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Dell Technologies aims for startup agility at enterprise scale

In his keynote address at the very first Dell EMC World, Michael Dell touted his company's unique position as a leading force in IT transformation.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
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Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell.

The Dell EMC marriage is in its honeymoon stage, and CEO Michael Dell has all sorts of loving things to say about his new Dell Technologies conglomerate.

In his keynote address at the tech giant's first customer event since Dell completed the acquisition of EMC, Dell touted what he believes is his company's unique position as a leading force in IT transformation.

According to Dell, bigger is better, private companies have it better than public ones, and hybrid cloud is the natural destination for today's enterprises.

"We are the largest enterprise systems company in the entire world," Dell said. "This unique structure allows us to be nimble and innovative like a startup but at the scale of a global powerhouse."

Looking ahead, Dell said Dell Technologies is positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for the entire IT stack, including servers, storage, virtualization, security, cloud infrastructure, the software-defined data center, and platform-as-a-service, just to name a few.

He also stressed that being a leader with such extreme capacity is possible because Dell Technologies is not beholden to shareholders.

"As a privately controlled company, we have an advantaged financial structure," Dell said. "Our cash flow to debt service ratios are phenomenal and far less than what our competitors spend on buy backs and dividends. We love being a privately controlled company because we are focused on long-term success, not short term EPS. We can think in a time horizon that's measured in decades."

Going forward, Dell said Dell Technologies is aligning capabilities across the entire family of brands to deliver engineered solutions in hybrid cloud, data, analytics, and security -- providing what he believes will emerge as the industry's leading converged and hyper-converged infrastructure from the edge to the data center. Part of this will come out of the company's substantial investments in research and development, Dell said.

In terms of his cloud vision, Dell said he believes "everyone is on a journey to the hybrid cloud," and that Dell Technologies will support that journey by focusing on three steps: Modernizing the data center, automating every process in IT, and transforming IT to operate much more like a service provider.

To that end, Dell unveiled a host of new product offerings aimed at boosting its infrastructure portfolio.

These products include: New VxRail Appliances and VxRack System 1000 hyper-converged infrastructure systems; updates to the Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage object storage platform; Isilon All-Flash Network Attached Storage, a combined strategy for SC Series storage customers; and a software defined version of Dell EMC Data Domain protection.

On Dell's PC legacy, Dell took a moment to reassure customers and partners that nothing was getting left behind.

"People said we were going to be distracted by this combination, that's wrong," he said. "This last quarter we outgrew our competition and year to date all of our major PC competitors have declined. We are the only ones growing."

Dell Technologies' go-to-market strategy didn't get much airtime in Michael Dell's keynote, but the generic theme from the event is that the company wants to be number one in everything, all in one place. To accomplish that, the company will combine sales models and enlist its substantial service provider community to push the Dell Technologies portfolio.

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