Dell has launched a brand new research division that can do the sort of long-term thinking that CEO Michael Dell said would follow after he freed the company from the demands of Wall Street by taking Dell into private ownership in 2013.

Dell Research has four departments looking at security, mobility, next generation solutions and data analytics ("Big Data"). Its leader, vice president and chief research officer Jai Menon, is a twenty-two year IBM veteran, but he is keeping his goals realistic.

Not aiming to compete with Intel or Samsung

Menon said: “We do not have the research and development budgets of an Intel or a Samsung but that is not what we are looking to mirror.”

Talking about the risk associated with this venture he said: “We have a very good idea of what we need to be focusing on and my goal is to be 75% correct about our general direction on a regular basis. Any worse focus would not be credible for the business.”

Dell is planning ahead for what it calls the software-based data center and not what many other vendors are focusing  on – the software defined data center. The difference is not such a subtle one.

Menon’s team seem very much more focused than some other vendors. Firstly Dell has a very clear strategic plan for how it will tackle selling its products into the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) market, closely related to software defined networking (SDN) opening up within the telecommunications industry.

Product development in the telecommunications industry has traditionally been locked into rigorous standards for stability, with long product cycles that caused traditional players to lose out badly to more highly-skilled nimble outfits as deregulation allowed more enterprise.  

According to Dell the data center of the near-future will still be based on the server (hardware) but storage will be software-based and so will the network.  The Dell approach will see telcos being offered a move away from their fragmented, non-commodity hardware needing a physical install per server per site to specialized software on standard hardware, delivered from the cloud. This will, Dell says, provide the data center with real agility extending from storage to networking.

Dell believes this approach not only dramatically cuts capital and operation expenditure but will speed up service delivery and open up a $161bn opportunity in 2016.