subject: Dell Studio 1555 Battery [print this page] Eight Questions for Dell the Man About Dell the Company
AllThingsD: So you announced today the creation of this $60 million investment fund aimed at storage companies. Youve been acquiring storage companies in the last few years and were also an early investor in Fusion-io, which is a storage company of sorts. What opportunities do you see in storage?
Dell: As youve probably seen, Dell has been acquisitive. We think there are opportunities to catalyze certain spaces, and storage is one of them. And so we have a specific fund just for that. Its part of our whole corporate development effort and under Dave Johnsons team. Hes been leading our acquisition efforts along with the business unit leaders. So this is specifically organized around making early stage investments in storage companies. We think theres still a lot of innovation to come. We think theres still potential for a lot of change and excitement.(Asus A42J Battery)
Lets talk a bit about the acquisitions youve been doing lately. You bought Wyse, you bought Quest, you bought SonicWall. Is there something specific youre looking for in the deals you pursue?
We tend to look at this from the perspective of how the tech landscape is changing and what new requirements customers have, and how we build the capacity to respond to those needs while expanding the range of things that Dell can do. Sometimes that results in organic investments, sometimes it results in acquisitions. So we identify a space, lets say client virtualization, which is what Wyse does. Wyse actually has some really great software for managing virtual clients, and we had partnered with Wyse quite a bit. The best acquisitions for us are firms that weve worked with and so we know a lot about them.
Is your hunt for acquisitions complete? Any hints on who might be next?
You will see us continue to do acquisitions. [Hahaha.] I find that if we tell you what were going acquire, the target gets a lot more expensive. So well tell you after.
What did you see that you like at Quest and made you willing to pay $2.5 billion for it?
Its right in one of the sweet spots for us. It connects with a lot of things we already do: Systems management, security, identity management, the application performance monitoring, data protection. They have some assets around client virtualization. They have some interesting things they do around dealing with data. We have a service called Boomi that does data integration. If you have, say, two cloud services like Salesforce and Netsuite and Workday or some other combination of stuff, Oracle were the best in the world at getting all that to work together and we do something like a million integration events a day.
Do you think the market unfairly values Dell on the assumption that its still primarily a PC company? Is the market getting the story or is the transformation just not complete?
Some shareholders get it and some of them dont. Thats how markets work. Most who have looked at it carefully say this is the right thing to be doing. They quibble about some of the smaller points, but they see the larger logic of what were doing and our job is to keep doing it.(Dell Studio 1555 Battery)
I hesitate to approach a comparison to Hewlett-Packard and the events at that company over the last year, but in light of how the PC market has been performing lately and given what the Gartners and IDCs of the world have been reporting, have you ever considered spinning the PC operations out?
Weve never considered anything like that. I think, broadly speaking, the numbers those organizations have reported are directionally correct. And certainly there are all sorts of factors and reasons for that. But there are still a lot of PCs being sold and its still an integral part of how companies and organizations use information. Now its shifting. You have value shifting into servers and services and all the stuff were doing. When you look at the profit margins, that has shifted a lot. Weve roughly doubled the size of the new part of Dell from $10 billion to $20 billion.
You mentioned China slowing down, but how does the PC market overall look to you? At least part of the slowdown can be arguably blamed on the market waiting for Microsoft to get Windows 8 out the door. How do you see it?
I dont want to say anything further on China other than what I said onstage. There are multiple factors. There are economic factors, theres the Windows transition and all this other stuff going on. How do you proportion all of those? No one has any scientific way of doing that. Windows 8 is pretty good. Im using it. Our business is still indexed pretty heavily toward the commercial market, and there are still businesses that havent upgraded to Windows 7 yet. So theyre not going to immediately go to Windows 8. What happens is, someone gets Windows 8 in the office and shows it off, and people start asking for it. Consumers tend to upgrade a lot faster than businesses. Theyre a lot more conservative.(Toshiba PA3534U-1BAS Battery)
Dell has taken some knocks over the years for not spending all that much on research and development. Historically, your R&D expense has always been relatively small as a percentage of sales versus your peers. Now theres a critical narrative that says Dell is buying companies to make up for the R&D you didnt do last decade. Is that fair?
As a counterpoint, Id say all you have to do is go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and look up the 5,000 patents we have been granted and applied for over the years. Weve been filing patents since 1988. We didnt get them all in the last few years. They read on pretty fundamental stuff in our industry. Could we have done more? Absolutely. Another way to think about it, though, is that when youre 19 years old and the company is growing really fast, someone could have said that you could grow it to $60 billion in size and you have to do the same thing and only one thing until you get to that size because if you dont youre going to get distracted and confused. Thats kind of what we did. We did the same thing until we got to $60 billion, and when we reached that point we decided we needed to do some new things. Could we have done it at $20 billion or $30 billion? Yeah, maybe. But I spend my time thinking about the future. I have to say it could have turned out a lot worse.
