Meet the Women of the Dell EMC Partner Program: Shawn Trotter

What is your current role/area of responsibility, and how long have you worked with the channel partner community?

As the Vice President of North America Channel Sales, I am responsible for 400 channel sales professionals currently servicing 44,000 partners. Over the past year, I am proud to say that once again, our team over-delivered on almost every target that was put in front of them, including significant growth, and improved internal and external Net Promoter Scores (NPS). My goal was to ensure that we continued to drive a positive employee culture, which translates into success in our partner relationships.   These are both critical indicators of success of our future business.

What are your goals for your company’s channel business over the next year?

My goal this year will continue to be centered on being the best place to work and having the best channel team in the industry, period.  Our team members will be experts on our world-class channel program and product offerings, providing our Partners and Distributors a competitive advantage. I not only expect my team to be the most responsive team in the industry, but also the trusted advisor who is committed to enabling partner growth.  We will measure these objectives with both internal employee NPS and external partner NPS. Winning together with our partners and distributors is what we strive to do every day.

Outside of your family, please name a woman you admire and why?

Mother Teresa, as I am inspired most by those who sacrifice to serve others.  She gave up worldly possessions and family to serve those whom no one else would care for. She opened hospices and orphanages for the poor so that no one would be alone. She inspired others to love and serve through her actions and not just through her words.  My favorite quote from her: “Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.”  If we can all leave everyone/everything better than we found it, the world would be a better place.

What advice would you give to other women in the industry? Or men?

Work hard, be adaptable to change, be a perpetual learner and most importantly, be passionate about what you do. At Dell Technologies we believe that progress lives at the intersection of technology and humanity, that our role is to bring innovation to people everywhere so they can thrive in the digital economy. We have always believed that technology exists to enable human potential. Live it…become a trusted advisor for the customers that you serve, so that you can enable them to evolve and continue to change the world.  If you are passionate about what you do, you will be successful.

Please share some words to live by that have helped you throughout your career.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. (Ghandi)  I am driven by a desire to leave things better than I found them (work, community, relationships etc).  I received advice from one of my most important mentors early in my career to take ownership of things I didn’t like and find solutions.  Rather than allowing circumstances to control me, I enjoy finding solutions to problems.  This not only allows me to channel creativity, but also keeps me positive.

What do you do for fun outside of Dell EMC?

My favorite thing to do outside of work is spend time with my family.  We love to travel, take long road trips, have family dinners and just hang out. Our favorite places include beaches or mountains.  I also love to spend time working out. Exercise is one of the critical components of stress management for me.  I rarely miss a day of working out, but I do vary the workouts.  My husband (and sometimes children) love to join me, which doubles as family time.  My workout regimen varies. I enjoy Orange Theory, Bickram Hot Yoga, Pilates, Zumba and sometimes even just a lazy walk outdoors or on the treadmill.

Source:-https://blog.dellemc.com/en-us/meet-women-dell-emc-partner-program-shawn-trotter/

It’s Time for the Media and Entertainment Industry to Virtualize

When it comes to virtualization, the media and entertainment (M&E) industry has lagged other industries. For 30 years, broadcast engineers have relied on bare-metal hardware and hard-coded applications, trusting that these solutions could deliver the performance and predictability required of a broadcast network.

Broadcast engineers have been wary of virtualization. But for M&E, virtualization in private, public or hybrid-cloud environments offers many tangible benefits: streamlined workflows, increased automation, lower cost of ownership, reduced production time and much more. In fact, forward-thinking media companies are now realizing that virtualization is the only way they’ll be able to compete in a new and rapidly evolving digital marketplace.

However, these benefits can only be realized if all components works seamlessly together. To ensure this, Dell Technologies is partnering with many of the world’s leading independent software vendors (ISVs) to test, qualify and prove the functionality of underlying VMware vSphere-based solutions and virtualized configurations.

Advantages of Media Function Virtualization (MFV)

Prior to VMware, broadcast engineers relied on single-operation hardware, which was limited to one job at a time, whether it was playout, transcoding or rendering. With MFV, media companies can execute multiple tasks on a single Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged node – an integrated system co-engineered by Dell EMC and VMware.

For instance, we have a qualified solution with an ISV that enables us to get 2 – 4 compute tasks, doing either the transcode or the renders on a single VxRail, versus running each job on a separate server. So, what used to take 20 or 30 physical servers is now handled on seven or eight 1U VxRail systems.

VMware vSphere can also create robust automated environments. This enables virtual machines (VMs) to move between clusters and stretch clusters to provide higher availability and reliability. If an environment goes down or is taken offline, the application can seamlessly shift to another storage array or vSphere host without any interruption or impact to the user.

Now, VMware vSphere advances also allow you to run OTT client applications in VMs, as well as host the core video streaming applications for many broadcast and media solutions.

Virtualization’s expanding role

As the industry progresses toward “IP Playout” delivery, the role for virtualization continues to increase. Broadcasters must compete for audience and advertising dollars by quickly offering new services and channels with specialized content.

Easy-to-deploy integrated playout solutions accelerate channel deployment well beyond the capability of traditional installations by offering a flexible, software-based architecture. This enables broadcasters to only pay for what they need and easily add new features as their business evolves.

Add to that the evolution of Dell EMC Isilon scale-out storage solutions, designed for high-performance and advanced production environments, enabling media companies to shape and configure resources to meet the demanding needs of each operation in the workflow.

Time is money

Traditionally, it would take 9-12 months for a customer to get their broadcast workload environment into production. They had to size the equipment, set it up, configure and test it extensively before going on-air.

With Dell Technologies, the configuration is already qualified and tested when the VxRail nodes arrive. VxRail can be up and running in a couple of days once the networking is ready. Once VMware vSphere is configured, the ISVs – who are familiar with the vSphere configurations and images – can load the base VMs that very day.

ISVs have tested and qualified this technology right in their labs, so they’re able to move your operation immediately into workflow customization. This is how environments that used to take 12 months to get running become operational – and collecting revenue – within three months. We’re talking about greatly accelerating revenue from ad sales and everything else that goes along with spinning up a new channel. It also can shorten their technology investment depreciation cycle.

This kind of efficiency has caught the attention of ISVs, some of which are now adopting VMware’s solutions as their underlying technology, with huge OEM potential.

Broadcast challenges

Uncompressed video streams with an IP playout – usually associated with live sports broadcasts – can present a significant challenge for broadcasters, who can’t have dropped frames, jitter or black space, so the requirements are extremely high.

The  ST-2110 standard requires 1.3 Gb/s bandwidth for an uncompressed UHD channel. To get multiple channels playing, we found it imperative to have the ISV engineering department working with our VMware vSphere Alliances & Performance Engineering team. It took a long time to solve these challenges, but we can now get two of these channels running on a single VxRail node.

One of our ISV partners spent nine months working on a hardware solution to solve this problem. They had no success, because it wasn’t a hardware issue – it was a virtualization-engineering feat. They needed a virtualization solution and Dell Technologies’ expertise. When we brought our VMware vSphere performance engineers to the table, our partners were finally able to overcome this issue.

Furthermore, when the next generation VxRail arrives with even more powerful CPUs, we expect to get up to four uncompressed live streams playing without any issue.

Lower total costs

VMware-powered solutions can help media organizations realize significant cost savings. A single VxRail – powered by VMware vSphere and vSAN – can do the work of multiple bare-metal servers. This results in less rack space, less power and a reduction in cooling requirements versus deploying server after server.

Finally, we’re in the early virtualization stages with M&E, but not in other industries where we have employed this solution successfully for years. It took the banking industry, for example, a year or so to understand how well virtualization works. Once they understood the tools and their comfort level increased, the technicians’ work became more meaningful and interesting, and the possibilities of virtualization began to be realized.

That’s where we’re heading with M&E, which is why it’s going to be such an exciting next phase in this industry.

To learn more about recommendations and best practices, download VMware’s new whitepaper: “Media and Entertainment Workloads on vSphere 6.7: Best practices and recommendations for deployment and performance tuning,” co-authored by VMware’s Mark Achtemichuk, Bob Goldsand and Shak Malik. It is the definitive guide to successfully deploy and benefit from Media Function Virtualization.