Cloud not a threat for us, says Dell EMC

Dell EMC says that its partnership with cloud firms such as Microsoft Azure is helping it grow its business and cement its leadership in the market.

“Is cloud a threat? If we were a pure-play storage company, possibly, but given the fact that we play from edge to core to cloud it is an opportunity for us. We will see some workload shift from on-premise to off-premise but that is where our partnership with Microsoft comes into picture,” said Rajesh Janey, president and MD, Dell EMC Enterprise India. He adds that customers are looking for a combination of on-premise and cloud solutions to meet their requirements. EMC partners with cloud providers like TCL, CtrlS and NextGen among others in India. A recent Bloomberg report said the company was hiring sales specialists to bolster the weak storage demand.

EMC’s merger with Dell has brought it under the Dell umbrella along with VMware, SecureWorks, RSA, Dell, Virtustream and Pivotal Software. It has changed the size and scale of the company and given them access to Dell’s massive global supply chain with over 140,000 employees across 180 countries. “From EMC being public we became privately held and now we can look at long-term investments. We are investing $4.5 billion in R&D this year itself,” said Janey. The Dell EMC merger is considered to be founder Michael Dell’s answer to the growing demand for technology-enabled businesses as well as the the rising competition between tech giants globally.

For network and storage providers like Dell EMC, telecom is a major market segment. Has the disruption in telecom impacted their business?