Dell EMC: We had no answer to HP on portfolio breadth in the past; now we do

#Dell #EMC has claimed that unifying the two companies means it can better compete with the likes of #HP, to which EMC was "sick and tired" of losing out on big, cross-portfolio deals. Speaking to press at Dell EMC World in Austin, Bill Scannell, Dell EMC's enterprise sales leader and former EMC man, said that in the past, rivals such as HP were able to "package [EMC] out" by offering a wider range of products than it could alone.

But he said together with Dell, this can no longer happen.

"Partners are no different to customers in that they don't want to deal with 100 vendors," he said. "In the past our partners loved our infrastructure products but we didn't have compute and we didn't have the client business so they had to go elsewhere for that.

"I was sick and tired, quite frankly, of having HP packaging us out saying to partners 'hey, if you don't sell our storage, we're not going to sell you our compute'. We had no answer to that but now we do. We're giving our partners end-to-end solutions."

HP split into two a year ago, with HPE now specialising in storage and servers, while HP Inc sells PCs and printers.

Portfolio breadth is a key point Dell EMC executives have been stressing during the conference, with Michael Dell himself boasting that the firm is the leader in "everything" – quipping that any business unit which wasn't occupying the top spot in its market was sold off.

Marius Haas, Dell EMC's president of enterprise solutions and former Dell man, added that the breadth of portfolio will give partners a unique cross-sell opportunity.

"When we looked at our top 10,000 [customer] accounts collectively there was less than 20 per cent overlap [between EMC and Dell]," he said. "Then we looked at our partners and there was a 60 per cent overlap. So that's great because you have a partner ecosystem which for the most part really understands how to serve EMC and Dell, but the opportunity at a customer level is enormous to cross-sell. That's what drives excitement because you can see how you can grow this engine with the collective portfolio we have."

HPE was not immediately available to comment.
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