Dell bolsters Digital Services and Analytics software solutions

Dell has introduced a series of solutions that help enterprises take advantage of analytics to enable improved customer relationships and transform data into actionable business insights. Dell Services introduced comprehensive digital business services that help customers redesign business processes to improve operational efficiency and engagement at every point in the customer experience through digital technologies. In addition, Dell Software announced the start of a collaborative effort with Microsoft aimed at delivering predictive analytics in a hybrid cloud setting. Dell Software is also upgrading its Statistica (formerly StatSoft) advanced analytics platform with enhanced big data capabilities through integration with Kitenga.

Digital Business Services
Dell Services is focused on helping its customers in three primary areas: modernisation, transformation and digital services. Today, the business unit has unveiled a new dedicated service line called Dell Digital Business Services (DBS), which includes Digital Transformation Consulting and Digital Technology Services, to help customers better understand their end users’ preferences and transform business processes using digital technologies.

Digital Business Services leads with consulting to help companies assess their needs and create a plan to leverage digital technologies including analytics, mobile, social media and cloud, along with other emerging trends, such as the Internet of Things. DBS pulls in best practices from Dell’s analytics solutions, experience as a social media pioneer, acquisitions across cloud and business intelligence, deep partnerships and expertise in digital technologies, and IP from across Dell’s end-to-end portfolio. With this comprehensive solution, Dell Services is uniquely able to help customers adapt their business processes and operating models to a take a digital-first approach.

For example, Dell Services is working with Zurich Insurance, a global insurer, on digital innovation projects that look at the potential for the use of mobile, wearable and social technologies to engage with customers at the right time based on their needs.

In addition to life insurance, customers across vertical industries can use digital transformation to improve customer engagement. For example, Dell has delivered analytics, social, cloud and mobile solutions for University of Kentucky (analytics), Concordia University (analytics), American Red Cross (social media), Pie Mapping (cloud), and Hilton (mobility).

“We have a long history of partnering with our customers as they modernise and transform their businesses to stay ahead of their competitors,” said Suresh Vaswani, president, Dell Services. “Today, enterprises are under pressure to leverage digital technologies to evolve their business and deliver an enhanced experience to customers, employees and partners, but few are prepared. Now, with Digital Business Services, we help customers implement a digital strategy and get to the future faster.”

According to a recent Forrester Research report, successful digital businesses will work openly in an ecosystem to collaborate and partner in new ways. With that in mind, and to provide unparalleled breadth of services for customers, Dell DBS has built relationships with a broad range of partners across the digital transformation technology areas, including Kony, Apperian, Cloudera, Informatica and many others, and remains vendor-neutral in order to work with additional third parties as needed to best meet customer needs.

Enhanced Analytics Software Capabilities
Furthering its strategy to offer a complete set of platform-agnostic information management tools that empower companies to manage, integrate and analyse data both on-premises and in the cloud, Dell Software today announced the start of a new collaborative effort with Microsoft aimed at enabling customers to perform powerful predictive analytics capabilities within a scalable, cost-effective hybrid cloud environment. The effort enables customers to use Dell Software’s recently acquired Statistica advanced analytics platform in tandem with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Service. With the combination of Dell Statistica and the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Service, customers get the robust predictive analytics capabilities they desire while enjoying the many advantages of a cloud deployment, all while maintaining proper compliance and security.

This powerful combination gives customers the ability to leverage the more than 16,000 analytical options available in Statistica, as well as its robust model management and secure compliance capabilities, while moving core modelling to the cloud, where Azure’s Machine Learning engine offers exceptional process power, scale and economic advantage. In addition, with the combination, customers enjoy a hybrid cloud architecture, where sensitive data remains within the local private cloud, while less sensitive or anonymised data can be processed at scale. This is especially critical for companies in industries such as banking, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, where strong regulatory, compliance or privacy mandates makes maintaining proper data governance an absolute must.

“We’re excited to be part of Dell’s initiative,” said Joseph Sirosh, CVP Cloud Machine Learning, Microsoft. “It’s a great example of how Azure Machine Learning enables revolutionary capabilities for operationalising advanced analytics and building cloud-based production systems from on-premises software.”

In addition, Dell Software also announced the launch of a new big data analytics module within its Statistica advanced analytics platform. The new module embeds capabilities from Dell Software’s existing Kitenga big data analytics platform – including various NLP, machine learning, predictive modelling, sentiment analysis, social network analysis, and visualisation capabilities – directly into the Statistica user workflow, giving customers access to an integrated technology that directly connects with and enables advanced analysis big data. The integration gives Statistica users the ability to crawl various forms of unstructured data, including web content and publicly available social data from sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as write that data directly to Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS) to further facilitate in-depth big data analytics. This unstructured data can then be seamlessly combined with large-scale structured data, enabling data experts to gain a richer understanding of customer behaviour and market opportunities. In addition, Statistica is now also fully integrated with Dell Software’s Toad Intelligence Central solution, providing users with direct access to a broad range of data types, including data residing traditional relational databases, NoSQL databases, and unstructured databases such as Hadoop and Cassandra, and cloud sources such as Salesforce.com.

“The digitisation of information, the rapid proliferation of new data types, and the always-advancing capabilities of modern data analytics technologies have created a unique opportunity for organisations to gain deep insight into their business processes and customer behaviours,” said Matt Wolken, vice president and general manager, information management, Dell Software. “On the heels of Dell Software’s acquisition of StatSoft earlier this year, today’s announcements represent another significant step in the company’s evolution as a premier provider of a comprehensive information management solutions highlighted by ubiquitous advanced analytics capabilities.”