#Dell ’s privatization in 2013 and $67 billion merger with #EMC has been a four-year epic, running longer than many television series. The newly branded company that emerged — #DellTechnologies Inc. — now stores more than half of the mission-critical data in the world, according to Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell. And the company has recently returned to the Fortune 500 list as one of the top 50-largest companies in the U.S. (ranked 41st this month). Dell’s transformation from a PC hardware supplier with its own direct channel to a new entity represented by a growing set of channel partners offering storage, #Hyperconverged Infrastructure products and a portfolio of enterprise services has been closely observed by the information technology industry. For Jeremy Burton (pictured, right), chief marketing officer for Dell Technologies, it’s a saga he’s more than happy to tell. “Dell Technologies is a family of brands; that’s the approach that we’re taking. We want to make sure that our people understand that Dell Technologies is maybe not what you thought Dell was as it evolved,” he said. Burton spoke with Stu Miniman (pictured, left) (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent WTG Dell EMC Users’ Group in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed Dell Technologies’ enterprise solutions, an expanding channel partner network, the importance of anticipating future tech trends and challenges facing IT shops today. (* Disclosure below.) This week theCUBE features Jeremy Burton as our Guest of the Week. The Dell Technologies family now includes the Dell PC business, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware. The company’s most recent Q1 report showed that PC shipments have risen for 17 consecutive quarters, while the Infrastructure Solutions Group produced $6.9 billion of revenue in the quarter. Triple-digit growth for hyperconverged Perhaps more significantly, Dell claimed to be the worldwide leader in x86 servers, with double-digit revenue growth for PowerEdge units. The company also said that it was seeing triple-digit growth in demand for its hyperconverged portfolio. The company’s array of technology solutions gives Dell the opportunity to embrace key trends in the world of enterprise technology and provide solutions to meet user needs, according to Burton. “We’ve got a good idea of what the general themes are. The best thing we can do to help our users is to articulate those very clearly,” he said. Much of that messaging comes through Dell’s expanding network of channel partnerships. Among the milestones noted in Dell’s Q1 report was 6,000 net new customers, including several hundred new enterprise accounts, delivered though the company’s partner chain. One of those partners, Winslow Technology Group, came into the Dell Technologies fold through prior involvement with Compellant, a storage solutions business that Dell acquired six years ago. In addition to Dell, the consultant group also has relationships with Nutanix Inc. and VMware Inc. and has deliberately followed a tight-knit approach. “Sometimes, they’re better at presenting a solution to a customer than even we are. They’re pretty adept, in local markets in particular, at knowing what that customer’s business is and giving them impartial advice,” Burton stated. Dell EMC moved quickly to roll out a unified channel identity program, only five months after the merger was finalized in 2016. Reports since have indicated that the company has nearly doubled rebates for EMC storage and HCI products and aggressively incentivized PC and server line sales. Dell Technologies has also taken an active role in the field of industry research. The company recently released a report that showed advances in software-defined networking will play a key role in the evolution of human-machine relationships. Need to anticipate future trends Being able to anticipate future technology trends will be important to customers throughout the IT industry, according to Burton. “The reality is if you lock into a three-to-four-year roadmap, articulate it and get committed to it, it could quite easily change,” he stated, further emphasizing the importance for companies to adopt more agile methodologies in order to “build course corrections into the development process.” While Dell Technologies builds its identity as the umbrella for Dell EMC brands, Burton said that the company is mindful of the perils facing IT departments as they support the enterprise in a highly competitive environment. “The threat is if you don’t get on board, you could find yourself with your nose pressed against the window, looking at a different IT operation doing the work that maybe you want to do as an IT pro,” Burton said. “So its exciting times and scary times together.”
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