The company will continue to sell products in competition with those made by EMC, Dell said.
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Wednesday, the Round Rock-based company announced it will acquire data storage company EMC.
“We’re doing a lot of work to get away from HP”, he said, adding that his company isn’t pleased with HP’s support.
Michael Dell said that there would be a few layoffs to come in the wake of the EMC acquisition, but that those would not be the primary focus. At a previous company, he worked to make it a Dell shop due to the company’s products and ingenuity.
From tablets and sensors to high performance computers and hybrid cloud, Dell’s offerings span the gamut of enterprise (plus consumer and SMB needs), he said. “The world’s largest enterprise systems company”. The CEO personally assured clients that Dell “will treat VMware very much the same way EMC has”.
How low can Dell go? “We see tremendous growth opportunities for VMware and EMC with the new Virtustream business, building on the strong momentum of vCloud Air”, said Pat Gelsinger, Chief Executive Officer, VMware.
He asked the audience to think about the scale of the new $80-plus billion revenue business Dell and EMC are set to become. The Dell CEO also spoke broadly about future strategies and specific product line directions. The proposed merger “makes them a force to be reckoned with”.
Nonetheless, he said he has no plans to take Dell into the mobile phone business after watching one of his competitors fail at it. There’s already one company in the space that does mobile phones really well, he said.
During his Dell World keynote, the company’s founder said that there are 1.8 billion PCs in the world, and 600 million of them are more than six years old.
“If you look at the market overall, the acquisitions were more a case of expansion than overlap”, he said.
That’s a problem for Dell, but also opens a new theoretical option.
“The real fear should be once they do [integrate]”, he said. This new unit will incorporate assets and people from the VMware vCloud Air Application Services business, vCloud Director and vCloud Air Network teams, as well as Virtustream’s Software Business including Advisor Planning and Migration tool, xStream cloud management platform and Viewtrust governance, risk and compliance solution.
HP CEO Meg Whitman issued a memo to employees after last week’s news of the EMC-Dell merger, where she said Dell would be saddled with significant debt, and could be forced to divert attention away from developing and working on new ideas, Geosits said. Assuming that discount, Dell and EMC could, for the same value, distribute 30 per cent of VMware’s actual shares rather than trackers representing half the company while still retaining a majority economic interest.
“We can fuel innovation across our entire portfolio”, Dell said.
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As a private company, the combined EMC-Dell will be “investing for the long term”, with “no 90-day shot clock”. “Digital transformation, the software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobility and security”. Follow him on Twitter @RBGatesTT or email him at [email protected].
