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IN THE BOARDROOM™ with...

 

Mr. Nicholas Thermenos

Director Sales & Marketing Americas

Dell EMC 

Surveillance and Security

 

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Nick. Before drilling down into how Dell EMC is making the world safer, please tell us about your background.

Nicholas Thermenos:  Since joining Dell EMC I’ve been in a variety of technology leadership positions.  I’m currently responsible for our Video Surveillance Sales Strategy and business for the Americas.  Prior to joining Dell EMC I spent 11 years at Microsoft in both technical and business leadership roles.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Manchester, Paris, Boston…the security environment has never been more challenging. What trends are you seeing in the field with your customers as the never-ending race continues to make better decisions faster vs. the bad guys?

Nicholas Thermenos: Video Surveillance is going through a fast-paced digital transformation from low cost, decentralized data repositories to true Enterprise Class, centralized infrastructure requirements.  The increase in IP cameras, retention times, and the assurance that data will be available when needed, is moving customers to find new way to retain, store and access video surveillance data. Business leaders are beginning to recognize that there are valuable insights to be gained from the vast amount of data that is being collected. Customers, particular business leaders, are looking to capitalize on the data contained in these video images.  Both of these trends are changing the landscape of storing and accessing video.   
              
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: “Dell Technologies is now #1 In Everything, All in 1 Place and we are bringing this world-class portfolio to the surveillance market. Never before, have our customers and partners been able to modernize their surveillance infrastructure with an end-to-end portfolio like we have a Dell EMC” says Ken Mills, General Manager, Dell EMC, Surveillance and Security. Please tell us about how Dell EMC is putting all this to work for your enterprise and government customers and making the world safer.

Nicholas Thermenos: Dell EMC is in the position to provide the broadest portfolio of leading technologies to address any and all of our customers’ needs.  From the edge to the cloud Dell EMC has proven architectures to provide almost any solution required.  With Isilon our customers can build centralized data and analytics data lakes scaling to over 50PB and with incredible management efficiency.  Our servers and SAN arrays can scale to handle smaller or decentralized environments and we can leverage cloud tiers for long-term archive requirements. We can connect this with a wide array of network switches to provide and complete end-to-end solution, and we are unique in that aspect.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com:  Nick, can you give us please a virtual tour of Dell EMC Surveillance Validation Labs and the role it plays assuring successful implementations?

Nicholas Thermenos: Our labs, which are located in Raleigh, NC and Bangalore, India ensure that our customers are designing and implementing a reliable environment that will reduce risk and scale as they grow.  Our labs test all of the leading Video Management Software and camera vendors with a “Test to Fail” approach.  This means we push the limits of the both the software and hardware by virtualizing tens of thousands of cameras. The artifacts of this testing are “Validated Solutions” including configurations and sizing guidelines to help our customers build bullet-proof environments.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Let’s turn to some of the Dell EMC partnerships? We read with great interest that, “Qognify and Dell EMC have partnered to deliver an enterprise class, converged VMS and NAS (Network Attached Storage) turnkey solution specially designed for the security market: Qblock”. Care to elaborate?

Nicholas Thermenos: Customers are asking for as much integrated support as possible. CIOs don’t want their software vendors to say it’s a hardware issue and have vendors pointing the fingers at each other when there is a problem, and they certainly can”t afford data loss or IT outages when video has become so important.  To this end we developed a turn-key solution with Qognify that ensures zero data loss at the storage level while giving customers one phone call to make to support the entire solution.  In anutshell it’s software, servers and storage fully integrated and shipped to our customers as a turn-key solution.  This provides a tested, integrated and fully supported solution to our customers. To date, it’s been very well received and we anticipate the interest to grow rapidly.  We are also working closely with Dimension Data to provide a complete solution offering from consulting and hardware to managed services.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Steve Joubert, Chief Executive Officer, Data Center Business Unit and Member of the Board, Dimension Data, said, "Our enterprise clients have the expectation that we will partner with best-of-breed companies. If you take Dimension Data’s capabilities and overlay them with the world class expertise Dell EMC has in its chosen areas, like storage, we can bring great value to our clients, jointly”. May we have some more color on this, Nick?

Nicholas Thermenos: Dimension Data has become a valued strategic collaborator in our Video Surveillance portfolio. Together we are offering the design and implantation of a Video Surveillance Infrastructure Solution.  Dimension Data has experienced and mature consulting offerings that we are bringing to market together with our portfolio.  Dimension Data has a very strong practice dedicated to Campus Security and Education, a key market we are pursuing jointly. We invite your readers to read our Chippewa Valley Schools customer profile here to better understand why 16,000 school children are more secure today.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: The depth of solutions and capabilities at Dell EMC is singularly unique. Any wins or success stories you’d like to discuss?

Nicholas Thermenos: The City of Virginia Beach is taking a progressive approach as part of the Next Generation Network project to deploy our Converged Infrastructure Vblock offering leveraging Isilon storage.  This will allow them to centralize unstructured data for better and quicker decision analysis. As part of this initiative, in addition to making their city safer, they project to save $6M over six years while building a best in class smart city platform.

“Our mission to deliver a dynamic and evolving set of core services and innovative technologies that the citizens demand is critical. Dell EMC is helping the City of Virginia Beach achieve this mission by enabling us to develop and implement the best technology solutions to meet those demands. Vblock Systems helps make this possible by providing the agility and scalability to meet their growing data management needs and to deliver services which support the real-world needs of the community.”  Matthew Arvay, former CIO, City of Virginia Beach, VA

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: In summing up…please share with us the meaning behind one of Dell EMC’s new slogans “Don’t let hero numbers make you a villain”.

Nicholas Thermenos:I’ll bring back the significant investment in our test labs to answer this from a video surveillance perspective.  Hero Tests are performance tests produced by technology vendors to showcase what I refer to as “best case” performance statistics.  Translated, they are unlikely to reproduce them in real world environments.  Rather thanchoosing platforms by hero numbers, which can be at best misleading,  our technology validations allow users to size based on real world testing and simulations to assure optimal performance.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thanks again for joining us today, Nick, we truly enjoyed our Dell EMC journey today !

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