Today marks the first anniversary of the historic $68 billion deal to combine Dell and EMC.
So, what’s changed?
Well…in a word: Dell has changed. Dell now has teamed up the salesforce of both companies, created a $35 billion channel ecosystem and added to its portfolio with RSA, Pivotal, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware.
Dell EMC Canada’s newly named President of its commercial side Kevin Connolly summarized the year as a journey where the company managed to increase its cross-selling efforts on server, client and converged infrastructure, while also paying down the debt.
Connolly told CDN that Dell paid down approximately $9.5 billion in debt with the aid of three divestitures.
“One year is hard to summarize but the biggest surprise is that there were no big surprises. And, as an employee that’s good news,” Connolly said.
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Mike Sharun, the President of Dell EMC Canada Enterprise, said the new company has been making in-roads in workforce transformation, data centres and security in the Canadian marketplace.
Mike Sharun
“When you start to look at digital transformation we become the only company that has a full suite of solutions from the edge to the cloud. Customers today do not want to deal with 10 to 15 vendors, but a few trusted suppliers who have a vision that can take them into the next 15 years,” he said.
Sharun added that they now are that 800-pound gorilla competitors like to refer too. But in the storage arena, which was a big aspect of the 2015 deal, Sharun said Dell EMC has been able to position itself in the mid-range space which is ideal for the Canadian market even in new areas such as all flash array solutions.
“We are a big company but we always tended to run them as a startup when we were EMC. When Michael Dell brought the companies together we remained focused on running them as if we were a small company even though we have 138,000 employees and are in 180 countries,” he said.
Dell’s channel business has also changed. Connolly said the two salesforces are now one, organizational accounts have been set and each team has their market segments assigned. Connolly, who has been on the job for just a month and a half, has already met with 25 channel partners.
Kevin Connolly
“My goal, not unlike with the salesforce, for the reseller partners is to help them sell client and infrastructure. I can walk into a partner’s office and ask them ‘if you are thinking about expanding’ why not invest in this line of business. And, when I do that I haven’t gotten any ‘no’s’ yet,” Connolly said.
With one year in the books, Connolly is focusing on the commercial hyper converge market for year two. He believes that the hyper converged market is ripe partner opportunity for Canada. Connolly is working on a plan for this space and wants to take a more of a leading effort in 2018.
As part of its one year celebration Dell EMC announced that GE signed a multi-year deal to use Dell EMC infrastructure solutions and other computing products specifically for its digital transformation journey.