Monday, October 24, 2016

Dell EMC merger: Future prospects for Virtustream, VMware, Pivotal

At #Dell #EMC World, executive leaders from #Virtustream, #VMware and #Pivotal described how the Dell EMC merger has impacted their companies; more channel news from the week.

At this week's Dell EMC World conference in Austin, executives from companies under the Dell Technologies umbrella discussed the benefits of the new organizational structure.

One of those executives was Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, a public cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2009 that focuses on mission-critical and highly regulated applications.

"When we took a look at developing Virtustream, we said that we were going to solve an engineering problem that was most characteristic of large-scale enterprise applications," Rogers said of his company's origins. "And we developed the software that allowed us to optimize running the properties of these mission-critical types of apps that take up such a large portion of the application estate of large corporations."

Now as a unit of Dell Technologies, Virtustream has entered into a new phase of growth, he said, and the company will continue to work independently to pursue its goals while bolstered by Dell Technologies' assets. "The way this [Dell Technologies] structure works for us and the reason that it is, quite frankly, awesome to support both innovation and growth is that we're essentially allowed to continue to do what we're doing from a product-development perspective," he said.

"We still have our own roadmap. We have our resources that we applied toward developing our software. … But yet we have the backdrop and the strength of the greater organization to call on. It gives us a lot of balance-sheet support. And it gives us a lot of reach into the marketplace. There is not a Fortune 500 CIO that we can't get a meeting with today."

Brandon Sweeney, senior vice president of sales at VMware, said the Dell-EMC merger allows VMware to further expand its business globally. He noted that VMware doesn't have as a strong a footprint as it would like in Asia, India and Eastern Europe. Dell Technologies also presents an opportunity to add more coverage here in the States. "I think, frankly, Dell will help bring some operational rigor to VMware that we can benefit from as we look to scale globally."

"Fundamentally, we are a strategically aligned business unit, and we are eager to partner much more closely with Dell. … We all know we have to run a balanced ecosystem to drive the overall numbers, but there's a tremendous opportunity for [partners] to help us better align around our go-to-market motion and make sure it's really simple for [partners] to drive customer solutions," he said.

In terms of the mutual benefit, he believes VMware will help Dell by driving customer conversations, citing software-defined data centers, hybrid cloud and mobile devices as a few examples. "The ability to marry all of these technical [lenses] together to make it easier for our customers, enable them on a digital journey, I think it's a tremendous opportunity," he said.

Finally, for software and services company Pivotal, the Dell EMC merger has ushered in important research-and-development and engineering capabilities.

"I think there's an environment out there where companies have essentially been adapting to the cloud era in their industry, and more and more people feel if they don't have differentiating software behind their offering, they're going to fall behind. That's happening at a time where, over the last 10 years, people have been trying to outsource a lot of what they do in software development," said James Watters, senior vice president of Pivotal's product and business development organizations.

"At the boardroom level, software proficiency has become a hot topic that people care about. And that's really important as you look to build a business with Pivotal -- that this is a boardroom-level topic, and that's what's so unique about it."

In this environment, vendors need "a whole set of assets to compete … because when you're at the boardroom level, they care about the end-to-end throughput in productivity. They're not as much as worried about the best-of-breed at every layer there," Watters noted.

"The idea that we have this unified set of businesses where I can go to our companies and say, 'Oh, there are six engineers from VMware that are on Cloud Foundry as a project. This thing's going to work well together.'  … This is the kind of end-to-end engineering relationships the customers need," he said.

"You can't just hand them nine different best-of-breed parts and say, 'Good luck' anymore. The speed of business is really fundamentally changed from that era."

http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/news/450401551/Dell-EMC-merger-Future-prospects-for-Virtustream-VMware-Pivotal



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