Dell EMC is a lot of things — in a quite literal sense. It has a huge portfolio of computing products complete with technology some may see as legacy baggage. But its position straddling the hardware-legacy and cloud-native worlds isn’t without its advantages. It makes the company kindred to many enterprise customers also in limbo.

Dell EMC is undergoing the same transformation many of its customers are slogging through. It is shifting focus up the stack and becoming more product focused, according to Howard Elias (@EliasatDell), president of services and digital at Dell Technologies Inc. In addition to manning Dell EMC’s services business, Elias is also responsible for Dell Digital, the company’s IT organization.

“It’s really embracing this notion of agile, balanced teams getting close to the business,” Elias said.

Elias spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Tech World event in Las Vegas. They discussed how Dell EMC is transforming and modernizing along with its customer base (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Many hands make light work

Bringing IT, developers and business people together results in a sharper focus on products and outcomes, according to Elias. This is mirrored in the customer base Dell regularly speaks with. They want to get as much lower-level plumbing off the agenda as they can.

“They want to look up to apps and data and somebody else worry about looking down and taking care of the infrastructure,” Elias said. That is what Dell EMC hopes to enable them to do with integrated solutions that streamline IT, low-value add, and rote tasks.

Dell’s internal team is leveraging telemetry data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to streamline support/assist processes. It also used robotics processes automation to automate time-consuming, low-value tasks to shift its focus to innovation. For example, it uses RPA bots to automatically execute customer orders it receives via email or fax.

These are the types of tasks that companies working on digitally transforming get impatient with; however, they are still critical to the business. “Especially when you have a complex ecosystem, as you’re rewriting and developing, either re-platforming or refactoring, or cloud-native, you’ve still got to get work done,” Elias stated.

Dell EMC is integrating its technologies into serviced solutions that complete tasks such as these with less legwork. It just announced Unified Workspace, which streamlines and simplifies high-touch processes including PC lifecycle management.

It also just unveiled Dell Technologies Cloud, which mixes the Dell and VMware Inc. portfolios to simplify management of hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Tech World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither the sponsors of select segments of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE