The companies of tomorrow will flounder or float depending on how well they serve customers with data. Today, established companies can and should juice their data for improved services to stay relevant.

Those established companies keeping pace with startups are smartly leveraging their data in new ways. “I say to banks, ‘You don’t need to buy another bank; you need to provide a service to me,” said Erin Banks (pictured), director of product marketing for unstructured data solutions at Dell EMC.

Banks spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed Dell EMC’s latest storage announcements and the stages of data management that lead to great services (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Can data resuscitate in-store retail?

Successful new services are based on a thorough parsing of customer data. No morsel information on the customer should be overlooked — likes, dislikes, hobbies, favorite travel spots, etc. Services that utilize this data get closer to the customer than the competition and win his or her business, Banks pointed out.

Dell EMC isn’t just delivering infrastructure solutions for data management. It’s also consulting with customers about how their data can transform them into future-facing, service-driven companies.

The retail market is flailing because it’s not using customer data nearly as well as online emporiums like Amazon.com, according to Banks. The way for them to get back in the game is to incorporate data into the in-store experience. For example, sensors can be placed near items; if shoppers linger there, they may receive a discount offer on their smartphones.

Powerful storage technology for the management of data is a must for companies that want to act quickly. “It all comes in, but it doesn’t add value until you really know what you have and what you don’t have. Because, even from an analytics perspective, you might have to supplement that [with] data from some other recourse; maybe you need to change the application to get additional data,” Banked stated.

Established companies can become data- and service-driven with the right tech upgrades and cultural tuning. Dell EMC walks companies through the process with real-world examples. “It’s us trying to get out there and say, ‘This is how other customers are using it; this is how they’ve been successful,'” Banks concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE