#untitled – AKA my first DellEMC World Post

What am I doing here? Connecting the dots. If you read my previous post about Alliances, you know how important I think it is that we are working very closely with our peers. I shared a ride from the airport this morning with one of my former colleagues who manages the Fortune 500 accounts in North Texas for Dell. He and I were reminiscing about the past and doing our best to predict the future that will define infrastructure in future years. I’d be willing to bet that the next couple days will show exactly what that future will look like from the perspective of the new mega company that now exists in the wake of Dell and EMC formerly coming together. Merger or acquisition is unimportant. What is important is that they are a beast with enough product in their portfolio to address every single customer on the planet. Seriously. All of them. So again…what am I doing here? 
Simple. I am building on their foundation. The ServiceNow suite of products is a tool to be used to manage the way business is done in the new world built on the infrastructure delivered by Dell Technologies. In my corner of the world which is focused on IT Operations, I am keenly aware that the infrastructure that is chosen by our mutual customers will eventually host the software that becomes the business services that are consumed by the end users in the organization. If I don’t understand the infrastructure, how can I possibly understand how it should be mappped? Understand what is important to the business to monitor? Understand what the end users main challenges are. It’s the year of all flash you say? How does the way that flash impacts the performance of a business service change the way I want to monitor it’s components? You invested in the rock solid reliability of the VMAX? I need to understand what your disaster recovery plan is so that I can help present a picture of the health. There are so many questions to be answered. 
So what I’m doing here is learning. Learning how this new World (pun intended) will be delivered. There are so many questions about the direction that Michael Dell will helm this massive ship and I’m here to find those answers.