Among the topics the Dell CEO and founder discussed were the recent acquisitions of SecureWorks and SonicWall – moves that have helped move the company from the hardware game to services. What Gartner analysts Neil MacDonald and Eric Paulak wanted to ask Michael Dell was how his company would compete with the likes of IBM and HP, both of which have outlined similar strategic visions that focus on mobility, security, and Big Data.
Dell the CEO sees three areas transforming his company’s business. The first two are internet-connected devices and virtual infrastructure/cloud computing. The third is security, bolstered by several recent purchases that include the aforementioned SecureWorks and SonicWall. “The reason security is important is because you can’t be an end-to-end IT company without having a very strong security capability”, Michael Dell said, highlighting the additional potential recent acquisitions have brought to a company that – until very recently – specialized mostly in cheap consumer-based hardware.
All of this gets wrapped up in the company’s burgeoning services capabilities, allowing Dell to provide managed IT services to organizations. Currently, said the company’s CEO, nearly half of its personnel are involved in providing bundled IT services. When asked by one Gartner analyst if security was one of his company’s top three initiatives, Michael Dell’s response was brief and to the point: “Yes.”
Regardless of an organization’s size, Michael Dell said “security was at the very top of the list for just about every customer we talked to”. He added that security is just as important among his company’s mid to small-sized customers – so it appears that Dell is listening to its customers to capitalize on a business opportunity.
He characterized the origins of the managed security business, of which Dell SecureWorks is a major player: “You can have the best security team in the world inside an individual company, but given the nature of the attacks and the rate at which they are growing, there’s absolutely no way for any individual company to get their arms around this.”
Dell, the company’s chief executive said, has seen its security business double within the last 16 months.
Rather than buying IT in parts and pieces, Dell’s vision is a confluence of offerings the incorporate storage, network management, and computing power into one physical or virtual appliance – all with security operating as a “peer within this stack”, as one Gartner analyst described it.
“We will bring together assets from all of Dell’s acquisitions to provide a more secure experience”, the company’s founder concluded.