Dell to push 'Technologies' brand over Dell EMC - new EMEA president
Vendor will push Dell Technologies brand and portfolio but EMC name is not being phased out, says Adrian McDonald
Dell will now be pushing its "Technologies" brand to the fore, with the Dell EMC name becoming more of a product line, according to new EMEA president Adrian McDonald.
The vendor has recently consolidated a number of roles that had previously existed separately in the Dell and EMC divisions of the business, with a number of execs who had previously held Dell EMC-specific roles now in Dell Technologies positions.
McDonald, previously Dell EMC EMEA president, now holds the newly combined position, with former Dell president Aongus Hegarty moving to an international role.
The tech titan is also undergoing a restructuring of its sales organisation which will see it merge its direct and indirect sales units under the leadership of Bill Scannell.
McDonald told CRN that the restructuring and staff reshuffling does not mean the Dell EMC name is being phased out.
"The main emphasis going forward is brand," he explained.
"The super brand is Dell Technologies and that's what the market is looking for. I think the Dell Technologies brand means something different to the Dell EMC one, but we still have Dell EMC on our storage products.
"While there's still a valid market to buy product line by product line, increasingly the market wants products put together with solutions, preferably put together around their cloud strategy or their application development strategy, and that's what Dell Technologies means. So you'll see us emphasising the Dell Technologies brand."
McDonald added that the Dell EMC name still has a good image in the market and the company continues to invest heavily in the unit, but that the holistic Dell Technologies portfolio is what customers of all sizes want.
"There are no current plans to phase out the Dell EMC brand; it still has immense meaning, particularly for storage buyers," he stated.
"Storage is still a major market for Dell Technologies. We're still innovating in that space and it takes up a large part of our $4.7bn (£3.6bn) research and development spend, so we have no immediate plans to relegate the Dell EMC brand.
"It's increasingly how the market and how the customer wants to buy, and that's everything from the largest enterprise accounts through to the smallest commercial or corporate accounts down to, in some cases, the individual consumer.
"They want this bigger experience and that comes from the Dell Technologies portfolio."
McDonald's previous role as president of EMEA at Dell EMC has merged with his new title of president of EMEA at Dell Technologies.
He said that his new title and the newly consolidated sales organisation came about from the vendor taking its time to integrate the two sales units and operations for Dell and Dell EMC.
"Michael Dell and the board realised that while there were lots of commonalities, there were two different sales go-to-markets which could be called a transformational sale and a transactional sale," he explained.
"They believed - rightly - that it would take time to bring those together. We didn't want to lose momentum in either of those go-to-markets and, in the first two years, our business went from $71bn to $91bn - 15 per cent growth per annum. We're predicting reasonable single-digit growth this year, so the strategy has certainly played out.
"It's still important to us and it's important to the customer base that we maintain and develop our skills and our product development around the transactional and the channel sale."