Michael Dell says EMC merger has exceeded promise
The combined tech juggernaut of Dell and Hopkintonbased EMC is bringing in billions more in revenue each year than expected, CEO Michael Dell of Dell Technologies said.
“It’s gone very well. We found the cultures were actually quite similar and the things that both companies valued were the same. The businesses were very complementary,” Dell said after an appearance in Boston yesterday. “The revenue synergies have been better than we had planned for, more than we’d planned for, by a couple billion dollars.”
In the quarter ending Aug. 4, Dell EMC brought in $7.4 billion in revenue, a 7 percent increase from the quarter before. The Dell EMC unit sells servers and storage to businesses. Dell said the combined company has become about a $30 billion business.
Speaking at the Boston College Chief Executive’s club, Dell said the company and EMC were close to a merger agreement nearly a decade ago, but plans were scuttled when the financial crisis hit.
“We were meeting in undisclosed locations and (using) code names,” Dell said.
Last year, the acquisition was finalized, making the combined company the largest privately held tech company. The roughly $67 billion price tag made the deal the most expensive tech acquisition in history. Dell EMC has about 9,000 employees in Massachusetts.
Dell said the company he started as a 19-year-old college freshman is setting itself up to be the foundation of what he describes as the “fourth industrial revolution” as companies figure out how to use the huge amounts of data they collect every day.
“If you’re building a smart building or a smart car or a smart bridge, or any kind of new object and you want to make it intelligent, well you need all kinds of computing power,” Dell said. “We’re providing all the hardware and software and security to be able to make that happen. ... We see a huge build-out in infrastructure because of the intelligence that’s embedded in all of these objects.”