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Dell-EMC ready new identity

Matthew Burbidge
By Matthew Burbidge
Las Vegas, 03 May 2016
Virtual reality and augmented reality will redefine work, learning and play, says Dell CEO Michael Dell.
Virtual reality and augmented reality will redefine work, learning and play, says Dell CEO Michael Dell.

CEO Michael Dell said once Dell's merger with EMC was complete, the company would be known as Dell Technologies.

"It's got a nice ring to it," he told the audience composed of customers, the media, partners and analysts at EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas.

Dell announced in 2015 that it had agreed to acquire network storage giant EMC for approximately $67 billion.

Michael Dell said the move was aimed to convey a sense of a "family of businesses", such as VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, Virtustream and RSA.

Dell said the client solutions business would also be branded Dell, adding the brand equity of the Dell PC was "irreplaceable". Meanwhile, the combined enterprise business would be named Dell EMC.

The Dell CEO took the stage after EMC CEO Joseph Tucci, who said he could think of no better person to whom to hand over the baton of EMC.

Dell painted a picture of a brave new world and said at the moment it took 26 hours and $1 000 to decode the human genome. He predicted that in 15 years, it would take 94 seconds and cost a dollar.

"[In 15 years,] when a new-born leaves hospital, it will have a complete DNA profile and a lifetime of personalised medicine.'

He also predicted that in 15 years, half of the cars on the roads would be driverless.

Dell said virtual reality and augmented reality would redefine work, learning and play, and "whole new ways of living and doing business will open up right before our eyes".

Artificial intelligence would amplify human creativity, and unleash a torrent of innovation and the ability to solve the world's great challenges, he noted.

"We are staring into a future of infinite possibility."

The applications and smart devices that would form the backbone of the new digital connected world would require data centre infrastructure to be architected in a very different way, he pointed out.

He predicted this would be a "cloud native infrastructure", and would be operated in a DevOps model. Dell added connected nodes and devices would create massive amounts of new information.

"That's the challenge we are all facing. And it's an opportunity. We are at the very beginning of the Internet of everything. It's been called the next industrial revolution ... the next quantum leap of human progress."

He said in the past, a data centre was used to run back-office applications, and make the business more efficient. Now it has to support the business, and the business itself gets to be increasingly digital.

"And soon everything is going to be digital, and the data centre becomes the centre of the world."

He said every company needed to become a software company, to be able to compete and succeed.

Referring to delegates, he said: "You're going to cure cancer, you're going to feed and water the world, and create jobs and hope and opportunity on a global scale - we have the vision, innovation, the market position and the horsepower."

Dell said he had seen the democratisation of information, of connectivity and computing power.

"I've seen the poverty in the world cut in half. I've seen a global middle-class emerge in new parts of the world.

"When Dell and EMC combine, our company, and all of you, our customers and our partners, will stand at the centre of the world's technology infrastructure, and that means we stand at the centre of human progress."

(Matthew Burbidge is in Las Vegas courtesy of EMC.)

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