The forum was attended by Dell EMC executives and experts who discussed steps and solutions to help customers in their journey in today’s digital transformation.
Just over a year ago, Dell and EMC were two different companies. Two tech giants, which after completion of the historic merger, formed the world’s largest privately-controlled tech company with a net worth of over $74 billion.
InterAksyon.com had the opportunity to speak with Paul Henaghan, vice president, Dell EMC South Asia and Korea, and talked about the two companies transition in becoming a single entity in both the consumer and enterprise space.
“We got announced in October (2015) and it closed in September (2016) so we had 11 months and there was an incredible amount of planning that went into that process for that 11 month period, and the reason we did that because we realized how complicated… and the scale of what it was we’re trying to do at that stage,” Henaghan said. “There were so many potential challenges we would face that would impact our customers and impact our staff. And to us those two critical elements were the most important. How do we protect the sanctity and the strength of our relationship with our customers? And how do we insure that our staff from an engaged positive, and really want to be part of this new organization?”
But twelve months into it, and on those two metrics, the Dell EMC executive said that he was extremely pleased and was a little bit surprised at the performance and the outcomes that they have achieved. What they saw internally and what they were seeing in the daily engagement were substantiated with the results that they have seen from inputs on both customers and staff.
“If you look at another level what’s really pleased us is the actual business performance of the organization,” Henaghan said. “So in pretty much and i’ll touch on it very briefly, every sector in which we compete we started off this process about how we saw great value being number one in the major markets in which we participate and that’s in our client business or PC business, it’s in our storage business, and in our converged infrastructure, flash, virtualization, the hyper-converge strategy, server business, etc.”
The Dell EMC exec explained that in every area, with the exception of one, the company grew performance. They out-performed the market over the last twelve months, in terms of their overall performance. Dell EMC went into 18 quarters in a row of growing their PC business as described by Henaghan “in a market that as we all understand is going into a very interesting dynamic at the moment.”
“We did struggle a little bit on storage, and in part we believe that there were two drivers to that: one is the fact that we brought together an element of complementary capabilities, so there’s legacy Dell storage and then EMC storage; and we took a little while to settle that down.”
Nonetheless, Dell EMC is optimistic about the what’s coming ahead, especially now that they have recently released several products combining their two technologies.
“Now that we’ve launch for the last 3 months a whole new product suites supportive of both of those product road maps; it’s given people the confidence that we are indeed absolutely committed and we’ve already seen a significant uptake in terms of our performance, Henaghan said. “And the other side of it is: the market is going through a very interesting change at the moment as software driven data centers are becoming a critical driver of future digital transformation and we’ve embraced that fully and partly in that side of it — because we’ve embraced in the new we’re almost impacting the transformation on ourselves so we’re just getting that balance right again.”
Dell EMC can proudly say that it’s a very good first year for them. The executive said that they had great employee engagement, and customer engagement is the same, adding that they’ve grown the business fairly significantly.
“In this last quarter, if you look at our position, and if i remember correctly, it’s about just over $19 billion that we turned over in that 3 months,” Henaghan said. “If you go and measure that against what you consider the very largest vendors in our marketplace, you’ll see very quickly that we’ve now outgrown pretty much everybody.”
Despite the good numbers, the Dell EMC executive said the company is not done yet. He added that there are certainly some things that they’ve learned over the last 12 months they need to improve on. There are also things that they need to continue to focus on.
As for the Philippine office, he acknowledged the leadership of former EMC Philippines lead Ronnie Latinazo, now Dell EMC country general manager and former Dell Philippines lead Chris Papa, now Dell EMC channels general manager for leading the successful transition of the two companies locally into a single team.
“A lot of the effort at the visible element was on the people and you guys (PH office) are the case study for how to do it successfully here in the Philippines. A big part is: there are two strong leaders in Ronnie and Chris who were able to maintain the harmony of their two teams. There wasn’t a lot of overlap; and by coming together everyone recognized the the whole is much greater in terms of the relationship with their customers: from the smallest business to the very large enterprise companies they have,” Henaghan said. “So the Philippines has been fantastic and it’s down to the local leadership here. There are other countries where the size of the two organizations has been, in terms, particularly in the high end of the market, the very top customers, it’s been a little bit more challenging. So you have to work harder in getting that alignment; getting people to complement each other working as one team. But overall, it’s been very successful.”
