No conspiracy theories here. So, what really happened to EMC? EMC was built differently. premium storage drove everything. enterprise customers mattered most. engineering carried real weight. then cloud changed infra. workloads moved somewhere else... customr buying patterns changed too. the old model got fu---d up. dell brought another op model where scale mattered more and cost control mattered even more. standardization was crucial indeed. sooooo, the integration never fully clicked. products kept overlapping. leadership kept rotating . cost pressure never let go. Innovation suffered as it was hard to do and the portfolio stayed complicated at best . meanwhile, cloud kept moving faster... I dont think there was one decision or mistake that destroyed emc. it happened more gradually. the special conditions that benefited EMC went away then EMC's market simply moved elsewhere. my 2c, may be off but this is how i am processing it.
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Not defending Dell here, but EMC was already heading downhill before the deal even happened.
Their tech wasn't trash, but buying habits changed fast. Cloud was getting popular, commodity servers were taking over, and the old playbook of selling six-figure proprietary arrays was dying. EMC saw it coming—they had VMware, ScaleIO, all of that—but you can't easily pivot to software-defined when your sales team's fat commissions rely on pushing the heavy iron.
Throw in activist investors hounding them to break up the company and leadership looking for a payout, and EMC was essentially shopping for an exit. If it wasn't Dell, somebody else would've bought them—and imagine how much worse it would've been if Oracle stepped in instead.
Dell just did what Dell does: cut costs, push volume, and standardize. The integration was a fu.. mess, but EMC was already running out of road. Just my 2c.
I worked for EMC 30 years. Six of the 30 was with Dell. At the time of the sale EMC had a very large amount of money. EMC also owned VMware, and Dell sold VMware for a tremendous amount of money. Seems EMC had everything to loose and Dell had everything to gain. The plan all along was to get rid of EMC. EMC senior management had the opportunity to make a lot of money and then they all retired. I think EMC had the money and the technical talent to innovate and survive for a long time. Management was the problem with EMC.
For a long time storage was the leading actor inside IT departments during the EMC days and management of it drove the direction of pretty much everything else. Then virtual machine infrastructure came along (roughly when Dell/EMC merged) and eventually storage became more of a supporting actor. When this happened, storage margins got thinner and Dell could no longer support the overhead of managing both storage lines so many cuts were made. Dell realized that VM infra was the future and picked up VMware -and we all know where that eventually went. As has been mentioned, access to cloud storage and colos also had a contributing effect.
A PC/Server company was able to buy the worlds largest storage company. Why? Because EMC overpaid sales and leadership. Many, many of the AE's were making 7 figures.
Their sales team's were made up of almost all former college athletes. They were not allowed to think. Just ask, where is the PO? Where is the PO?
EMC was a "niche" fast player, focused on specific products and investing a lot to ride high and innovate.
Dell is a moloch with an insane portfolio, huge overhead costs and a business model that focuses more on milking the most out of its products until they are obsolete or lose traction, rather than being an innovation leader.
EMC was purchased to fill a gap and acquire a customer base, but with no intention to remain the innovation leader on the long run. Under this aspect, Dell operates more like a Private Equity company rather than a big tech.
As soon as Dell bought EMC, the fun stopped.
Tucci’s jobs was to sell EMC. EMC survived, not by innovation, but by acquisition, similar to how Jack Welch kept GE getting bigger and bigger. EMC was never going to be a 100 year company. EMC was a great ride, Dell was a great way to stash money into 401k and Roth 401k and bid your time until retirement. Sadly too many of you were in your 30’s and 40’s and you couldn’t retire when you got let go.
If you want the honest answer to that question, look no further than the long list of Dell acquisitions that were starved of momentum and fundamentally mismanaged until they were completely unrecognizable. It is the same pattern over and over and over again. Dell is not a technology company. Never was.
• Quest Software
• SonicWall
• Perot Systems
• Dell Mobility / Streak Team
• MessageOne
• Exanet
• EMC Corporation
- VMware
• AppAssure
• Boomi
• StatSoft
• Gale Technologies
• Scalent
• KACE Networks
• Make Technologies
• Credant Technologies
• Clerity Solutions
• Wyse Technology
All were driven into the ground by poor Dell management. Dell is what happened to EMC. Simple as that.
EMC wasn’t perfect but it managed to survive the dot com crash, the 2008 recession, and other events that tripped up competition.
EMC built by anticipating market and technology trends. We sold what the customers’ needed and supported the he-l out of them. We had field staff who knew just as much about a product at the remote support team.
Leadership listened. They did not always agree with what we said but we were heard.
We didn’t assume we were smarter than the customer.
Dell is what happened to EMC. A sh---y company in Texas bought it, destroyed it like all its other companies it’s bought and then thinks they’re innovative.
When it was EMC, there were new feature releases all the time. My team ran like a small startup. We got things done. When Dell came, everything is about the process, not the product. A 5-min code fix will take weeks to get it in. The numbering of engine/node and director/node-pairs are so sc--wed up right now, I bet you millions that the CE will pull the wrong part no matter how much defensive mechanism we build into the software.