James Dartnell reports from EMC World 2016, where company chairman Joe Tucci joined Dell CEO Michael Dell in announcing major changes to come once its $67 billion acquisition – the largest of its kind in technology history – has been completed.
“Michael Dell is the smartest man I know,” Joe Tucci proudly announced to a packed Sands Expo Centre at the Venetian Hotel. As was expected, Dell’s impending acquisition of EMC – the largest such deal in the technology industry’s history at $67 billion – was the overriding them of this outing. The man Tucci praised so highly went on to announce that once the deal has closed, the combined company will be called ‘Dell Technologies’.
“Our merger with Dell is not the end of something great, but the beginning of something greater,” Tucci said. “Every two or three lifetimes, there is a huge change in society. The shift that is currently taking place will dwarf the industrial revolution. EMC has to change rapidly to rapidly to remain a leader in this transition.”
Tucci reiterated that he would be soon to relinquish his primary duties at EMC. “I say this every year, but this will most likely be my last EMC World as chairman and CEO,” he said, receiving a standing ovation in the process.
Dell Technologies will comprise Dell, EMC Information Infrastructure, VMware, RSA, Pivotal, SecureWorks and Virtustream, and will adopt the name once formalities of October’s announcement have been completed.
Michael Dell said, “Dell and EMC complement each other in terms of technology. When you combine our capabilities in PCs, cloud infrastructure, servers and storage, you have a company that is perfectly positioned to stand at the heart of technology infrastructure, and of human progress.
“Dell and EMC complement each other in terms of technology. When you combine our capabilities in PCs, cloud infrastructure, servers and storage, you have a company that is perfectly positioned to stand at the heart of technology infrastructure, and of human progress.”
Dell went on to add that combining the companies would make matters more straightforward for customers. “The number one thing Dell and EMC share in common is customer focus,” he said. “Customers never ask for more vendors, partners and suppliers that they have to deploy and manage. They want simplification, and want to focus on applications and workloads.”
EMC used the event to announce multiple new data centre products and services for data centre transformation initiatives at the event.
The firm introduced its Unity family of all-flash storage; Virtustream Storage Cloud platform; EMC MyService360 service-centric online dashboard, EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) and ViPR Controller 3.0.
“The IT industry is in a state of massive transformation, resulting in both disruption and great opportunity,” David Goulden, EMC Information Infrastructure CEO, said. “Every business leader, across every industry, is facing the dilemma of how to support and grow traditional IT infrastructure while modernising the data centre in order to support the development of new applications and advance their digital agendas. Some are doing all of this simultaneously. The products and services announced today will help advance the customer’s journey to build a modern data centre in order to thrive as a digital business.”
Along with its message of 2016 being the “year of all-flash” EMC announced the expansion of its storage portfolio with its Unity family of storage arrays. The new all-flash array is available in all-flash, hybrid, converged and software-defined configurations and is designed to help customers make an affordable and simple transition from disk to flash.
Virtustream Storage Cloud is a cloud storage platform offering enterprise-levels of resiliency and performance combined with web scale.
Cloud-based service dashboard MyService360 is available at no additional cost to customers registered with EMC Online Support, and provides “near real-time” visibility into the health and status of an EMC data centre environment.
MyService360 is built using EMC’s internal data lake and provides analytics and visualisation tools designed to improve, enhance and simplify the way customers engage with EMC products.
eCDM, meanwhile, is an expansion of EMC’s Copy Data Management portfolio which helps customers tackle data sprawl and reduce the cost of storing and managing multiple copies of the same data.
ViPR Controller 3.0 bridges traditional and cloud native environments. New updates announced today help customers modernize their multivendor storage environments, with support for over 50 EMC and third-party storage platforms.
The firm also announced the latest addition to its cloud portfolio, Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) – a turnkey platform for cloud-native application development and deployment.
