I have been very consistent in my bullishness on India: Michael Dell
For the man who is pulling off the largest technology merger in history, Michael Dell appears incredibly calm. Even as tech pundits continue to debate about the merits of the $59-billion marriage between Dell and EMC, which is expected to be consummated by October, Dell CEO Michael Dell flew down to Bengaluru for a day-long visit to review India operations — which is now 20-years old. In an exclusive interview with ET's TV Mahalingam, Dell spoke about engineering the biggest acquisition in tech history, Dell 's future bets and why he continues to remain bullish about India. Edited excerpts: So, you are engineering the largest acquisition in tech history. Was it a tough decision to green flag? There is a fair bit of history here. Dell and EMC had a partnership for almost a decade (Dell-EMC) and that became a $2-billion business . Then around the fall of 2014, I contacted Joe Tucci (EMC CEO) — we have had this discussion in earlier years if we should combine the two companies. I told him we should look at this again. We had extensive meetings, discussions, due diligence. Over a year later, the transaction was announced. If you look at what we are doing, these companies are highly complementary. Dell’s new security solutions guard thin clients and virtual desktops against malware Dell is the servers, EMC is the storage and VMware is the virtualization. So, who is your competition now? If you look at what we do now, we are competing with one part of HP or another part of some little company over here or another company over there. I think it is going to be very difficult to be a company in silos. I think the game has changed. If you look at the PC market, it's changing...virtual PCs, physical PCs...we are in our 14th quarter in a row of consecutive market share gain. While we gained in the biggest market in the world — 2.5 points of share, HP lost minus 2.4 of share. We took share away from HP. We also have a better capital structure and we are private company. That allows us to think beyond the next 90 days...we can think about 3 years, 5 years, a lifetime. You have led Dell through several transformations from the PC era to going private. What's next for Dell ? Our industry is change or die. The role of IT is fundamentally changing. For last several decades, it has been about taking existing businesses and making them more efficient with IT. What's happening now is that IT is evolving so quickly that it's enabling all kinds of new businesses and new business models. All this is making companies jump up and embrace digital transformation.
