‘Please think of Dell EMC as one company,’ pleads CEO Michael Dell

Trade

Joe Tucci with Michael Dell at EMC World 2016. (Image: EMC)

Just six weeks since the record-breaking $67 billion merger of Dell and EMC, the overriding official message at Dell EMC World in Austin this week is one of unity.

“We’re not two companies anymore. It’s one company. Please think of us as one company as that’s what we are now,” CEO Michael Dell told press.

However there are confusions. It’s unclear if the new company is called Dell Techologies or Dell EMC (both have been used interchangably throughout).

Far more importantly, it’s not clear what magnitude of job cuts will follow, although surely they will given the inevitable overlap in areas of each business like HR, legal, communications and others. Bloomberg has reported 2,000 to 3,000 job cuts (out of about 140,000 staff) initially, although that is still yet to be confirmed by Dell EMC. One thing we can be sure of at a local level is the loss of 50 jobs in Cork.

Unsurprisingly for such a newly formed company, there hasn’t been much major news at the conference though there have been a few minor announcements like a new Dell EMC Partner Program, an expansion of its converged infrastructure portfolio, new security products, a new data analytics tool, a new storage system and updates to its Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage platform.

Michael Dell was typically ebullient in his press Q&A, claiming the company is “number one in everything: servers, storage, virtualisation, hyperconverged and converged infrastructure, PaaS, PCs, we’ve been growing 15 quarters in a row with PCs…. the future’s never been brighter for us.”

Many of Dell EMC’s customers are caught with one foot in the past and one in the future, meaning they have to “modernise their existing infrastructure while also building entirely new capabilities in a multi cloud, hybrid cloud world”, he added.

Can we expect to see the company diversity beyond its current product range?

Michael Dell was at least clear on one area he doesn’t see Dell EMC moving into: “I don’t think the world needs another smartphone company”.

IDG News Service

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