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Dell Enterprise One Year Later

This article is more than 10 years old.

It was old home week for many of us, former and current colleagues, a lot of back slapping, and a few cocktails.

The question on everyone’s mind was essentially this: so, a year hence, after you announced or rather re-emphasized your commitment to transforming Dell from an outfit that bangs boxes together into a first-tier enterprise supplier — a provider of “converged cloud” solutions, as the current jargon has it — how is it going?

The company was relentlessly on message.  At one point, in plenary session, one of the analysts noted, in lieu of a question, that management should be complimented on its unity of tone.

All this careful craftsmanship had but one goal: to convince us that Dell is serious about this repositioning business.

In contrast to the old days, when at least some portion of every meeting of this sort was devoted to product highlights, demos, and roadmaps, over a day and a half, there was almost no discussion of products.  Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman and long-time aide-de-camp of Michael Dell, almost offhandedly answered an inquiry by saying, yes, there will be tablets, when Microsoft releases Windows 8, and yes, there will be more phones, time and place of our choosing.

Citing industry research, no doubt coming from one or more of the firms in the audience, Clarke noted that one-third of the workforce is now mobile, half of all endpoints sold in the world will be smart phones or tablets in 2015, and most users now have two to three devices.  He said the company intends to “increase tablet and smart phone prominence and product mix,” promising that we “will see rich a portfolio of phones, built for business.”

That was it on boxes.  Of PCs?  Nary a whisper.

Oh, at one point the leaders of four practices — servers, storage, networking, and software — actually got up and stuck their modules into an M1000 blade chassis, just to show that they really could build a modular, converged system.  Well, actually, Praveen Asthana, VP of Enterprise Strategy and Marketing and software spokesman of the moment, just held up a USB key for the audience to see and said it contained the 100,000 lines of code that glue the hardware elements together.  He didn’t actually load it in our presence.  But the point was taken.  These guys have an increasingly full set of solutions, and it’s not just imaginary.

The rest of the time was devoted to establishing, step by step, proof points that demonstrated the progress the company is making toward becoming a full-line enterprise supplier.

As in any situation in which a vendor is asserting some capability, the best spokespeople are its customers.  Steve Felice, President and Chief Commercial Officer (you don’t think these “C” titles are getting a bit out of hand?) ran a panel which featured a well-funded startup, a quirky content creation company, and a well-established services company that works with non-profits.

Of course, they sang Dell’s praises.  They were, after all, hand picked.

But the startup really drew some attention.  Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Lauren Flanagan’s latest challenge is launching an electric scooter manufacturer.  Current Motor is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and uses IT in a number of interesting ways.

The vehicle gets 50 miles to a charge and can go up to 55 miles per hour (although Flanagan noted that she has heard anecdotal reports of people doing 70).  People considering buying an electric vehicle are greatly concerned with driving range and battery life.  So, the Current Motor scooter’s dashboard transmits instrument data to the cloud to closely monitor battery health and remaining drive time.  Route-planning software allows the rider to match a proposed journey to the scooter’s battery state.  Oh, and each scooter gets a customized skin, which can be drawn from a variety of patterns available in an online gallery or uploaded by the buyer.  A “sales cloud” provides information to Current’s team, letting them know that, for example, you stopped by their booth at South by Southwest and later checked out a zebra pattern online.

So, what’s Dell’s role in all this?  Flanagan saved precious startup capital (from venture funds) that might have gone to establishing a datacenter by turning to Dell’s cloud services.  “We don’t need a CIO,” she said.  “We have Dell, a CIO in a box.”  Current also got significant trade financing from Dell.  In a rapid standup, the first scooters started shipping in February this year.

Dell partners got only slightly less spotlight than Dell customers.  Big players in big data, including Microsoft, Cloudera, SAP, and SAS testified to the solidity of Dell’s offerings.

Dell management also devoted a fair amount of space at the conference to talking about its many acquisitions and their integration.  These companies have been key to building out Dell’s enterprise capabilities.  There are literally too many to enumerate here, and the pace of acquisition has been pretty brisk.  In one week early this month, the company announced not one, not two, but three new buys: Make Technologies, Wyse Technologies, and Clerity Solutions.

Dave Johnson, SVP of Corporate Strategy, told a small group of analysts that Dell is fine-tuning its ability to integrate these new pieces into its enterprise-capability mosaic.  By monitoring metrics like sales force retention regularly, he can see whether a new acquisition is acculturating.  A senior Dell manager is assigned to operate “in a box” with the chief of the new subsidiary.  Sales goals are aligned, and collaboration and communication are emphasized.

A lot of numbers were thrown around during the meeting, but one really stuck with me.  Steve Schuckenbrock, President of Dell Services, noted that of the large services contracts that came up for renewal in 2011, Dell retained 100% of them.

Now, that’s customer satisfaction.

Disclosure: Endpoint has a consulting relationship with Dell.

© 2012 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc.  All rights reserved.

Twitter: RogerKay