theCUBE Matt Wolken – Dell World 2014

Over the span of a few years, Dell Inc. has managed to transform itself from a company best known for selling cheap computers to the masses into an enterprise technology powerhouse with a roughly two-billion-dollar software business. Much of that figure can be attributed to its information management group, whose vice president and general manager, Matt Wolken, dropped by theCUBE at the recent Dell World summit to share the insider track on the IT titan’s plans for taming the data explosion (full video below).

Dell repositioned software and analytics in particular as top-level priorities around the turn of the decade as part of its efforts to increase margins amid faltering demand for PCs. And so the company’s information management group was born. “Four years ago, we worked out a strategy to create a software group that is relevant to Dell, will go after the problems that customers are seeing and enhance growth for us,” Wolken told theCUBE hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. “We concentrate on systems management, security and information management.”

The latter category encompasses Dell’s analytics portfolio, the tip of its software spear, which the executive said covers everything from handling data in its native format to combing that information for usable insights and delivering the results to the right people. But the lineup stops at the database layer, which Wolken explained the tech giant leaves to partners such as Oracle Corp. to fill out of a will to remain platform-agnostic. That approach is as pragmatic as it is about providing customers with freedom of choice.

“As we built our business, we tried to remain to the database tier, because each company will have a preference for their vendor of choice and what type of database they will need,” he explained. “So we prefer to stay in the database tooling business where we can help enable each database.” The strategy has paid off tremendously so far, with Dell emerging as the leader of this segment on the back of the Toad application it obtained through the acquisition of Quest Software Inc. in 2012.

Originally geared exclusively towards managing Oracle environments, Toad has been enhanced to support over three dozen data stores since the time of the buyout, including both traditional platforms such as IBM Corp.’s DB2 and modern systems like Hadoop. The solution provides a unified management layer across all those different solutions in the most tangible realization of Dell’s database-independent approach yet, but Wolken highlighted that it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

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With the purchase of StatSoft Inc. earlier this year, the tech giant put itself in a position to play the role of an arm’s dealer for yet another key layer of the enterprise software stack without getting pulled into the competition. “When we looked at where we wanted to go, we saw a panoply of players in the self-service BI space, just lots of players, and we thought we either dive into that space or we go above that space,” Wolken reflected. “And that’s where we decided to go, go up the higher tier of value that is really gonna be the challenge.”

StatSoft developed data analysis tools characterized by versatility and an emphasis on user experience. Coupled with the fact that the company managed to build up a considerable arsenal of vertical-specific solutions over its 30-year history, Wolken said that this made it a perfect fit with Dell’s vision for the future of analytics. “There is gonna be boundaries crossed, analytics are gonna be embedded in operations and we will enable that to happen,” he remarked. “Right now we’re providing the user interface to your data and code, and we’ll probably take it to the tier where the average use who isn’t the data scientist can use something.”