Presidio VP Chad Dunn On How New Engineering Organization Can Deliver AI Transformation ‘Twice As Fast’

‘This is a pretty big decision on Presidio’s part to take this approach, and I am absolutely honored that they would pick me to lead it,’ said new Presidio Vice President of Product Solutions Engineering Chad Dunn.

New Presidio Vice President of Product Solutions Engineering Chad Dunn said the CRN Solution Provider 500 powerhouse’s new engineering organization is poised to deliver breakthrough transformations for AI, cloud and hybrid for customers twice as fast with new common building blocks.

“There’s no reason we can’t be delivering things twice as fast as we were in the past for a given use case, or maybe even more,” said Dunn, who joined Presidio in December after an 18-year run at Dell Technologies, most recently as vice president of product management, AI and data management. “When you’ve got a catalog of these solution accelerators with the solutions that have been prebuilt, already tested, interoperable, ready to deploy in an automated way, clearly you are going to get some big acceleration. I don’t think 2X is a stretch in a lot of cases.”

Dunn said the new organization marks the first time Presidio has brought together a “centralized engineering team” to drive faster transformations for customers in AI, cloud and hybrid.

“This really is all about velocity and reducing that time to value from when we figure out a use case for the customer to when they are able to start realizing value out of it,” said Dunn. “Having a lot of that work done using common sets of tools, common architectures, common building blocks across multiple solutions, it just makes us more efficient and it gets customers to their destination much more quickly.”

Dunn said he could not be more excited about the opportunity ahead. “This is a pretty big decision on Presidio’s part to take this approach, and I am absolutely honored that they would pick me to lead it,” he said.

Here is more of CRN’s discussion with Dunn.

How does it feel to make the move to Presidio after 18 years at Dell?

I’m really excited to be here. I mean, it’s an amazing bunch of people, a lot of them are people that I’ve worked with in the past at EMC and at Dell.

I really like the company’s vibe, the mission that they’re on and how driven they are. For me, working with a solution provider like Presidio you get to be even more intimate with customers and what their needs are. Not that I wasn’t able to be intimate with customers at Dell, but we showed up with a prescribed set of products to fit a use case, and now with the breadth of what Presidio does from a cloud perspective, as well as from an on- prem perspective and from the services perspective, we can start to get really intimate with what customers want to do with AI to get to those valuable outcomes for them. And that’s just super exciting for me. It’s really getting into the details of what customers want to accomplish.

How important is that deep customer intimacy with AI focusing on vertical solutions and business process workflows?

It really comes down to mapping out what are the outcomes, what’s achievable and highly feasible and that will have a high business impact. That’s going to be slightly different for every customer because their data is different. The outcome they want to achieve is different. The path they want to take is going to be different. So being able to meet them wherever they are in terms of their maturity and their approach to AI is absolutely critical because it’s not like we can just sprinkle AI powder on anything and it gets better. You really have to understand the use case. And a lot of those use cases are coming out of the lines of business within these customers, where they face very, very specific problems and they need very, very specific solutions.

What does the new job entail and how are you approaching the new role over the next 100 days?

The mission is to build out this solution engineering group function. Today, like a lot of solution providers, we’re building a lot of things for customers as one-off solutions. What I’m looking to do is look for commonality across those solutions. We’re looking to establish some architectural guidelines and look for opportunities to reuse [code], to double down and really get a leveraged effect of what we do in engineering across all practices, across all the verticals that we serve.

Getting experience in those individual verticals is really important, and that is why some of my first hires are going to be specialists in key verticals like SLED, health care, financial services, telco, media and entertainment. These are already verticals where Presidio has a fantastic presence. So having solutions that cut across those verticals and that can easily be verticalized by the practices is a recipe for success in our mind.

How many engineers are you overseeing?

It’s too early to get into numbers, but it will be a fairly sizable team, and it’ll be centralized in the organization to service all the different practices and all of the different verticals. This is a new investment for Presidio.

We’ve had engineering in different practices, in different places, but this is the first time Presidio is creating this centralized engineering team to be able to address these bigger solutions for AI, cloud, hybrid and the verticalized solutions we are building. When we talk about these large-framework, big transformational solutions, this is where they belong.

How big a breakthrough is this in terms of a new engineering model to build these transformational solutions, particularly for AI?

If you look particularly at a lot of these AI solutions, there are going to be a lot of common building blocks that are required and a lot of things we can do to accelerate the solution, whether it’s the ability to rapidly develop AI agents, identity and access management components, or end-to-end solutions.

Having a toolkit of accelerators and prebuilt solutions allows us to go and address those customer needs much more quickly and much more repeatably. We think that’s a recipe for success.

The first 100 days is going to be a lot of listening. This is a big move for us at Presidio, and expectations are high. Right now, as I joke about it, I’m basically speed dating everyone in the company right now to understand what they do, what their needs are, and what their expectations are of the team. I’m very pleasantly surprised that everyone is so aligned behind this.

What do you see as the ultimate impact on customers in terms of accelerating transformational solutions, especially AI?

This really is all about velocity and reducing that time to value from when we figure out a use case for the customer to when they are able to start realizing value out of it. Having a lot of that work done using common sets of tools, common architectures, common building blocks across multiple solutions, it just makes us more efficient and it gets customers to their destination much more quickly.

How dramatic a step forward do you think you can make in accelerating these transformational solutions?

It’s hard to say. It is going to depend on the complexity of the solution, but there’s no reason we can’t be delivering things twice as fast as we were in the past for a given use case, or maybe even more. When you’ve got a catalog of these solution accelerators with the solutions that have been prebuilt, already tested, interoperable, ready to deploy in an automated way, clearly you are going to get some big acceleration. I don’t think 2X is a stretch in a lot of cases.

How do you feel the Dell experience will help you as you take the job at Presidio?

Clearly my time at Dell was incredible preparation for this. I think as much as the exposure to the technology and the people of Dell is important, exposure to the customers on their AI journey was invaluable to me. I would see common stumbling blocks and common challenges that customers faced as they tried to adopt AI.

I would also see the common challenges that IT encountered as they tried to support those lines of business in adopting AI. Having that visibility and customer exposure, as well as the world- class technology that Dell has from an accelerated server perspective and a data management perspective, I couldn’t ask for better experience.

How do you feel as you take this new job breaking new ground in engineering solutions?

It’s exciting to be doing something brand new after my time at Dell, with a whole new group of people with technology that’s changing so fast. I can't wait to get to my desk when I get out of bed in the morning and dig into this and understand the challenges that customers are facing and how we are going to solve them at Presidio. I’m just incredibly happy to be on the team. You couldn’t ask for a better bunch of folks to work with.

What do you see as the big advantages culturally at Presidio?

I was exposed to Presidio for the first time 15 years ago during my days at EMC. I’ve always known them to be a world-class partner. What I think is amazing about what they’ve done is how they continue to reinvent and continue to evolve themselves really aggressively. They were one of the early ones to understand that it was going to be a hybrid world, and that they needed those cloud practices and relationships with companies like AWS and Microsoft Azure. They cultivated those very early on, and those have paid significant benefits.

If you look at the acquisition path that Presidio has been on, it’s incredibly measured and purposeful in terms of the solution providers they choose to acquire, the practices they acquire and the technologies around them. So there’s clearly a pattern and a progression to what they’re doing, and one that’s very impressive to me. Presidio’s ability to transform and evolve the company as quickly and aggressively as they do was a major selling point for me. There is nothing static about this job and this company at all.

The great thing about the people is everyone has this amazing bias to action. I’ve got to be careful because If I mention an idea on a call somebody will start doing it. It is amazing.

As you look toward the future, how do you feel about the opportunity you have in front of you?

This is a perfect, perfect opportunity and a perfect fit for me. I couldn’t be happier being where I’m at.

This is a pretty big decision on Presidio’s part to take this approach, and I am absolutely honored that they would pick me to lead it.

How big an investment and breakthrough could this be for Presidio?

I think it can be a game-changer for us, and I think other solution providers will follow suit. When you look at the number of clients that we need to engage and the number of use cases, we can’t really be handling those in one-off situations. We’ve got to get efficiency, and we’ve got to get velocity. If nothing else, the velocity at which AI is moving requires us to do this.

How fast is the AI technology moving and what impact is that having on customers?

It’s moving so fast that it’s difficult for customers to be able to understand it, let alone consume it quickly. So they need a solution provider like Presidio, who can be intimate with their business, their business model, and be able to take them on that journey to get to those outcomes.

If you’re a customer, you can’t watch every startup and every new development in AI and be on top of that and still operate your business. That’s what we do at Presidio. We look at the newest technology and AI and understand how we can adopt that for the individual verticals and the individual use cases that customers have. And as my team is building out those solutions and those accelerators, those will be ready to provide customers that faster time to value when they’re ready to make that transformation.

The engineering solutions organization encompasses AI, cloud and hybrid. How important is AI for the new organization?

AI is sort of the marquee poster child for this. It’s the thing that’s driving this level of velocity. If you look at the entire stack of things we’ll be delivering, there’s certainly going to be components that are not AI, but it’s really AI creating the velocity and the need in the market for us to do something like this.