theCUBE Live With Michael Dell

It’s barely a year since Michael Dell took his company private, but already he’s insisting the gamble is paying off. “We’ve got incredible momentum in the business and we’re growing all across the world in every single business,” said Dell in a segment on theCUBE. “It’s a lot of fun, not managing with the 90-day shot clock, being in control of our own destiny, it’s all good.”

Throughout its 29-year history, Dell Inc. has consistently upset the applecart in Silicon Valley. It was during the early 1990s that the Round Rock, Texas-based company emerged as a leading innovator in laptops, helping to make them powerful, portable workhorses of business users all over the world. Despite intense competition from the likes of IBM corp., Sony Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and others, Dell achieved remarkably consistent market growth througout the decade.

Things briefly went awry in the mid-2000s when Dell the man quit the CEO job, while Dell the company struggled, first with PC price wars, and later with the rise of tablets and smartphones that strangled demand for its laptops. Shareholders were left begging for Dell to return and restore the company’s fortunes. And that’s exactly what he did, reassuming his role as CEO and vowing to steer the company away from its dependence on PCs.

Since coming back, Dell has built on the company’s ties to its corporate customers and slowly transformed it into leading enterprise IT vendor that’s ready to take on and conquer giants like IBM, HP, Cisco Systems Ltd., and the rest.

“We’re in an incredible time where there’s just an amazing amount of possibilities the impact of technology can have in our world,” said Dell. “You look at what’s going on in the data economy. You look at what’s going on in bio-tech and being able to unlock a lot of the mysteries of health and science with all this computing power. There’s a ton of opportunities and we’ve got plenty on our plate and we’re growing nicely.”

Shaping the digital fabric

Michael Dell chats with Dave Vellante on theCUBE at Dell World 2014

If anything, that’s an understatement – what Dell really should have said is that there’s never been more opportunities, or better opportunities, for a company like Dell to advance. Dell’s transition comes as we enter a new era of digital infrastructure that Dave Moschella at CSC has termed “a digital fabric”, wherein the traditional vertical industry stack is being replaced by a wave of horizontal services such as compute/store/connect; Identify/secure/transact; Publish/communicate; and Sense/analyze/understand.

Few companies seem to fit into this ‘digital fabric’ quite as well as Dell, which has managed to get its fingers into just about every pie one can find within the data center.

“I was struck when I got here,” said theCUBE host Dave Vellante to Dell. “Networking, flash, converged, Oracle systems, VMware, Docker, NFV, IoT, Big Data, hyperscale, services, security, system management. Beneath these you’ve got an unbelievable portfolio that you’ve amassed.”

And Dell could easily help itself to a much bigger slice of the pie, because it finds itself in the unique position of having money to burn and no-one to answer to.

“It actually costs a lot less to be a private company than a public company,” revealed Dell. “And if you’re managing with a 90-day shot clock, you don’t take a lot of risk because you want to meet that guidance. That’s all gone, we’re accepting risk and placing bets across the business. We’re handing out more money to go and take those risks and invest.”

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Streets ahead in software-defined storage

Dell’s spending spree has already borne fruit, with “at least fifty product launches” in the last year, according to Vellante, while Michael Dell claimed his company is seeing growth in just about every market it’s got it’s teeth into, and he’s not just talking about the money.

“We’re gaining share. Revenue is great, we’ve got revenues, they’re growing, trust me,” he joked. “But in a world where the game is changing, where the network and storage are becoming software-defined, you’ve got to look at the whole thing. Internal storage, external storage, combine it altogether and we’re number one, we’re growing and other guys are shrinking.”

As if to underline that point, Dell took the opportunity to roll out a range of new storage and server products designed to strengthen its grip on the software-defined data center. The most exciting of these, according to Michael Dell, is the 13th generation PowerEdge FX server enclosure – a fully converged enclosure with shared power, cooling, management and PCI connectivity that can flexibly support a variety of server, storage and networking modules, designed to address the shortcomings of both blade and rack servers.

“It is the core of the core of the data center,” said Dell. “We’re big believers in software-defined and software-based networking and storage. We’ve seen this trend for some time, where, because of virtualization and cloud based models, workloads are moving into the compute layer.”

Pushing the private cloud

Dell also happens to be a big believer in the cloud too, especially the water-tight variety. “What we see primarily from enterprise customers is the growth of the private cloud,” he said. “When I think about the public cloud, I think about it as having this perfect efficiency, but the private cloud is getting better and better.”

What Dell is trying to do with its hyperconverged systems is to give its customers the best of both worlds – combining the efficiency of public cloud with the privacy and security afforded by private clouds. “We’re seeing tremendous growth here, and of course we’ve got the hardware, the software, and the services to help make it happen,” said Dell.

That’s not to say Dell isn’t paying any attention to the public cloud. On the contrary, the company makes a good deal of cash from selling its infrastructure to the major public cloud providers, and so it has a keen interest in making sure both cloud varieties go from strength to strength.

“Once a customer wants to go to the public cloud, we’ll help them go there, and if they want to go to the private cloud we’ll help them go there too,” insists Dell. “In the software-defined world you’ve got to give customers a choice. We’re big believers in choice.”