A single company for the whole IT world: this is Dell’s vision
Interview with Robin Kuepers, EMEA DataCenter Solution & Marketing Director
Robin, I was just here in Barcelona last October at VMworld, when Michael Dell spoke his message about the acquisition of EMC. I know that for some legislative reason you can’t openly talk about that and must wait, but what do you feel about Dell’s future regarding this colossal acquisition?
I can confirm we can’t talk about that, unfortunately we must wait for the legislative procedures in all the countries where Dell is present. However I can say that we are facing a great opportunity, also considering the good compatibility level between our commercial offering and EMC’s.
With that scenario in mind, what do you think about one of the most important themes, in my opinion, like security?
Dell believes security is one of the key factors of the future of IT. Being on the market with an even bigger company and a more complete offering we can really guarantee that end-to-end security the market asks for. In particular, Dell focuses its attention on 3 key areas in order to improve security in the IT world: data protection with our hardware solutions, network security with our Sonicwall UTM and the Secureworks platform that manages alerts in a proactive way by highlighting each non-habitual behaviour.
You clearly have chosen the opposite path than HP which splitted up in HP and HPE.
It’s true, Dell believes that the proper approach in the IT world is the one of a single company the enterprise world -and the SMB channel too- can refer to. A single company that can provide notebooks, desktops, servers, storages and more complex and complete infrastructures.
What do you think about the Italian market in this scenario?
The Italian market is one of the most interesting on a EMEA level. The switch to the Channel represented an important event followed by a remarkable growth. The vast number of small companies strictly ties IT to the Channel, therefore this switch has been strategic for Dell. In particular, I got curios about the interest for the Tower VRTX hyperconvergent platform that we sell. It has way more success in Italy than other rack solutions that are more successful in other countries.
And what about your presence here at MWC?
As you’ve seen in our stand, we are here in particular because of the many innovations about NFV technology. We have a series of architectures dedicated to Telco and we think that it’s fundamental for this important change to adopt an important and reliable vendor like Dell.
Talking about security with professor Kevin Curran, one of the hottest themes is about hardware support for a longer time than the time the product is available on the market, with the logic of a long-term support. What is Dell’s opinion about that?
Dell supports, for instance, server platforms for 5 years as a basic warranty that is included in most models. These 5 years can be increased with additional support years up to a total of 10/11 years for many models. In our opinion, technological evolution makes unuseful to go past this period of time. Just think about power consumption of a 10-year old server to understand that keep on supporting obsolete products makes no sense at all and that has nothing to do with the care for security, of course.
What do you think about the Italian market in this scenario?
The Italian market is one of the most interesting on a EMEA level. The switch to the Channel represented an important event followed by a remarkable growth. The vast number of small companies strictly ties IT to the Channel, therefore this switch has been strategic for Dell. In particular, I got curios about the interest for the Tower VRTX hyperconvergent platform that we sell. It has way more success in Italy than other rack solutions that are more successful in other countries.