“Predictive analytics from Dell Statistics can help organizations forecast future trends”

Please explain the digital technologies launched recently that is helping customers redesign business processes?

Digital and its technologies of mobile apps, Internet of Things (IoT), social media, cloud and analytics help organisations better engage with customers, automate processes, and create competitive advantage through the conversion of physical touch points into digital touch points. Digitalization, simply stated, is the conversion of an otherwise “physical” business into an increasingly “digital” business.  It’s about shifting the way customers are engaged.  Dell Services has established a high performance, dedicated services team in the form of “Dell Digital Business Services” to help our customers undertake this exciting journey of ‘digital’.  Guided by a rigorous consulting methodology, called 5R, consultants from Dell Digital Business Services help our customers take a business first view of digital.

Our 5R methodology that helps the team to assess and implement the digital transformation can be summarized as below:

Recognize: Investigates the larger business environment, including priorities and risks.

Rethink: Looks at business processes to investigate what areas can be digitalized, and what benefits these changes will derive for stakeholders.

Render: Builds mock-ups of the proposed changes to storyboard the idea, and create better engagement from key stakeholders.

Reorganize: Defines what must be done in terms of process, people, KPIs and ownership to deliver the transformation.

Realize: Execute on the transformation through a combination of business process changes and technology implementation of initiatives around Analytics, Cloud, Mobility, Social and IoT.

We also offer Digital Workshops to act as a catalyst in the adoption of the digital journey for those customers who want to get a quick sense of the journey before undertaking a full-fledged transformation initiative.

Can you please explain the concept of predictive analytics and how your collaboration with Microsoft helping your customers? Why do you think the collaboration was necessary? What is Microsoft bringing to the table?

Whereas traditional business intelligence focuses on helping an organization figure out what’s happened in the past, predictive analytics aim to deliver insight into what’s going to happen in the future, thus enabling the organization to proactively make smarter, better business decisions.  For example Dell recently acquired a predictive analytics software company, StatSoft. StatSoft is the developer of the Statisticasuite of analytics software products and solutions.

Predictive analytics from Dell Statistic can help organizations forecast future trends to identify new customers and sales opportunities, forecast industry shifts, explore “what-if” scenarios, and reduce the occurrence of fraud and other business risks.

Partnering with Microsoft helpsDell maintain its strategy to offer a complete set of platform-agnostic information management. The collaborative effort is aimed at enabling customers to leverage these powerful predictive analytics capabilities within a scalable, cost-effective hybrid cloud environment. This enables customers to use Dell’s advanced analytics platform in tandem with the Microsoft Azure services allowing them get the analytics capabilities they desire while enjoying advantages of a cloud deployment, all while maintaining proper compliance and security.

Do you think your digital platform is a revolutionary attempt to store and access data on a global scale?

We have not created a platform. We offer system integration services around various digital platforms offered by our technology partners.

Which are the key industries who are your target area?

Our target industries for digital transformation include but are not limited to Healthcare and Life Sciences, BFSI (Banking, Financial, Securities, Insurance), travel, hospitality, manufacturing and retail. We are already working with customers in each of these industries and delivering transformative digital programs.

What strategies are you undertaking to market this initiative? Have you received any positive feedback yet?

We are executing a multi-pronged approach for marketing this initiative. In November 2014, we launched the “Dell Does Digital” marketing campaign to increase and spread the awareness about our digital transformation offerings leveraging multiple marketing channels. This campaign has been tailored to our target industries and the business stakeholders of the enterprises. This campaign features, among others, functional and domain customer journey maps that highlight digital touch points.

Please explain the function of Statistica and Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning Service and  how these two services complementing each other?

Dell Statistica and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning represent a powerful combination. The combination gives customers the ability to leverage more than 16,000 analytical options available in Dell Statistica, as well as its robust model management and secure compliance capabilities. While moving core modelling to the cloud, Azure’s Machine Learning engine offers exceptional process power, scale and economic advantage.

In addition, with this combination, customers enjoy hybrid cloud architecture, where sensitive data remains within the local private cloud, while less sensitive or anonymized data can be processed at scale. This is especially critical for industries like banking, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, where strong regulatory, compliance or privacy mandates makes maintaining proper data governance an absolute must.

What is your opinion of quality and cost effectiveness? Do you think quality is kept at stake       for the sake of cost?

As mentioned earlier digital is a business imperative. The focus of digital is to drive new revenue models for our customers. Therefore our customers are looking at digital from the lens of how they use digital to drive revenue growth, better customer and employee engagement. Needless to add our services are of high quality and offer value to our customers.

Why do you think digitization of data is essential in enterprise space? Do you think a similar requirement also exists in the SME sector?

Digitization of data is critical to unlock the full potential of data captured across the enterprises. Digitization is leading to big data that is foundational to effective analytics. Thus, digitization is the first step in extracting the actionable insights in a more meaningful way. Thus, digitization of data if staged and implemented effectively, can accelerate growth, increase profitability and throughout, improve processes, can lead to better employee and customer engagement.

We see no reason why would it be different for SME sector, but digitization for defined purpose/s is the key.  The current and evolving needs of the SME—familiar theme of scalability—is obviously important.