Thread regarding Dell Inc. layoffs

Many of the private clouds are not based on enterprise storage, they come with their own scale-out hardware. Look around and learn dumb--s.

Whos the dummy who said "on-prem storage is likely to be a private cloud." private cloud means nothing it still needs to stored on Enterprise class storage and storage never gets smaller the demand keeps getting bigger and bigger. Can Dell DellEMC compete with the other storage vendors is still the question.

The cloud guys use custom-built scale-out storage boxes (may not be Dell), certainly not Dell-EMC multi-million dollar enterprise storage. Furthermore, nowadays, on-prem storage is likely to be a private cloud.

@WlQ50ZX-mkdm As a senior storage sales exec you sound clueless so let me help you. Selling a lot of storage to a single customer isn't as profitable as selling storage to many customers. So storage sales are definitely going to be under pressure as cloud storage continues to grow. Not to mention there is a ton of profit in customer support contracts and supporting a large cloud company isn't as profitable as having many support contracts in place. Sure data is growing but so are HD capacities and hardware storage costs keep dropping dramatically.

On Prem's days of ruling are over.. Not really Cloud has to be hosted somewhere and needs storage to support it. Little on site DC's may be going away, but they are being moved to LARGER internet connected DC's and will use more storage than ever before.

These days people design systems with data going in, but don't think about deleting or archiving, so systems just keep growing.....

As I said BEFORE "cloud" is such a fake marketing term. All Data and all compute power has to be hosted on some physical thing!

I know of a startup that initially built its product on top of legacy enterprise storage, they were about to go out of business because of lack of demand. Fortunately, they started supporting public clouds and now have few clients and seems to have survived. This anecdote should help prove the point made in the thread regarding On-prem ruling.

@WlQ50ZX-lvze I’ve seen this, too. EMC support being treated like they’re clueless because they actually know the customers they’re working with, instead of just running numbers. It doesn’t bode well.

Quote;

EMC have a much more mature model for tending to legacy customers with intricate, unique, hard-to-understand configurations.

Hate to tell ya, but EMC support is being all ripped apart for the last year and reconfigured to meet something closer to the Dell model. If that's why they purchased EMC they're doing a sh--ty job of the whole thing

"Very valid and sadly true, the big vendors cant sustain all these staff when people are buying far less per project"

Oracle laid off over half of their Solaris and Sparc people about a year ago, so they saw the handwriting on the wall.

@WlQ50ZX-8ofr “They demand growth,” indeed. If you look at the numbers, there’s no way Dell will sustain needed levels of growth, or for that matter innovate sufficiently to keep pace. And as the EMC customers grow weary of the growth-only mindset and see their levels of customer care erode, well, you get the picture.

To your comment @WlQ50ZX-7lfy below

Thats all good . . . But the results are far less in revenue for Dell, even if customers like hybrid. Every sales rep and manager and engineer in Dell is targetted on "Do last three years numbers averaged plus growth every year". So they will fail. Staff will be smashed. No one is buying a 3m DC anyone, they are buying small 100k pods and cloud. Dell gets very little from that.

You need to understand how Dell targets its customers. They demand growth.

Amazon might actually be making it (somewhat) easy for Dell to keep pace, since they're rolling out offerings that can either be complemented by Dell's offerings, or Dell can replicate in some form. In the end, none of this works without hardware, even if it is lower-cost. With the strength of the Dell brand among higher-ups who write the checks, details like troublesome implementation, persnickety configuration, and maintenance headaches are going to wash into the Total Cost of Ownership bucket, which can be mitigated (fiscally) by sending much of the work offshore.

Dell have been "fast followers" almost from the start, so there's no reason to think they won't go for an encore performance with cloud offerings. AI. IoT. HCI. Pick your 2-3 letter combo. Everything is still wide open for people who can deliver what looks like a decent solution to those who make the decisions and depend on predictable budget cycles. Whether Dell do it well, is another question. But there's no reason to think they won't look for the magic formulas that work for others, and then jump on-board, either as collaborators or "See? We provide that too!" competitors, and updating their executive briefings accordingly.

So far this has been the most intelligent conversation on this topic and forum. Completely agree with all points.

Organisations still in this segment must change "and not by a little" as change has come exponentially and immediately. The size of each project and opportunity is staggeringly smaller and people are fighting over sc-aps. Not everyone will go 100% to a cloud but sales forces and engineering teams cant be sustained on small deals with a high cost of sale.

Will their be layoffs? Yes, there should be. If I was a shareholder I would be asking why there are so many staff. The only question is whether the staff are laid off or managed out through target modification and change in conditions.

Dell didn't acquire EMC for their products. It acquired them for their customers. EMC have a much more mature model for tending to legacy customers with intricate, unique, hard-to-understand configurations. That's a gap in Dell's customer service skills, which are very oriented towards quick-in-and-out sorts of "transactions", versus hand-holding and taking care of them over the long term.

Ultimately, the disappearance of EMC's aging product offerings won't matter, so long as Dell can figure out how to sell other products to those customers and (perhaps more of a challenge) keep them.

Dell's customer relationship approach is closer akin to speed dating, while EMC's is about a prolonged courtship, followed by a long-lasting marriage (for better or worse). If you want to last over the long term, you'd best commit to the relationship-building piece of it

Dell's future isn't at play: there will always be a market for commodity hardware (PCs servers, switches and other down-to-earth physical devices which provide actual end-user functionality).

I'd worry more about the -EMC part. Some major refactoring might not far off for it... Unless -EMC actually starts providing widely available cloud based services (using its own in-house designed storage solutions... or not if other cheaper/better alternatives are available).

As it was once said a decade or two ago: the future of storage lies in assembling off-the-shelf parts and making it work as efficiently and cheaply as possible. The key point here is software to orchestrate it all... All the more reason for being pessimistic, given the number of canned projects -EMC had in its final years before getting acquired by Dell, which has very little understanding in that matter.

Just my 2 cents...

People are too complicit at Dell and not seeing past their rah rah chants end of row.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/amazon-outpost-brings-cloud-technology-to-traditional-data-centers.html

any idea how many years dell will survive, is there any possibility for default on debt payment if they dont go for public listing?

Very valid and sadly true, the big vendors cant sustain all these staff when people are buying far less per project