Dell-EMC: What Is Michael Dell Thinking?

The Dell-EMC deal is either a doomed marriage or two dinosaurs, or a visionary leveraging of complementary resources, according to the reports and press releases I’m reading about the deal.

To the world of Cloud Foundry, its implications are less dramatic. The fundamental question is whether cares about Pivotal, and how this will affect Pivotal’s fate.

A few folks I spoke with agree that there is no chance Pivotal will disappear, whether completely or into the fabric of Dell. The question is whether it will ultimately be spun out, and if so, when.
 

Follow the tracks

One aspect of the proposed merger is to issue a “tracking stock” for VMware, one of those Wall Street feats of prestidigitation that often fool nobody. The idea seems to be a way to reduce the capital Michael Dell and his co-investors need to complete the deal, while offering continued upside to the cloudy part of the business.

Pivotal, co-owned by EMC and VMware, will apparently be driving (and be driven by) that stock price, to some degree. If the stocking track performs well, there would be a opportunity to spin off WMware (or perhaps only Pivotal) to into its own, separate public company. If the tracking stock does not perform well, there would be an opportunity for someone (including Pivotal management and friends) to buy it on the cheap and/or take it private as a separate company.

Yikes, my head hurts thinking about this. No doubt yours does as well. So let’s focus—as I presume Pivotal management is now doing—on the future of private cloud, hybrid cloud, and Cloud Foundry. Amazon has been in the news recently, with some aggressive announcements at its recent re:Invent conference that show the company is focused on continued, even increased, dominance of the world of cloud computing.

Amazon’s early and continued leadership in public cloud is been mentioned as a reason for the so-called dinosaurs like Dell and EMC to combine forces in a desperate attempt to deny the future.

However…
 

The big switch, right?

Just because all of enterprise IT can more easily move all of their resources to Amazon’s expanding services portfolio, doesn’t mean they will. The foundational book about the emerging future of cloud, Nicholas Carr’s “The Big Switch,” published in 2008, imagined compute resources as utilities such as electricity and water.

Companies trust third parties to deliver these two commodities (even if they often have electrical backup), as they also trust everything from phone, food, and cleaning services to others. Some day, they will all do the same with their IT, as the argument went.

But will this happen? Can all of IT—particularly all the software that has started to eat the world—ever be a commodity? And then there’s this: there is no company data or intellectual property in water, electricity, or dirt on the floor, but IT contains all the kingdom’s treasure. When will all companies feel safe in letting a third party handle it?
 

So, Michael, what’s up?

I am left thinking about Michael Dell and what he may be thinking. I had the opportunity to speak on a couple of panels with him, a generation ago in Japan. Michael was a cocksure 25-year-old industry star at the time; I was a slightly older editor, who focused on leading-edge technology within the global Computerworld empire. Eric Hippeau, known recently as the person, who did the deal selling the Huffington Post to AOL, was publisher of InfoWorld at the time and also on the panels.

We talked about the future. Michael seemed to be brilliant, decisive, and utterly unable to communicate with the stonefaced, traditional IT execs, who comprised our audience. Dell (the company) did not do well there at the time. But his main point, that PCs were going to displace big computers one way or another, whether centralized or not, proved to be true.

His argument was not that the entire computing paradigm (i.e., centralized resources) was going to be subverted forever so much as the way companies went about maintaining control was going to change. Even in today’s world of highly distributed apps and services, non-structured data (often in real-time), and ubiquitous personal computing devices at the edge of every network, there is still a strong tendency toward centralization.

And after all, isn’t turning enterprise’s IT resources over to Amazon in a very real sense simply an off-site centralization?
 

Will this take flight?

Thus, I must ponder what Michael is thinking now. Has he simply ignored what’s going on with Pivotal and Cloud Foundry in pursuit of the goal of integrating servers and storage? Or does he understand that the future of the data center must integrate the most sophisticated software development and deployment with the underlying hardware? Could it be, somehow, that getting a good grip on CF is the ultimate key to his strategy?

After all, integration of the world of contemporary software with the traditional data center world was Topics A and B at recent events I co-chaired in San Francisco and Singapore called StackingIT. A small minority of the audience at these events already seem to “get it.” It seems that the brilliant, still-cocksure Michael Dell may grasp the importance of merging these two worlds, as well.

Rather than marrying two dinosaurs to produce new baby dinosaurs, is he in fact driving the evolution of the ugly old dinosaurs into beautiful, new birds?