Innovation Plays a Pivotal Role in Software Architect Michal's Career in R&D at Dell Technologies

Michal Davidson | Software Architect | Israel 

Originally Published: August 17, 2023

My Role and its Impact on the Business and Dell Technologies Israel: 

I am a Software Architect in the PowerFlex group, where I lead Public Cloud and Security architecture for PowerFlex. I work with groups across all three of Dell’s Israel Research and Development (R&D) offices, along with teams at many other Dell sites around the globe. PowerFlex provides the underlying storage for APEX Block Storage on AWS, which was launched at Dell Tech World this May, and it was exciting for me to watch the launch broadcast and know I played a key role in this.

What Innovation Means to Me:

The top words I would use to describe innovation are...

• Creativity
• Value
• Impact
• Challenging Limits

To me, innovation means constantly striving to create and add value. There is an expression in Hebrew called "Rosh Gadol"; the literal translation is "big head," but the actual meaning is thinking outside the box, thinking about what can be done better, and how you can make that happen. I think those are important principles that we can all bring to our jobs to create impact. I like the idea that if you want to raise an issue, you should at the same time propose a solution for that problem. So much innovation comes from identifying pain points and then thinking about what you can do to solve them.

How I Bring Innovation to Life in My Role:

I have so many opportunities to innovate in my role since we are constantly breaking new ground at Dell including around storage on the cloud and securing that storage. I’m very grateful for those opportunities since they keep my work interesting!

Key Accomplishments I am Most Proud Of:

This year was a really busy year for me at Dell! I was part of the ISG Hackathon’s winning team and the GenNext Game Changer’s winning team! I was proud of how well we all worked together and had fun at the same time.

I’m also proud of starting the blog @MsArchitect on Medium, where I write about security and software architecture, and I'm beginning to talk at external industry conferences. Doing new things can be scary, but it’s worth it because that way you can constantly expand your comfort zone.

My motto at this year’s Women in Action event in Israel was "Be Brave, Not Perfect," because perfectionism can often hold us back from trying out new things.

Why Dell?

Something really special at Dell Technologies is the huge amount of support for Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). I really enjoy being a member of the Women in Action ERG, where I lead Dell’s collaboration with the organization Woman2Woman. I made wonderful friends through the ERG, and it adds so much value to my day-to-day work.

On the technical front, there is a lot of encouragement at Dell to take ideas from ideation to patent to product. I joined Dell Technologies in 2022, and right away there was a lot of support from my team and from my managers to think outside the box and to innovate. I was able to co-author three patents in my first year and am now collaborating on quite a few more.

At Dell Technologies, progress takes innovation. How do you innovate?

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