Dell Technologies Inc. today announced that Chuck Whitten, a partner at venerable management consultancy Bain & Co., will join the company in the role of co-chief operating officer.

Whitten (pictured) is taking up the co-COO role after serving as the managing partner of Bain’s Bain Southwest division. The executive will work alongside Dell’s existing COO, Jeff Clarke, and report directly to founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell.

“Together Jeff, Chuck and I will shape the future of the company and accelerate the outcomes we can drive for customers,” Michael Dell said in a statement. “Chuck’s leadership, energy, knowledge and humanity make him the obvious choice to join our team and strengthen our industry leadership.”

Whitten is bringing a significant amount of existing Dell experience to the co-COO role. The executive has advised the enterprise technology giant’s leadership team for years on its business strategy and helped shape revenue growth initiatives.

Last quarter, Dell’s revenue grew 12% year-over-year to reach $24.5 billion. The company’s strong top-line performance was driven in significant part by its personal computer group, which boosted sales of consumer machines by 42% and also saw a 14% increase in demand for business-grade devices.

“As our top adviser, Chuck has been an integral part of the team for a long time working across strategy, transformation and operations,” Dell co-COO Jeff Clarke said today. “I couldn’t be happier to have him as co-COO to capture big growth opportunities across our portfolio as the world becomes more digital and data driven.”

“In my opinion this is about long-term succession planning,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon. “Dell is very thoughtful about succession planning and business resilience throughout the company, not just at the top — it’s that supply chain mentality. So this is no surprise and it’s a good thing for investors to see a founder CEO thinking ahead like that. Preserving the culture and long-term viability of the Dell name — that’s what this is.”

Vellante added that if Whitten, who he noted has been around Dell for years as a consultant, could potentially be the CEO someday, “putting him in an operating versus pure strategy role is a smart thing to do.”

Whitten, who holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, is joining Dell after more than two decades at Bain. The executive is the managing partner for the Bain Southwest division, is a member of Bain’s Executive Committee in the Americas and was elected to the management consultancy’s board of directors in 2018.

Whitten has spent the last decade of his 22-year career at the management consultancy focusing exclusively on the technology sector. Bain’s website lists “growth strategy, complexity reduction, cost optimization and capital markets strategy” among the executive’s areas of expertise. He is credited with carrying out projects across a “range of hardware, software, solutions and services market segments.”

Michael Dell appeared on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE in March to discuss the company’s strategy and the future of the enterprise technology market:

Photo: Bain