theCUBE Live With Michael Dell

Dell Inc. believes its decision to go private was the correct one, helping it to get its products to market faster and spur the company’s growth.

Kicking off the company’s annual Dell World conference in Austin, Texas, CEO Michael Dell said “It’s been a year since we completed our privatisation – actually the largest company ever to go private. We couldn’t be more pleased with the positioning, the progress and the performance of our business.”

“One of the advantages of being private is that we can direct 100 per cent of our energy towards the success of our customers and partners, and focus on a future that is well beyond the next quarter, the next year or the next shareholder activist,” he added.

Dell’s privatization bid was not without troubles. Michael Dell was forced into a bruising 8-month struggle with activist investor Carl Icahn, who opposed the move and wanted to push the company’s CEO out. However, Dell eventually got his way by arguing privitization was the only way to accelerate the company’s transformation from a PC and hardware maker into a fully-feldged enterprise IT services and solutions vendor.

Dell finally went private in October of last year, and it couldn’t have picked a better time to do it. The move coincided with a rebound in the PC market (thanks in part to Windows XP’s demise), while at the same time several of Dell’s competitors have experienced turmoil – Hewlett-Packard Co., has since decided to split itself into two companies, IBM Corp. moved further away from hardware by selling its x86 server unit to Lenovo Group Ltd., and most recently, EMC Corp. has been battling to keep its own federation of companies together.

Meanwhile, Michael Dell insists things have been looking up for Dell the company, boasting of strong growth seen in the last 12 months. Dell declined to give specific figures to back this claim, but did offer a few tidbits, saying its software business has seen double-digit growth while its 3rd quarter PC shipments rose by 10 percent.

Dell said one reason for this was that going private meant it had become more agile, with freedom to act faster. “We don’t have that 90-day shot clock that other businesses do,” he said.

Dell also took the opportunity to take a swipe at arch-rival HP’s own survival strategy, saying its split would create “chaos” within the company.

“One has to ask the question, who is this [spinning off] for?” he said. “Is this for customers, does it actually help customers by doing this? Does it help partners? Does it help in research and development [or] to create the next great new innovations?”

Later in his talk, Dell spoke about some of the firm’s product launches to be announced later today. These include its new converged data center solution the PowerEdge FX, which combines Dell’s networking, server and storage technologies to improve density and scalability. He also spoke about the company’s new cloud marketplace that customers can use to find infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions.

Dell was also took time to field a few questions about the firm’s mobile strategy. Regarding this, Dell said the company was planning to stay away from smartphones (too competitive), but would instead focus on two-in-ones, tablets and services.

Finally, Dell addressed the number of job cuts the company had made earlier in the year, saying these were done through a voluntary separation program. This was “more humane”, he said, adding that the firm continues to evolve and is still hiring people in R&D, sales and services.