Consolidation of Dell/EMC Began in Europe

There is one guy, chairman and CEO Michael Dell, 51, at the head of $74 billion Dell Technogies resulting of the acquisition of EMC by Dell for $67 billion, if you except Mik Cote, CEO of SecureWorks, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, and Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal.

Among the former EMC top executives under Michael Dell, you have now Jeremy Burton, CMO, Howard Elias, president, Dell EMC services and IT, David Goulden, president, infrastructure solutions group, and Bill Scannell, president, enterprise sales for the infrastructure solutions business to be be known as Dell EMC.

Joe Tucci, 68, EMC CEO since 2001 has resigned, has no more executive function, and got $27 million golden parachute: $7 million in cash, equal to triple his annual salary and bonus. The other $20 million comes in the form of EMC stock that Tucci had been awarded. The company will also continue to pay for Tucci’s life, disability, accident and health insurance benefits (for himself and his dependents) for three years. He discussed retirement for the past several years but never followed through. He says goodbye at EMC World 2016. Christian Hiller (see below) told us that Tucci was on the board of Dell Technologies but this information has to be confirmed. On this Web page from Bloomberg, the name of Tucci does not appear. John Egan, who’s been a director on the VMware board since 2007 and at a time John EVP of sales and marketing for several years, also resigned.

But in Europe, there will be two heads at the European level: Aongus Hegarty who was Dell EMEA president and becoming EMEA president of Dell EMC, and Adrian McDonald from president of EMC EMEA to Dell EMC. It will be the same in each country until February 1, 2017 when the complete consolidation of EMC and Dell will be achieved. Example: in France, they are Christian Hiller, former SVP and GM of EMC France, and Anwar Dahab, former VP and GM of Dell France. But probably Hiller will conduct Dell EMC in France as Dahab will get a new European position for the PC manufacturer.

The Dell’s acquisition was a big surprise for a lot of people. For us, it’s mainly at the origin a financial operation (EMC could also by Dell, why not?) conducted by Denali Holding Inc., parent company of Dell Inc. But now, the two IT companies try to convince everybody that it’s an industrial operation especially in storage. “In France, only 5% of the revenue are not complementary,” said Dahab. It’s true that EMC is more focused on high-end storage and Dell on SMBs with compute, storage, servers and networking. “If you except Compellent we never were face to face“, remarks Hiller. “Compute was missing but we were and will continue to be in partnership with Cisco.” He has been impressed by Dell’s logistics: “We have thirteen orders per year per customer, they have eight per hour.”

Dahab remembers that there was a partnership in 2001 between Dell and EMC on CLARiiON line: “We still offer services to some customers.”

But the storage portfolio of EMC is much larger and covers about all the Dell’s offering. EMC Dell will probably keep Compellent, a low-end VNX, and it has been revealed that software-defined storage platform ViPR will support Compellent, the most successful Dell’s storage product. But what will happen to EquaLogic? We don’t see the new company keeping so many different not-compatible storage lines.

Concerning flash, Dell was a minor actor and EMC is the worldwide leader with a large offering: VNX all-fash, XtremIO, Unity, DSSD and Scale IO ready node.
 
For the moment, no layoffs have been announced in France but some redundant positions will be eliminated in the next months. Dell has 1,500 employees and EMC 1,000 in the country.