI is helping
companies harness the power of data.
DellTechnologies.com/AI.
to best position ourselves in the industry. If
we get it wrong, that’s where problems start
to happen.
You’ve been outspoken about the “data
era,” but data and big data have been
around for decades. How is this era
different?
For the first time in history, we not only have an
abundance of data, but we have also invented
new, more economic ways to store and process
that data. Then most importantly, the software
and algorithms have now reached a point, primarily
through artificial intelligence and machine
learning, that we can mine this data and turn it
into something more interesting.
There’s a hierarchy in data. There’s data,
which is raw. Information is when you organize
the data into structures. Knowledge is
when you gain insights from the information.
And wisdom is when that knowledge becomes
useful to predict the future and understand
the past. We are entering an era when the
compute infrastructure, amount of data, and
the algorithms are all coalescing so we can
get to knowledge and wisdom at scale, across
almost any industry. I think that justifies
saying that we’re entering a new era—the
data era.
IoT devices are creating vast amounts of
data at the edge. What is the edge, and
why is it important?
First, it’s important to recognize the edge
isn’t a standalone environment. There are four
layers that make up the multi-cloud architecture.
There are the devices, which connect
to the edge, which ultimately connects to
private data centers, where you have full