Dell EMC — Would It Be Able To Deliver Big?

Dell EMC has lined up a portfolio comprising the building blocks of modern IT. There are early signs of success, but there are many threats as well. Will Dell EMC be able to outpace them?

- Ed Nair

Dell Technologies, the company formed out of the merger between Dell and EMC, held the first edition of its annual showcase for customers, technologists, partners, and influencers at Las Vegas in May. With over 13500 attendees from 122 countries, Dell EMC World 2017 (DEW 2017) could contend to have been one of the largest shows in IT.

Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies in his keynote reiterated the company’s approach to helping customers with IT transformation, workplace transformation, and security transformation in their journey of digital transformation. Michael said, “Digital transformation is the ticket to the dance of continuous innovation”. Michael and his top team dwelt on the essential contours of what the company achieved in the past few months since the merger, new product launches and technology roadmaps, customer innovations, new consumption models, and the emergence of Dell Technologies Capital, its corporate venture arm, from stealth mode.

But let’s step back for a moment and look again at the Dell- EMC merger from a strategic point of view. Agreed that enough has been said about it by now. But they have all been official statements carefully crafted by the corporate communications team and mostly attributed to Michael Dell himself. I was looking for a different articulation about the logic behind the Dell EMC merger.

At DEW 2017, I caught up with someone who has been involved with Dell and its various acquisitions, its divestitures, and the EMC merger. Matt Baker, Senior VP- Strategy and Planning, Dell EMC has been at Dell over the past 12 years in the role of strategy leader. In this role, he made number of acquisitions of product companies and services companies in the run-up to making Dell an enterprise IT company shedding its ‘PC vendor only’ image.