I have just spent time at the Dell Storage Forum event 2012 (disclosure: Dell kindly paid for the hotel and subsistence) and although is no-where near the size of an EMC-World type event, everyone seemed to be having a good time and there were lots of smiling attendees.
Compellent customers seem to be almost uniquely happy with their supplier and this does not appear to have changed too much even after year of Dell’s stewardship; so it appears that Dell are at least not messing this up.
But I think Dell have a dilemma, how do you meld a set of acquired IP and product into a strategy? Especially with all due respect to Dell, in a company which does not have a massive history in product innovation.
Dell have been a great client-side supplier with strong supply-change management and delivery but they are not the company you immediately think about when talking about innovation.
Many of the announcements made at the Storage Forum are arguably just catch-up and there’s some interesting niche products; for example SharePoint object storage which show Dell working in partnership with ISVs to address particular pain-points but there’s nothing which shows Dell leading the way.
I think Dell need to move beyond this and think larger, they need to build a strong narrative for the future and deliver on it.
1) Dell need a strong file story, they desperately need a credible NAS product; the Exanet IP gave them a file-system but if you look at the Exanet product, that was about all it gave them.
2) Dell need an integrated management console for their products; their product range is still small enough that this is an achievable goal, if they leave it much longer, then they will stand no chance.
3) Dell need to stop comparing themselves to HP and the like; they need to build their own narrative and focus on next generation storage. This means looking at what some of the pure SSD players are doing and build a strategy around ‘What happens when SSD becomes free in the same way that spinning rust as a component is free?’; what can you do then that you cannot do now. Automated Storage Tiering is very clever but we will still care about it in 10 years or even 5 years? If all your primary storage is SSD, what changes?
4) Dell could also consider being Dell; what happens if you decide that you are not going to gouge your customer base and move away from the high margins which storage and Enterprise storage traditionally attracts?
5) Buy Brocade? Lots of smart people in Brocade and it would bring a number of innovators into the fold.