Dell Technologies lifts off: Here's what to watch as Dell, EMC, a bevy of enterprise businesses combine

#DellTechnologies will be comprised of #Dell, #EMC, #VMware, #SecureWorks, #Pivotal, #Virtustream, #VCE, and #RSA. It's a datacenter juggernaut that'll need to be nimble as workloads move to the public cloud.

Dell is about to take the wraps off its new name, Dell Technologies, with Dell EMC as the company's enterprise brand, Dell for PCs and VMware, the linchpin in @MichaelDell 's master plan for reinvention.
On Sept. 7, Dell will close its EMC purchase. Dell Technologies includes the businesses of Dell, EMC, a PC unit, VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, Virtustream, and RSA. Toss in converged infrastructure from the likes of EMC's VCE for good measure.

Simply put, the Dell Technologies menu is massive. How this enterprise giant navigates account management, innovation, and product overlaps for technology buyers remains to be seen. What's notable here is how rival Hewlett-Packard split up into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. Lenovo has bulked up its enterprise ambitions. And IBM is retooling to shed commodity datacenter gear and focus on Watson, analytics, and growth markets.

Indeed, Michael Dell appears to be zigging toward scale when other datacenter players are trying to slim down and be nimble. The elephant in the enterprise room is Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure as a trio that's taking more workloads.

The CEO of Dell has promised to be more nimble and innovative -- even as the combined company swells. We'll see how this one turns out. In the meantime, here are the key questions.

HYBRID JUGGERNAUT -- BUT THEN WHAT?

There is no doubt that the combination of Dell and EMC will dominate the datacenter. It's likely that every enterprise will be buying from some tentacle of the company. And if you add VMware in the mix, it's clear that most enterprises will be working with a few less vendors.

Is that a good thing? Dell Technologies will argue that, yes, scale is wonderful since there's one less throat to choke. The IT buyer, however, may want diversification. Yes, Dell Technologies will have more of your technology budget, but many companies will aim to diversify out of principal.

The big question is how companies will diversify. Will more of their datacenters go to a traditional rival, such as Lenovo or HPE, or the public cloud players?

http://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-technologies-lifts-off-heres-what-to-watch-as-dell-emc-a-bevy-of-enterprise-businesses-combine/