The New York center, located in Penn Plaza, is the 11th solution center opened worldwide in the last 12 months, marking an important step in Dell's becoming a complete solutions and services provider. An opening reception today will showcase a broad range of Dell offerings, including business intelligence, storage and end user computing, that offer unique capabilities for customers in industries such as financial services, education and healthcare.

Many enterprises rely on the expertise of Dell Services to help them evaluate, validate, implement and manage the IT systems that can help their businesses grow and run efficiently - whether their needs include Cloud, security, business intelligence, modernization, mobility, or others. The Dell solution centers offer on-site resources and experts who can help customers with proof of concept testing prior to deployment to help ensure the solution will work in the customer's environment.

In the past year, more than 2,400 customer engagements have been completed at Dell solution centers, with a very high customer satisfaction rating. Of those, approximately 40 percent were in the Americas, 25 percent in Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) and 35 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

"As we are exploring our options for the best ways to prepare our IT department for the future, we were able to learn about a wide variety of offerings with one comprehensive engagement at the Dell solution center in Limerick, Ireland," said Tunji Alabi, Group Head, Technology Infrastructure for Ecobank Group. "The in-depth technical briefings gave us an opportunity for hands-on evaluations of desktop virtualization solutions, virtual integrated systems, network storage and several other solutions. With one stop we were able to learn about a broad swath of technologies, with Dell experts there to help us determine what was right for our business."

"The IT function is no longer just responsible for keeping things running. IT is nowT is now a primary driver of the business overall, which puts added responsibility on the CIO and requires new skill sets of the IT staff," said Jan Uhrich, vice president, Dell Services. "At Dell, we are paying close attention to these realities. They're not trends—this is the new state of IT, and stepping up to these challenges is the very foundation of our entire Services business. Our solution centers provide a venue where we can give our customers hands-on support for developing and testing practical solutions to meet their specific needs."

In a recent study Dell conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit, data showed that companies who leveraged IT strategically to drive business outcomes were nearly two times more successful at driving revenues. This shows that IT departments need to be increasingly flexible to help the business grow, while also trying to satisfy the demands of budgetary pressures, adapt to an increasing number of physical and virtual workloads and provide robust, granular security for their IT infrastructure. Dell solution centers help customers address these pressures by allowing them to identify and assess the solutions that meet their needs.

At today's New York Solution Center opening, Dell will highlight a selection of offerings, including:

Banking & Securities: Financial services customers are able to improve security, reduce downtime, and minimize power and cooling costs on trading floors with Dell's Trading Floor Simplification solution from Dell and Amulet Hotkey. The High Performance Database Solution from Dell and Kove provides the industry's lowest latency and highest performance tick capture and market data analysis for faster analysis and decision-making.
End User Computing: Dell's virtual desktop infrastructure solutions allow customers to support remote users, secure their data and centralize IT control quickly and easily. On-site demonstrations will show how healthcare and education industries are using this technology.
Cloud Solutions: Dell's portfolio of efficient public, private and hybrid Cloud solutions, including Virtual Integrated Systems, SecureWorks, Dell Openstack-Powered Cloud Solution and the Cloud Solution for Web Applications, helps customers integrate the cloud into their IT environments to quickly scale their infrastructure to meet business demands.
Data and Analytics Solutions: As business intelligence continues to grow in importance, bringing with it challenges of data migration, security and storage, Dell Services will demonstrate how its storage portfolio and data and analytics solutions help customers.


The New York Solution Center is centrally located in One Penn Plaza. The other Dell solution centers are located in Limerick, Ireland; Shanghai, China; Austin, Texas; Washington, DC (Herndon, VA); Singapore; Chicago, Illinois (Buffalo Grove); Tokyo, Japan; Frankfurt, Germany; Paris, France; Sydney, Australia; and a satellite site in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A new center in Silicon Valley, Calif. is scheduled to open later in 2012.