ESG's Mark Peters discusses his impressions from the Dell Technologies Summit 2019, held in Austin.
Read the related ESG Blog(s):
- Dell Technologies Summit by Mark Peters
- Dell Tech Summit 2019: Delivering Automatic, On-demand IT, with Goals for Sustainability and Inclusion by Scott Sinclair
Mark: The scale of Dell is pretty darned impressive. I mean, that's not really news.
But whether in terms of its sheer revenue, sales and partner presence, or its representation in significant organizations where it serves 98% of the Fortune 500, it's a hard vendor to avoid. But it hasn't always had a defined attitude to match its definite aptitude. That's been changing for a while, however. And at the "Dell Technology Summit" last week, we saw an all grown up version of the company that looks to be hitting its stride as the progeny if you like of technical optimism and open simplifying.
The most pertinent thing in my view was not the breadth and depths of things, although more on that in a moment, but the succinct way in which the key things were conveyed. The longer I do this job, the more I'm convinced of an inverse relationship between the amount of time a vendor takes to introduce or explain something and the actual value of that thing. Dell, as in Michael, had the three key points of the event on the screen and essentially dealt with in just a few minutes.
Whether he was talking about Moonshot, Dell Technologies On Demand, or Dell EMC PowerOne, the essence and value was crystal clear, extensive and compelling. Now, while you can read and watch plenty about all these in myriad other sources, here's the nutshell versions. Moonshot is Dell's encapsulation and embrace of significant social advances over the next decade, stretch goals that cover sustainability, gender employment equality, improving lives and ethics and privacy or privacy depending on your preference.
Dell Technologies On Demand is self-explanatory, and more importantly has very few asterisks, as the program covers most Dell Technology's offerings, and is backed by Dell's significant financial clout. Jeff Clarke was able to cover it really well in under five minutes, I think, and that by my rules makes it a very powerful statement. And Dell EMC PowerOne was the centerpiece product introduction, a sophisticated and scalable converged infrastructure platform that leads with its automation.
Now, of course, there were breakouts and deep dives on a whole host of topics, everything from CFO, Tom Sweet, yeah CFO, talking about the value of brand and reputation to Dell's financial success, through to analysis of Dell's Cloud and Edge thoughts and plays. The former being a steady course on unifying multi clouds to serve singular businesses and their specific needs.
The latter being an early acknowledgement that the edge may be trendy right now, but the basics of IT physics don't change. As is so often the case with this sort of event, its tone that matters just as much as content. And the tone was that a capable and confident adult. Okay, so an adult with nearly $100 billion revenue and 22 million orders processed a year.
But the takeaway is that Dell increasingly looks less like the sum of its various parts, and increasingly like a coordinated and very solid IT vendor.