Jai Menon CTO, Dell Enterprise Solutions Group

In a blog, Jai Menon wrote:

My New Role as CTO
of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Group

Dell is undergoing a massive shift in its business and strategy. Over the past four years, the company has been busy building significant new businesses to augment its traditional and well-known strength in client devices. Examples of this include a new Software division, a Services division, and the most visible to date – the Enterprise Solutions Group. ESG comprises Dell’s server, storage and networking domains and has been one of the most active groups in all of the technology industry in terms of expanding its capabilities and addressable markets. It’s now positioned to address current and future customer concerns as it never had in the past.

As I have had a chance to learn in my first 10 weeks on the job, Dell ESG has done a remarkable job of predicting where the puck is going to, and getting there first. We saw the importance of rack efficient, hyperscale servers for the cloud provider marketand made an early investment in DCS. Today, we have 53% market share. We saw the value of iSCSI storage, made an early investment in EqualLogic and we now have #1 share in iSCSI storage almost 2X that of our competitors. We predicted the trend to distributed core switches and are an industry leader in that emerging new segment. We understood the importance of virtualization early, positioned our servers and storage to be optimized for virtualization, and we are now the preferred infrastructure provider in virtualized environments. We understood the need for power efficiency and developed the most power efficient mainstream x86 servers. We are making a bet on OpenStack clouds, and were the first to provide a complete OpenStack solution. Time after time, we have made bold predictions, and driven to be leaders in new spaces – it’s quite a remarkable story.

The rate and pace of change in enterprise technology today is many orders of magnitude what it was only 10 years ago and shows no signs of slowing down. Our industry is about to hit many exciting inflection points. New forms of storage like Flash are poised to completely change the storage landscape. Integrated systems of servers, storage and networking are beginning to redefine how customers buy IT. The emergence of clouds is making it an imperative that we give customers seamless access to their applications and data across on-premise and cloud environments, while retaining tight policy control over performance, data, and security. These changes hold the promise of ushering in a new wave of productivity and growth for businesses and Dell is perfectly positioned to help shape their future. We have proven we can make the right bets in the past, and I am confident we will be successful and bold as we move forward.

So it’s this combination of technology transformation and the opportunity it creates for Dell which I found intriguing and when the offer came to join the company, I saw it as too good to pass up. Trading in my career equity at IBM, my role as CTO and VP of Technical Strategy for IBM’s Systems and Technology Group and my role as an IBM Fellow, where I had wide latitude to think about the biggest and most interesting problems in the industry, was not an easy decision to make.

But as Dell has matured in the enterprise space and become a true end-to-end solutions provider-which has both the ability and desire to innovate across technologies like no other-I felt like now was the time to make a move. The opportunity to help guide Dell’s enterprise architecture as it creates solutions for the next 25 years in an environment that is not encumbered by the past excites me. As I enter week No. 10 of my job and have had the chance to meet many people at Dell I find myself even more convinced that we are on the right path.

About Dr. Jai Menon

Before joining Dell, Jai Menon was CTO and VP, Technical Strategy for IBM.s Systems and Technology Group. His responsibilities include technical strategy, technical leadership, research collaboration and technical vitality for IBM STG.

He joined IBM Research in 1982. He has made many contributions to the storage industry and to IBM in the areas of disk emulation, storage controllers, disk caching, storage networking, storage virtualization, file systems and RAID. He is one of the early RAID pioneers that helped create a technology that is now a $20B industry, contributing to many key IBM storage systems products, including the Shark Storage Server. He also initiated the project that became the leading storage virtualization product.

He became IBM’s world-wide storage research leader, then CTO and VP for Storage and Systems Software in STG. Later, he became vice-chair of the IBM Academy of Technology, an elite body of 500 of IBM’s worldwide technical leaders who mission is to provide technical direction to IBM. He was also VP of IBM’s University Collaboration programs. In this role, he doubled IBM’s overall university research spending; quadrupled our activities in the emerging markets; and doubled our university interactions in the emerging area of Services Science.

Jai is an IBM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and an IBM Master Inventor. He has many IBM awards, serves on several university industry advisory boards, has published 78 papers and reports, holds 52 patents and is contributing author to three books. He received the 2002 IEEE Wallace McDowell Award and the 2006 IEEE Reynold Johnson Award.

He is a Distinguished Alumnus of both IIT, Madras and of Ohio State University (from where he earned M.S. & Ph.D degrees in Computer Science).