Q&A Tarkan Maner, vice president and general manager, Dell cloud client computing

Can you explain a little more about your new role?

Since the acquisition of Wyse by Dell, there has been a process of integration going on and now I run the cloud client computing business within Dell with my team, Alice and Michael.

It is a reverse integration, so we are bringing a lot of people from Dell into our organisation. We used to have 500 people at Wyse, now there is going to be 3,000 people in the next year. So we are growing very fast last year we were a $400m business, this quarter we just turned over $300 million dollars. So it is very exciting times.

Cloud Labs is our lab' because it is where we test new cloud based solutions.

What does the new Dell Cloud Labs initiative entail?

The vice president and general manager of cloud at Dell, Nnamdi Orakwue, has been an amazing legal person and IT person and now he runs our cloud best practice business. In the past, it was run as a service organisation, now it has become this new initiative.

So Cloud Labs is our lab' because it is where we test new cloud based solutions, applications and infrastructure and allows our customers to get involved too, be that consumers, enterprises or SMBs around the world.

It is designed for anybody to be able to have a cloud based application or infrastructure geared towards themselves. You saw some of those applications in Michael's keynote,like our Dell Healthcare Cloud, where five billion medical images are managed through the cloud.

There are similar cloud systems done for retail, such as our new solution for virtual cloud based point of sale (POS). Today POS means PCs, all of which are local and physical and individual. Tomorrow, these are going to be all cloud based.

The same application is available for other use cases like education. We are doing a big education delivery here with the State of Illinois, which has 4 million K-12 (Reception to Year 13) students. We are cloudifying 21 apps for every student for K-12 throughout the state. We already have some [of them], some of them are going to be hosted by the government, so that goes through Cloud Labs. So across verticals, across geographies, across all subtypes for those who want to use cloud applications and infrastructure, there is a lab with an infrastructure framework to help them initiate and explore that.

Jane McCallion
Deputy Editor

Jane McCallion is ITPro's deputy editor, specializing in cloud computing, cyber security, data centers and enterprise IT infrastructure. Before becoming Deputy Editor, she held the role of Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialise in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.

Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.