Dell’s CEO introduced the company’s moonshot visionary social objectives for 2030, and related them to the company’s strategic objectives.

AUSTIN – Today at the first Dell Technologies Summit, a global event for media and analysts held here, Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell provided what may have been his fullest statement of vision presented in public to date, and announced the company’s 2030 Progress Made Real plan.

“I’m excited to share what we’ve been up to, and our vision for the future,” Dell stated in his keynote to the gathering. “Dell has always been about a culture of technology and optimism, democratizing access to technology.”

He emphasized that while progress has been incredible, measured by things like life expectation, infant mortality, and  reduction in poverty, there’s always more to do.

“We can do more now than we ever have imagined,” Dell said. “Our world is being digitally transformed. That’s creating an enormous stream of data in the digital universe – a tsunami of data. The greatest opportunity is to put this data to work to help the most people. If we can take that data and move it to the appropriate resource or location, and analyze it and act on it with agility and skill, we can see the benefits across all of society.”

The problem, Dell stressed, is that data is becoming increasingly siloed across a multi-cloud world, with developments like autonomous factories, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent hospitals and buildings.

“It requires orders of magnitude more data processing power at the edge, to make decisions in real time,” he said. “And without data integration and coordination, it’s just noise and chaos. The promise of progress from all this data is just promise unless we can bring it together and do something with it.”

Dell Technologies maintains that its unique combination of technologies across its companies makes them the company most able to bring this about.

“We are positioned to be the Open Simplifier, moving data across an increasingly fragmented environment,”Dell said. “We are hard at work at integrating our innovation across an environment that is simple, open and unified, innovating a simple open platform that can provide data driven insights and action where it is needed. I believe this is the most important work we can be doing, and it also represents a generational opportunity.”

That generational opportunity includes making a positive impact on the world. Dell stressed that for decades, before anyone was paying attention, they were leaders in things like recycling and transparency.

“It’s in our DNA,” he emphasized.

To that end, Dell announced that following up the completion of their Legacy of Good 2020 objectives, Dell Technologies is now announcing Progress Made Real, the company’s goals to be reached by 2030. Dell identified four key objectives: advancing sustainability, cultivating inclusion, transforming lives, and upholding ethics and data privacy.

Advancing sustainability goals include recycling an equivalent product for every new product sold, using 100% recycled or renewable material in all packaging, and a comprehensive science-based climate program aimed at meeting a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of 60% per unit revenue by 2030

“Recycling is not a new topic,” Dell said. “We have been doing this for 25 years or so. We have recycled hundreds of millions of pounds of material. Today, we have new products with recycled material in them.”

Dell acknowledged that today, they really have no idea how they will achieve these goals, but said that that’s a good thing

“While we don’t know how to do these things – that’s the point,” he said. “It  stretches us. The point of having stretch goals is that we don’t exactly know how to make them happen, but when we challenge our 20,000 engineers and PhDs with a goal like this they aren’t frightened, they are challenged.”

“You wouldn’t have thought ten years ago, we would be using the materials we do today for packaging,” said Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman, Products & Operations, Dell Technologies. “We use wheatstraw, which is the refuse of the harvest. 10-15% of material we use is reclaimed plastics. These are the things we have done today that we would not have thought about a decade ago

“Meeting the packaging commitments were the hardest,” said Trey Layton, SVP of Engineering for PowerONE at Dell. “When you ship things like a monitor, you need to make sure they don’t break. It required a lot of ingenuity from our engineering team, to be lightweight but even safer and more secure.”

Cultivating inclusion was the second goal, with Dell pledging that by 2030 women would be 50% of the company’s global workforce and 40% of global people managers. Dell gave a shout-out from the stage to members of Dell Resilient Coders, a Boston-based non-profit that teaches people of colour to become software engineers. One of the four members in attendance, now an engineer, was a doorman a year ago, Dell told the audience.

The company also set a goal of having black and Hispanic employees be 25% of the company’s U.S. workforce and 15% of managers by 203

The third goal, of transforming lives, involved pledges to advance the health, education and economic opportunity of 1 billion people, to digitally transform 1,000 nonprofit organizations, and achieve 75% employee participation in charitable giving and volunteerism in communities.

The fourth objective, whose metrics are more opaque, is to uphold ethics and data privacy. This includes fully automating data control processes to make it easier for customers to access, delete or share their personal data.

“At Dell, we design our technology with our customers’ technology rights top of mind,” said Sooji Seo, Chief Privacy Officer at Dell. “Transparency is the critical enabler for customers to continue to share their critical data with us.”

“I’m excited about the role our company can play in driving progress,” Dell concluded. “We can be the company that can aggregate all the disparate data. When we get this right, all of us will be standing at the centre of the greatest progress in human history. It’s the most exciting work we can do, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.”