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  • November 2020 (Revised July 2022)
  • Case
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Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground

By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
  • | Pages:23
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Abstract

The case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion—the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company’s business strategy and its go-to-market operations. Michael Dell founded Dell Inc. in 1984 to assemble PCs. The company quickly became the market share leader by the end of the century. By 2008 (before the recession), Dell had expanded into servers, networking and storage, as well as services. Still, the hardware market was beginning to commoditize, with the trend accelerating after the recession. EMC, founded in 1979, had a similar story. It became the dominant player in data storage through early 2000 only to find that new technologies and nimble competitors were putting its business under severe commodity pressure by the turn of the century. Thus in 2015, when Dell made a $67 billion acquisition of EMC, many knowledgeable IT industry observers found it hard to comprehend the logic of two commodity/hardware players coming together. By then, most enterprises, large and small, were eyeing digital transformation. Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud seemed to be serving their needs. Thus Michael Dell had to carefully construct a strategic position for the newly constituted Dell company in the rapidly evolving IT market space. In addition, Dell and EMC also had to decide how to merge their Go-to-Market operations to gain the synergies promised by the merger. Dell had over 365,000 customers and EMC nearly 430,000. Dell had 17,000 salespeople and EMC, 7,000. Each had over 10,000 channel partners. Adding a wrinkle to the merger was a third actor, VMware, an independently listed cloud software company, 80% owned by the new Dell Technologies entity. Integrating their software capability would be an exciting opportunity and a challenge.

Keywords

Value Proposition; Go-to-market; Strategic Positioning; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Technological Innovation; Business Divisions; Information Technology Industry; Computer Industry

Citation

Mojir, Navid, and V. Kasturi Rangan. "Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground." Harvard Business School Case 521-036, November 2020. (Revised July 2022.)
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About The Authors

Navid Mojir

Marketing
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V. Kasturi Rangan

Marketing
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Related Work

    • August 2021
    • Faculty Research

    Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground

    By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan
    • November 2020 (Revised July 2022)
    • Faculty Research

    Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground

    By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan
Related Work
  • Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan
  • Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan
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