back to article Dell board meeting: What've we got on the table? Sparkling, still, sarnies... and oh, IPO?

Four years after Michael Dell took his company private, he is considering whether Dell should make a stock market comeback, or so "familiar sources" have told a slew of newsfolk. "People familiar with the matter" told Bloomberg – and later blabbed to WSJ, Reuters, FT and others – that an upcoming Dell board meeting was going …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    NetApp

    If NetApp achieve their goal of being the Go To Platform within AWS/Azure/etc, where does that put them in the chart you've drawn?

  2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    Financial engineering

    Why compare only revenues?

    Dell's debt is crippling and an IPO during a booming stockmarket is a neat trick for Silver Lake if they can pull it off and dump the company on some hapless investors.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Financial engineering

      are all large corporations financial engineering, to a greater or lesser degree?

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Financial engineering

        Yes, but Dell's path trajectory from public to private to IPO has always been about the engineering. What about those 30 year dated promisory notes?

        1. baspax

          Re: Financial engineering

          No, it was about reorganizing a moribund company, not engineering. Dell wouldn't know engineering if it bit them in the ass. Yes, their new Proliants are pretty good and some features actually impressive but that's just PC hardware engineering on steroids. Nobody gives a shit.

          Turning the company into a full stack vendor has failed. Thinking about selling Pivotal is all you need to know where their heads are ... in a fantastic yoga pose, sticking it firmly up their asses.

          1. Roj Blake Silver badge

            Re: Financial engineering

            Since when did Dell make Proliants?

            1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

              Re: Financial engineering

              Since when did Dell make Proliants?

              Since they invented their new business plan of buying machines retail at BestBuy then selling them at a discount. Lose money on every sale but make up for it in volume (tm)

            2. HurdImpropriety

              Re: Financial engineering

              LOL... talk about "sticking fingers up maybe their own ass." LOL

          2. HurdImpropriety

            Re: Financial engineering

            Learn who makes what before you stick your finger up your own arse there sparky.

  3. chrismevans

    Why buy into VMware now, when shares are at an all time high? It's the reverse of Gordon Brown selling off all the gold when prices were lowest. Also, if components like Pivotal are key to the future, why sell that off? Surely Dell should be selling off the business that is declining or has no margin.

    As has previously been discussed, Dell bought into a business (EMC) that was at an inflection point. Tucci didn't know what to do next because the Federation idea didn't really work. Rather than give someone else a go, he sold the company. Buying EMC allowed Dell (mr) the ability to claim a vanity project of the biggest private infrastructure vendor and biggest IT acquisition. But really, with so much public cloud growth, where's the future for them?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Spot on, Chris. We are in the same industry but I will stay AC for now.

      Also, everyone keeps forgetting recent history and what lead to the EMC acquisition:

      * Dell's consumer business crashed due to the iPad and smartphones. No-one was buying consumer PCs anymore. It has recovered lately but nowhere close to fuel a business.

      * Their bread and butter business, small business servers, was being attacked by Supermicro and the cloud.

      * Their large scale HPC and commodity server play got wiped out by Supermicro, Quanta, and whitebox.

      * EMC was being pummeled by Pure and Nimble. Attacked on all sides, the VMAX business/profitability imploded, XtremIO had all sorts of problems and is Walking Dead, Unity is basically only being sold into the remaining hardcore installed base.

      * EMC is losing market share in the high margin backup space. Data Domain and Avamar are being replaced left and right by Veeam plus commodity (HP Apollo, Cisco S, Exagrid) or CommVault.

      * EMC' famous R&D budget which led to a ton of (overlapping) products has been decimated.

      * Vmware is doing well on paper but customers are continuing to move to Hyper-V, cloud, KVM.

      * vRealize, vCloud, VSOM, etc are mostly for VMW monocultures and hardcore Vmware fanboys, everyone else is going best of breed. I have seen Vmware reps RAPE their installed base on maintenance renewals, which tells me they are desperate for revenue. Behavior like that will get you through this year but permanently burns your relationship with the customer. The downfall will come soon.

      * The strategy to use EMC to get Dell proper into the enterprise market didn't take off at all. EMC reps and execs either left or are being pushed around by their Dell counterparts who don't know shit about channel or enterprise.

      Where is the future for them?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Public Clouds are built on Software

    The key ingredient to Public cloud is not box shifting. It is software.

    Dell and software? DELL AND SOFTWARE?? DELL AND SOFTWARE???

    It is ONLY January, not First of April.

    Cloud software is not a commodity yet. It requires continuous investment, R&D, experimentation and not pack-n-ship. You cannot ODM Cloud Software to a couple of Chinese factories and present as your own. That works only for commodity servers.

    (*)Disclaimer - I spent a large chunk of last week dealing with code in an open source project coming from DHELL. So I am probably "a bit" biased.

    1. Stand001

      Re: Public Clouds are built on Software

      and the software is running on? air? Crystals? Ohh, yes, Now I remember, it´s runing on hardware

      1. sal II

        Re: Public Clouds are built on Software

        >and the software is running on? air? Crystals? Ohh, yes, Now I remember, it´s runing on hardware

        Yeah but the x86 hardware market is well established and the iron is mostly the same irrespective of which of the dozen or so major vendors. Purchase decisions are mostly based on organization preference / what they are currently running etc. It's hard to differentiate yourself from the others and gain market share.

        Everyone and their dog is after a piece of the new hot pie - public cloud.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Funny

    You know, your constant digs at Cisco's server business just show how little you know about the business.

    HPE's and Dell's server business is so big (in revenue only) because they sell a TON of cheap small servers to small businesses, at extremely low margins. Their commercial and enterprise footprint is not that great, especially for Dell, HPE is doing a bit better.

    Dell had a lot of success in the commodity space early on, but for Dell and HPE the commodity play is gone gone gone after Quanta, Supermicro, and other ODMs completely took over. HPE has left the cloudscale space entirely a few weeks ago. Both HPE and Dell have been desperately trying to gain enterprise share but have a hard time holding on to the little they have. Failed channel strategies, slashed R&D, and layoffs in presales are not helping either.

    Dell bought EMC/Vmware precisely to gain foothold in the enterprise and large commercial segment, yet they are not executing successfully at all. On the other hand, Cisco OWNS this space. What's the UCS market share in converged infrastructure? 75%? 85%? Unreal, especially in this business.

    Overall marketshare in enterprise and GET is around 50%. That's just fucking brutal.

    You comparisons look to us industry experts like someone comparing the footprint of MS Access vs Oracle. It's laughable and embarrassing; your readership deserves better.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yeah right

    The new value is in software. Software defined everything and Dell is where software goes to die. A few years back Dell announced a billion dollar investment in cloud. That was total horseshit, they never committed anything like that amount. Michael loves cash and it’s generation. He doesn’t really give a shit about technology and certainly didn’t understand the value of software over hardware. If he does an IPO it will be for the money. He may pay down some debt and try to acquire revenue to be the big company he always claimed he could build, but his company built a world class cloud team and shit all over them by allowing idiots and internal politics to stagnate the effort. Michaels leadership of the company through the boom in 2000 to going private simply resulted in falling stock value, year on year. Lots of bad decisions and frankly so so products. Sort of tier 1 gear for a tier 2 price. Microsoft is spending more money than Michael would ever have the balls to commit and can’t keep up with Amazon. Dell had its chance and fumbled, badly. Could it make a come back? Frankly all Dell delivers today is EMC storage which is increasingly less relevant and cheap servers if you want to own your own. Otherwise there is nothing particularly compelling. Would he invest five billion a year into a cloud? I doubt it, and even if he did where would he get the talent from. He had some of the best people and shit all over them, who’d want to go there now.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Out of idle curiosity

    What would be the esteemed readership's opinion on the quality of Dell kit?

    1. Roj Blake Silver badge

      Re: Out of idle curiosity

      We use a lot of Poweredges. Build quality is excellent and the management tools are pretty decent.

    2. Is It Me

      Re: Out of idle curiosity

      If you mean laptops/desktops the Lattitude and OptiPlex ranges seem very well built and the support when there are any issues is very good.

      I wouldn't touch the consumer oriented kit, as it seems to be more flimsy etc.

      The servers of theirs I have used have been well built, but I haven't got the long term experience with them to comment on the support side.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Need to compare AWS revenue

    The table isn't a good comparison. Amazon's revenue is $136B (retailer and now groceries + AWS etc). If AWS was it's own company it might be in the order of $15B annual revenue.

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