UPDATED 17:46 EDT / OCTOBER 18 2016

NEWS

Dell EMC: Insights into hyperconverged systems, market in China | #DellEMCWorld

As the field for cloud and hyperconverged systems becomes more clearly defined, the major players in that sector of the market are turning their attention to making their utilities stand out above those of their competitors, with foreign markets forming a key aspect of these strategies.

At the 2016 Dell EMC World event in Austin,TX, Matt Eastwood, SVP of Enterprise Infrastructure and Data Center at IDC Research Inc., joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about several aspects of Dell’s business, with a special focus on the Chinese market.

Finding balance

One of the chief topics of consideration was the organization of Dell and EMC’s soon-unified holdings and how the merged company would make its place in the market. Eastwood shared his assessment of the two companies’ abilities together: “You’ve got these two really strong players in storage and compute. … Customers certainly are giving them a green light to do more together.”

In his assessment, “All those [hyperconverged] players are becoming more software-oriented in how they approach the market,” and Dell-EMC would be well-poised to leverage its assets as that shift took place.

“I think together they’re going to try to balance this thing out and be the best of both worlds,” Eastwood said. “They’re going to really focus on anything they can do to raise cash, including the lower-margin stuff.”

Privilege and position

And while Eastwood sees Dell EMC as a company with a very comfortable place in the tech market, he also felt it would be a long shot, or at least a long time in the making, for them to catch up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in revenue generation.

Still, as he explained, Dell’s position was certainly preferable to that of the companies trying to penetrate the same market spots with lower budgets. “The big guys are gonna be highly customized, and they’re going to do a lot of integration in a customized way. The next tier down can’t afford [to do that],” he said.

Eastwood continued by looking at the continuing definition of the roles of automation and manual handling in the data realm. “The next phase of [data] really builds on the industrial part of this … when you start thinking about where the data’s coming from and the industrialization of the data.”

Holding steady

Another large part of the discussion focused on the challenges and complexities of Dell’s work to establish itself as “more than a branded box” in China, along with responding to customer reactions to the Dell EMC merger.

“What we effectively heard [from customers] … is: ‘Don’t do anything dramatic in terms of terms and conditions … and the products I bought from you,’” Eastwood shared, noting that, overall, response had been positive, since: “If you put yourself in the customers’ shoes, choice is always a good thing.”

Moving to an overview as the interview came to a close, Eastwood picked out what he saw as the key points for market development in the near future: “If you look where all the growth has been coming from in the market, it’s mainly been coming from hyperconverged and China.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell EMC World.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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