@MichaelDell, the founder of #DellTechnologies, explains how his company got to be as big as #IBM and why he’s steered it toward AI and the data boom. Q: When I interviewed you 25 years ago, you were 26. You made a bold prediction: Dell would be bigger than IBM someday. Fast forward: IBM’s latest fiscal year was $80 billion in sales; your first quarter this year was nearly $20 billion. Are you as big as IBM now? Dell: Well, it’s pretty close. (Chuckles.) Pretty close
Q: Explain your 2015 acquisition of EMC for $67 billion. I thought the cloud had killed storage. Did you overpay?
Dell: Looking at the cloud, I see an analogy to the Internet. The cloud isn’t a place, it’s a way of doing IT. If we were having this discussion 20 years ago, we’d be talking about the Internet and you’d be asking, “What’s your Internet strategy? Where’s your Internet product division? Who’s your vice president of the Internet?” And where’s all of that stuff now? The Internet is just a part of everything.
Well, the cloud is becoming like that. If you think about what’s really going on in IT, there’s this enormous wave of transformation that’s occurring with all the data. And the data is informing better decisions. You get artificial intelligence, machine intelligence. And what’s the fuel for all that progress? It’s the data.
If AI is a rocket ship, the data is the fuel. And the more connected devices you have--whether it’s the Internet of Things or imbedded intelligence--the smarter and faster you get. So what we see is a mass of opportunity with all the connected devices, all the data, all the new computer science. And you can put your data center here, there or wherever you want, but we don’t see all of your data going to one place.
Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Technologies, explains how his company got to be as big as IBM and why he’s steered it toward AI and the data boom.
Q: When I interviewed you 25 years ago, you were 26. You made a bold prediction: Dell would be bigger than IBM someday. Fast forward: IBM’s latest fiscal year was $80 billion in sales; your first quarter this year was nearly $20 billion. Are you as big as IBM now?
Dell: Well, it’s pretty close. (Chuckles.) Pretty close.
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Q: Explain your 2015 acquisition of EMC for $67 billion. I thought the cloud had killed storage. Did you overpay?
Dell: Looking at the cloud, I see an analogy to the Internet. The cloud isn’t a place, it’s a way of doing IT. If we were having this discussion 20 years ago, we’d be talking about the Internet and you’d be asking, “What’s your Internet strategy? Where’s your Internet product division? Who’s your vice president of the Internet?” And where’s all of that stuff now? The Internet is just a part of everything.
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Well, the cloud is becoming like that. If you think about what’s really going on in IT, there’s this enormous wave of transformation that’s occurring with all the data. And the data is informing better decisions. You get artificial intelligence, machine intelligence. And what’s the fuel for all that progress? It’s the data.
If AI is a rocket ship, the data is the fuel. And the more connected devices you have--whether it’s the Internet of Things or imbedded intelligence--the smarter and faster you get. So what we see is a mass of opportunity with all the connected devices, all the data, all the new computer science. And you can put your data center here, there or wherever you want, but we don’t see all of your data going to one place.
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Q: In fact, most regulated industries--or any of the industries that are intensely transactional-- say they want to hedge their bets with both cloud and on-premise storage.
Dell: There was a study that came out in May from something called the Uptime Institute, and it asked people, “Where do you have all your data?” And 13% was in the public cloud, 65% was on-premise, with the remainder in co-location and managed services. So the idea that everything goes to the public cloud isn’t correct.
There are use cases where a public cloud makes sense. But when you modernize and automate on-premise systems, whether they’re a managed service or a co-lo, they become extremely efficient. That technology isn’t standing still.
Then, when you further imagine this future of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the fifth generation cellular network (5G ), you’re talking about hundreds of billions of connected devices. And a 5G cellular network isn’t so you can talk on the phone faster; it’s for low-latency device-to-device communication.
When we look at what’s going on in the automotive, medical and industrial fields, we see that all of the companies involved are embedding intelligence into their products, which creates huge amounts of data. Again, the data is the fuel. That data has to be reasoned over, using new computer science--and not just the real-time data but also historical data.
As you do that, you’re able to create a better product and a better service. Now, one really interesting thing is that as you get more data and as you get better computer science, the historical data actually appreciates in value.
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