Overview:

Hardware and software integration can no longer be an afterthought – it’s essential for the success of a project…  Electronics and computers are everywhere.  They are in our homes, our cars, our pockets.  They are how we communicate, how we remember what we’re doing each day, how we find where we’re going in unfamiliar places.  As technology becomes ubiquitous worldwide, the user base for these technologies continues to expand dramatically from the technically savvy to the mainstream, and even beyond.  To continue this growth and to reach the next billion users, ease of use and functionality will be increasingly paramount in product design.  With this in mind, it is essential that our industry recognize that hardware and silicon design must be tightly coupled with the design of the software that will enable it.  Both need to innovate concurrently to maintain the relevance of hardware and software alike.

Paul Prince is CTO for Dell’s Enterprise Systems. He leads Dell’s Server and Storage technology teams, focusing on future architectures and the core technologies associated with those platforms. He manages the executive and technical interface to some of Dell’s top vendors, and is deeply engaged in developing strategies for how technologies will intersect Dell’s product roadmap. Paul has been in the computer industry for almost twenty years, focusing on high performance architectures from supercomputers to servers and storage for the data center. His expertise lies in system architecture, including both hardware and hardware-software interfaces.