 "We are not trying to create a monolithic company: Jeremy Burton")
When Dell agreed to buy EMC for $67 billion, in the largest technology acquisition ever, everyone in the sector took a note of it. For Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing at EMC, the trial run for this merger took place about a decade ago. Burton, who manages global sales of EMC, talks to Shivani Shinde Nadhe about the implications of the merger on India, the need to keep the federation model and benefits of the merger. Edited excerpts:
How do you see this merger helping the two companies?
Enterprise technology is undergoing huge transition. The traditional infrastructure customers want to drive out cost. One of the ways to do it is to do more business with few vendors. Second, there is a big race to build new technology to be relevant in the cloud-native era. We felt that by bringing the two companies together, we could operate at a scale that allows us to secure more business from large customers. Also, we would have more resources to attack the cloud-native era. It’s a unique combination because we had very good partnership for over a decade, and between us we were able to drive about $1 billion of incremental business. So, we did have a trial run.
More From This Section
We did grow apart but that was because Dell got into storage business. But from a commercial standpoint, it was one of the very few successful partnerships. There are very few partnerships between two large technology companies that have resulted in a multi-billion dollar business.
We should stick to what we are good at — EMC focusing on enterprise tech and Dell sticking to selling more volume products at the mid-market and commercial space. We can take some of EMC products in the mid-market and likewise take Dell products to enterprise segment. Enterprise technology in general is moving from people buying individual component to converged systems. The idea that you can buy a complete infrastructure from combination of EMC-Dell is much better.
What does this mean for EMC in India?
It will have huge implications. We are very well-known at the high-end market segment. About 50 per cent of our revenues come from less than a 1,000 customers.
We have never really built an effective distribution channel in the emerging territories or mid-market and below. You need a much bigger volume distribution network, and it has not been an EMC sweet spot. The way we are seeing it is that immediately we got additional market coverage. Access to volume channel is a big positive.
By the same token, Dell has not built its enterprise customers line-up. We are pretty excited to get access to the volume of channel partners.
EMC has always worked as a federation of companies. What happens to this now?
The federation model will continue and Michael (Dell) has been very clear that Pivotal continues to do what it does.
That model is liked by everyone. One of the things we announced was that EMC would run the enterprise business. For most of the customers and partners, this is huge.
The strategy that we had at EMC was federation of companies. This meant that customers will have an element of choice. We are not trying to create a monolithic company. Post merger, we will have group company mentality.
What happens to your partnership with Cisco?
We built with Cisco through the VCE joint venture. The Vblocks system, that is the primary product, is going to be Cisco-based. We will not swap out Cisco just because we have a plan with Dell now. We will be announcing some of the new hyper-converged products with Dell. The current plan is to keep Vblocks. For the foreseeable future, we will be selling more Vblocks.
All this brings much more for the customers to choose from. Though 60-80 per cent consumers still want to select the products and get a team to assemble that, increasingly customers will ask for complete storage and network integrated at built stage. We can offer variety of converged systems.
IT industry is talking about bimodal approach as companies tackle the digital disruption. What is your take on it?
The reason why people go bimodal is because they want different DNA. The way applications are going to be built for digital business will require skills that IT does not have today. That’s going to be a painful journey because IT hates shadow IT.
Second, the infrastructure that these applications will be deployed on will be different. It is not going to be high-end servers or traditional storage arrays, it’s going to be much more community server software defined and the architecture will be scaled up massively in future.
We felt the pain of this because we (EMC) didn’t task people who built symmetric and systems with building cloud-native infrastructure. We carved out that group into core tech division and created an emerging tech division that works on digital. We have gone bimodal the way we develop products.
