Decision to go private the right one, says Dell

Dell’s decision to go private has led to its new position as the world’s fastest-growing integrated technology company, according to CEO and founder Michael S Dell.

The Dell World 2014 conference, taking place in Austin, Texas this week, has been the tech giant's chosen platform to convince the world that its decision to go private has been the right one.

Dell founded the company in 1984 when he was just 19, and took it public four years later with a market capitalisation of $85 million. More recently, however, Dell had been suffering from declining computer prices and an inability to break into big markets such as mobile computing.

Believing that its unpopularity lay with an over-emphasis on meeting profit margins rather than customer expectations, in October 2013 Dell decided to spend $24.9 billion buying the computer giant back from shareholders. Now, at age 49, the founder and CEO owns 75 percent of the company.

The aim is to move away from the perception of Dell as principally a hardware provider to include products in the realm of cloud computing networks for global enterprises, and personal devices.

New tablet

In the realm of security, the company has developed software that measures facial expressions, voice tone, and even how individuals swipe key cards. A new Dell tablet will also be the world’s lightest and thinnest, the company says, with a three-dimensional camera and a four million-pixel screen. A number of new personal computers are also on the way.

Since going private, Dell has become the top internal and external storage supplier globally in the first half of 2014, according to International Data Corporation, is ranked number one by Gartner Inc for worldwide IT services for healthcare providers, and has shown year-on-year growth across every region globally in both hardware and software. Dell PC shipments have also grown by almost 10 per cent in the third business quarter, leading many at the conference to question the perceived wisdom that the PC market is dead.

“Today, Dell is the world’s fastest-growing integrated IT company in the world,” said its CEO. “Our strategy is resonating with customers worldwide as they look for a stable, reliable end-to-end solutions provider to meet their business and IT needs. From the endpoint to the data centre to the cloud, customers and partners value the certainty, ease and predictability of working with Dell.”

Partnerships

The importance of strategic partnerships was emphasised by

Aongus Hegarty

, president of Dell in

Europe

, the Middle East and

Africa

(EMEA), who said that 40 per cent of Dell’s EMEA business is through collaboration. “In the last seven years, Dell has gone from exclusively hardware to becoming a complete end-to-end technology company, and business has enjoyed double-digit growth across all EMEA regions,” he said.

Dell also revealed findings from its first Global Technology Adoption Index (GTAI), which surveyed more than 2,000 global organisations and found that “security is the biggest concern in adopting cloud, mobility and big data”. It also found that while 97 per cent of organisations surveyed “use or plan to use cloud and nearly half have implemented a mobility strategy”, actual big data adoption is lagging as many firms still don’t fully understand how to utilise it. In addition, only 39 percent of respondents “have a workforce that is fully aware of the organisation’s own security rules”. The event continues until Thursday.