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