WOULD DELL EMC BE ABLE TO DELIVER?

Eight months ago, in September 2016, the $67B

merger between Dell and EMC was completed. It was the tech industry’s biggest merger ever, done against the backdrop of disruptive change in the tech industry, with the merging companies representing the old order rather than the new one.

Most mergers in the past in tech have not been successful and the larger the companies involved, larger are the stakes and slimmer are the chances of pulling it off.

One undisputed trend in enterprise IT is that public cloud vendors (such as AWS, Microsoft, Google) are eating the lunch of traditional IT infrastructure players like IBM, Oracle, HPE, and Dell EMC. Public cloud is the biggest threat that Dell EMC has to face up to. Michael Dell mentioned in his keynote that public cloud is twice as costly than on-premise, everything cannot be done on public cloud, he referred to it as the ‘boomerang effect’. Dell EMC’s best response to this threat is to offer a range of IT infrastructure consumption models on pay-for-usage basis. The company does not plan to offer a public cloud service yet; it may even not be the best competitive maneuver. But the threat of public cloud remains a big one.

Even though it is too early to pronounce a verdict, we can begin to catch some early signals on the success of the merger based on the content, messages, and the flavor of conversations at DEW this year. Dell EMC has begun its journey well, packed the right stuff, started out in the right direction, with seemingly the right maps and weather details. Thumbs up on this one, at least for now. Dell Technologies family of businesses is poised well to deliver modern and secure IT infrastructure across the edge, the core, and the cloud to serve variety of computing workloads. With the sheer breadth of its product portfolio, the renewed partner strategy, the network of global alliances and their solutions portfolio, and the continuing investments in R&D, it is expected that Dell EMC is outvoted by its customers.