The server business was always more sticky and now is hugely more strategic than storage.
Years of comp plans for lEMC sales focused on pushing unity, powerstore, powermax etc distracted from the real prize of owning the entire data centre. They never understood apps, infrastructure. Just boxes.
If they had focused on overall sales, share of wallet, Dell would have been even more of a powerhouse than today.
Servers were never as high margin as storage, but highly profitable and close enough to matter.
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@a7 Back in the Clariion days I remember speaking with a manger at a major investment firm. He said the rarely had to think about the EMC products in their data center. It just worked. The applications were always what had to be tweaked and debugged.
How the mighty Dell has fallen to internal infighting and bickering along with petty squables. Shame on you!
same with CyberRecovery. It was ki-led under Dell.
@dt A good example of this is PowerStore. It was being developed by some EMC legacy people. Originally it was called Cyclone, then Trinity. Finally they had to stick the tired ‘Power’ monicker on it.
They also placed the project under some Dell Legacy people who, while smart, had little experience in such a development project. Things were delayed because approvals for changes took forever to go through the bureaucracy.
Then they let go two of the top people who understood the practical aspects of installation and trouble shooting. Yet the layers of management still exist.
Maybe some AI system will recommend cutting back on the layers of management.
@OP I think you've got it backwards. I would argue, and easily I might add, that EMC is one of the few, if not only, acquisitions that has helped keep Dell afloat. It's not about the revenue, it's about the costs. Storage is extremely high margin while servers are pennies on the dollar profits.
The problem is Dell ki-led EMC over ten years ago when it refused to continue developing its products. This is what Dell does. It has absolutely no clue how to continue integrating or developing acquisition technologies. It just sells them until they're buried in the ground. Look at the key technology from EMC - Data Domain. Good Lord, we haven't advanced that technology in over 10 years. We're still trying to sell legacy, dead data deduplication while companies have long been moving to the cloud, object storage, cloud-based infrastructures. Dell knows nothing about the cloud, unstructured data, or modern storage technologies. That's a fact!
The layoffs will continue because all we have to offer these days are legacy, dead technologies that have reached the end of their lifespans, along with low margin tin and plastic that we assemble. That's it!.
speaking of storage.. those costs (high capacity drives) might be going 'absolutely insane' in the next 2-10 months.. buckle up.
In the last Dell report, servers were more profitable in absolute dollars. Storage is likely higher-margin but smaller in total profit contribution.
Servers and Networking revenue: 10.1 Billion
Storage Revenue: 4.0 Billion
Dell does not breakout standalone operating profit for servers vs storage.
it was a lot easier to sell storage 10 or 15 years ago.
Whoever created this string hasn't a clue
wow, so much internal fighting now. Boy, does this sound like the political landscape.
Really? Dell has literally no Intellictuql Property. They literally are just masters of a supply chain assembling parts into a box. EMC actually developed storage platforms with real features. That said, storage is now being commoditized no doubt. But please don’t kid yourself, Dell has always sold boxes and been a run rate business. The server side is just hotter now due to AI hype.
@OP 100%. EMC always sold for discount off list. Margins were sometimes very low just get the business.
This is why companies like Pure, NetApp and several others have eaten away at Dell's market share - they got it.
This is delusional. L-Dell was always a commodity sales play whereas L-EMC was a value oriented, solution play. That’s why L-EMC sellers led upmarket teams.
@a2 you just confirmed his opinion. The application was always the most important part of the data center.
Um, no. We understood infrastructure and were a leader in Fibre Channel connectivity with partners.