Part of the price of doing business in a digital economy is investing in information technology. For organizations, these purchases can often reach into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Should anything break, or as parts and pieces become obsolete, they must be replaced, which can again be a costly and complicated process.

Purchasing from IT companies can be an opaque, complicated process. As such, Dell EMC decided to do something about that process with the addition of its Future-Proof Loyalty Program.

“It’s a culture change. The industry has shift. It’s innovate or die,” said Jay Krone (pictured), storage portfolio product marketing at Dell Technologies Inc. “The innovation is not only in the products; we’re doing some innovation on the business side as well.”

Krone spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The discussed the genesis of the Future-Proof Loyalty Program, as well as its advantages for customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Protecting IT investments

There are nine different pillars in the Future-Proof Loyalty Program that are intended to give customers peace of mind, protect their IT investments, and give them a path forward with their technology, according to Krone. While many of theses practices were already in place at Dell EMC, the company has “turned up the volume,” making it more visible to customers and to the sales force.

Originally, it started as a future proof loyalty program for storage, but because customers and sales people were so enthusiastic about it, they asked, ‘Can you add more?’ Dell EMC said it could. In July 2018, it added Data Protection to the Integrated Data Protection Appliance. Then it added VxRail Hyperconverged in August 2018. On the storage side, the program also includes PowerMax, VMAX All Flash, XtremIO X2, SC Series, Dell EMC Unity, Data Domain, Isilon and ECS Object Storage.

“As people have [become] more sophisticated about the way they buy technology, they’re looking for other assurances that vendors are going to be there for them when something goes wrong,” Krone concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Dell, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE