As a new age of big data analytics dawns, customers are shifting their attention away from building and managing infrastructure and toward turnkey solutions that enable them to focus on building applications that deliver business value. Dell Technologies Inc.’s Dell EMC division is putting the finishing touches on a technology portfolio that will enable that kind of full-scale automation, according to Peter Cutts, senior vice president of hybrid cloud platforms at Dell EMC.

“The need for businesses to gain better insight into the customer and to use infrastructure as a turnkey offering to deliver a better experience has gotten greater,” Cutt said in a CUBE Conversation interview with Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante (below). “Customers are expecting a more personalized experience.”

For example, entertainment companies are creating offers based on geolocation information from smart phones and analysis of what individual customers have purchased in the past, he said. Healthcare providers are using big data to change the patient experience based upon diagnostics and therapies customized to their individual situations.

Automating analytics

Dell EMC’s most recent effort to enable that personalization is the Analytics Insight Module, a turnkey hardware/software platform that automates much of the data discovery and transformation process that slows big data projects. Designed to be deployed on a hybrid cloud platform, the module automates much of the drudgery of big data analytics and enables information technology organizations to focus instead on applications.

“Enterprise hybrid cloud is about automating your legacy operations and spending more time getting applications running better,” Cutts said. “This ties traditional data sources and new data sources into a single platform that allows you to ingest data, source it, put lineage on it and secure it.”

“Are we finally at the stage where infrastructure is invisible?” asked Vellante. Cutts said we’re close. “Our goal is to make hybrid cloud platforms invisible,” he said. “For customers who are building for themselves, we want to support them in any way we can. For customers who have spent a lot of time building but haven’t reaped the rewards they were looking for, Dell EMC will be one-stop shopping for turnkey offerings across the spectrum.”

The emergence of turnkey hybrid cloud platforms changes the role of IT administrators from manually provisioning and managing virtual machines to working with development teams to support the applications they build. “Customers don’t come to us looking for infrastructure needs. They come to us because they’ve got a business need,” he said. “That’s a totally different perspective than looking for infrastructure, and it’s game-changing.”

Value center

In this new scenario, IT becomes a value center rather than a cost center, and its relationship with product and marketing organizations shifts from order-taking to cooperation. “I see a huge embrace of data scientists and the chief data officer role because they can deliver business transformation,” Cutts said.

Big data is entering a third stage of development, Vellante said. The first was characterized by tire-kicking and the second by cost reduction. “This is a transformative phase where we can drive monetization strategies and create substantially more value,” he said.

Dell EMC is aligning for that third wave, Cutts added. “When you pull together the legacy EMC services organization and the Dell services organization, they’re world-class,” he said. “EMC had a lot of storage assets. Having the Dell server component gives us an opportunity to build a transformative offering.” With vendor-agnostic support for Microsoft’s on-premise and cloud platforms along with VMware Inc. virtual machines, OpenStack cloud, cloud-native applications and now analytics, “We offer turnkey systems with single-call support.“

Disclosure: Dell Technologies is a client of SiliconANGLE Media. Neither Dell nor other clients or sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Watch the full interview (22:57)

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