Dell CTO Identifies Tech Challenges

As Dell Technologies looks to solve today’s technology problems, Global Chief Technology Officer John Roese said at the Dell Technologies Forum in Washington, D.C., that the company is looking to tackle five tech and innovation hot spots.

Those five, according to Roese, are AI technology, multi-cloud infrastructure, edge technology, the human aspect of proliferating AI tech, and cybersecurity.

“When we think about our industry, the challenge we have right now is that we don’t just have one area of innovation happening, or one problem,” he said. “In fact, we would frame it that there are five distinct areas all related to each other that are in a period of rapid innovation and change.”

However, Roese said that Dell Technologies identified these five problems because it’s confident that they can be solved. “And so, our vision is pretty simple. It says, ‘What if we solved all these problems?’”

For example, when it comes to AI, Roese said that it is a “huge opportunity” and is all about “rebalancing work” for machines to do.

As for cloud infrastructure, he said there is a need to optimize for multi-cloud architectures.

“What if starting with multi-cloud we can make the clouds of the world work together? [What if] data didn’t become siloed and fragmented? And quite frankly, if the systems were optimal, and it actually behaved like a platform, that would be great,” Roese said.

Edge computing is another problem Roese pointed to, noting that “you may not know you have an edge problem yet, but you do.”

“Today, we have a huge problem where everyone articulating a data pipeline or an application pipeline that includes the real world is also advocating for an edge to extend it,” he said. “So, we’re proliferating edges everywhere. And the reality is if that continues, we might end up with situations where we have dozens of edges sitting in the same retail store to solve model problems, which is not a sustainable path.”

Looking ahead to solutions, he said that it would be ideal if the infrastructure transformation “didn’t just happen in the data center, it happened anywhere the data was, and we had a cogent way to extend it out into the edge.”

When it comes to the human aspect of AI technologies, Roese said it’s vital to look ahead to a future in which there are AI “co-pilots that are helping you do your work. What kind of computing environment do you need? What do the peripherals look like? Surely, it’s going to be different, so we have to contemplate the human in this process.”

Finally, Roese said the “overarching problem” is IT security. Right now, he said the state of the security industry is “irreparably broken” and “we are perpetually reactive.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if, at the end of this journey, our security posture was better, we had a different outcome, [and] we could actually sleep well at night,” Roese said. “That’s our vision.”