Medallia Selects Dell’s Open Networking Solutions to Accelerate Growth and Simplify Network Management in a Software-Defined Era

Dell today announced that Medallia, a global leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions, has selected Dell’s Open Networking solutions to enable faster networking speeds and improve its customer experience. Medallia runs the Linux® network operating system from Cumulus Networks on Dell Open Networking switches. The announcement demonstrates Dell’s capability as a leader in providing customers a choice of third-party operating systems to enable them to tailor networks for their specific application needs.

Medallia enables global brands to capture customer feedback across web, social, mobile, and contact center channels and deliver insights to improve the customer experience – all in real time. Medallia must process enormous amounts of data every second in order to give their customers complete visibility of the daily performance of their touch points, deliver actionable customer feedback, and resolve issues as they emerge. Medallia sought a more efficient approach to process data in real time with low latency, and selected Dell’s Open Networking for a fast, affordable and scalable solution.

Dell has achieved key momentum in open networking since it signed an agreement through which Dell offers Cumulus Linux network OS as an option for its Dell Networking S6000-ON and S4810-ON top-of-rack switches. This combined solution helps enterprises and service providers achieve holistic management and provisioning of the complete data center compute and networking environment, physical and virtual, and accelerate deployment of new applications while simplifying IT operations.

Dell’s software-defined networking (SDN) strategy is built on providing customers a choice, allowing them to tailor networks to their specific needs. Dell’s agnostic SDN approach fully interoperates with legacy networking devices and applications, while also supporting SDN overlays (such as VMware and Microsoft) as well as OpenFlow implementations. Yet all of these disparate devices can be managed through a single interface.

Dell Open Networking Initiative

Dell is driving a new open ecosystem that stimulates innovation with best of breed, standards-based network equipment, networking operating systems and network applications to serve customers unique business needs. Benefits and value of the open networking model include:

• Best-of-breed networking for workloads, application and other networking needs including orchestration, automation and monitoring;
• Consistent view across data center resources with a common deployment and operational model; and,
• Rapid standards-based innovation and availability of abundant open source data center solutions.

Supporting Quotes

• “We run our enterprise on Linux and are excited to unlock the benefits of open source technology to improve our networking operations,” said Karl Armani, Head of Infrastructure and Operations at Medallia. “We chose Dell Networking over white box vendors because Dell offers unparalleled support and top notch engineering at an extremely competitive price point. It’s great to be able to extend our existing relationship with Dell beyond their PowerEdge servers.”
• “Dell is committed to providing customers choice in how they move to a more software-defined data center,” said Tom Burns, vice president and general manager, Dell Networking and Enterprise Infrastructure. “We are thrilled to announce Medallia as an open networking customer since launching these new open source solutions earlier this year.”
• “Together, Dell and Cumulus Networks are unleashing the power of open networking for Medallia and our other joint customers,” said JR Rivers, CEO and co-founder Cumulus Networks. “The benefits to Medallia go beyond the improved economics and manageability of the data center. With their modernized network, advantages should extend right into their core business as they provide better services to their customers.”

Additional Information:

• Dell Open Networking wiki
• Dell Networking and Cumulus Networks wiki
• Dell Networking on Twitter

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