Desiring continuous engagement with their end-user communities, Dell EMC invited 25 technical leaders from Americas region to be part of the Dell EMC Modern Data Center Partner Technical Advisory Board. Cerium is proud that our own Ray Hall, Sr. Systems Engineer was selected to represent the northwest region on the advisory board.
The criteria for nomination were not published, however in talking with Ray, the reasons are evident. He is passionate about the benefits of converged infrastructure for his clients and their businesses. Ray explains, “IT organizations use converged infrastructure to consolidate systems, to increase resource-utilization rates, and to lower costs.”
Dell EMC’s focus on the two-day meeting was to meet with the top channel technical experts, influencers and executives for an interactive discussion to align technical direction, drive converged infrastructure (CI) and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) visibility and awareness within the channel community.
We recently caught up with Ray and asked him to share some of the key takeaways. Here is what he had to say: “Dell asks for the feedback we receive from customers, and they listen and make changes to the CI/HCI platforms based on what they hear.” Ray was not able to disclose the details of those conversations, but he was able to share his thoughts about participating and what his involvement means to Cerium’s customers.
“The most exciting part of being on the board is that I have been given unique access to hyper-converged/converged leadership, where I can provide direct input from my customers.” What that means to Cerium’s customers is access to the latest technology advancements. For Ray, it is all about identifying, designing and implementing the best solution for each client.
Key topics covered over the two days included:
- Roundtable discussions
- 2019 channel updates
- VxRail, VxRack SDDC updates, and direction
- Converged infrastructure direction
- Vscale strategy
- Hybrid cloud strategy on CI and HCI platforms
A little bit about Ray Hall
Ray is no stranger to Dell EMC. He served as a Sr. Solution Architect at Dell EMC before joining Cerium. In fact, his strong desire to stay focused on his clients with a more direct relationship is what led to his decision join Cerium. “Going from a company of 140,000 employees to 175 was part of the equation, but most importantly is that now I can drive development in support of my customers. The fact that Dell EMC is spending 4.5 billion in R&D this year speaks to their commitment to their partners.”
Ray’s Approach
“When I meet with customers, I take a holistic approach in the discovery phase to fully understand the roadblocks they are facing. I also try to understand the business implications and influences around the IT decision-making process. So many businesses today are leveraging IT to add value to the bottom line versus simply maintaining. I love guiding customers into more efficient, modern and agile solutions. Although there are many solutions, available, I’m finding that HCI and CI infrastructure is a way to simplify workloads and at the same increase performance. Customers are finding that with HCI and CI, they can re-train or develop current administrators from maintaining systems to creating revenue-generating applications. Michael Dell defines the cloud as an operating model. With HCI/CI customers can realize the functionality of public cloud on premise.“
