Dell’s Jeff Clarke On ‘Driving’ More VMware Integrations And Innovation

Dell Technologies vice chairman Jeff Clarke talks to CRN about driving collaboration with ‘VMware and the other Dell Technologies brands and continuing to build more tightly coupled, tightly integrated solutions for our customers.’

Jeff Clarke On Building ‘More Tightly Coupled, Tightly Integrated Solutions’

Dell Technologies vice chairman Jeff Clarke says technology integrations between the seven brands of the $91 billion infrastructure giant will only accelerate going forward.

“What I’m going to do is continue the journey that I’ve talked publicly for the past year and a half of driving broader levels of integration and innovation across the Dell Technologies estate, while driving our collaboration with our colleagues at VMware and the other Dell Technologies brands and continuing to build more tightly coupled, tightly integrated solutions for our customers so we can drive differentiated advantages at the Dell Technologies level,” said Clarke, vice chairman, Products and Operations, in an interview with CRN.

Clarke, known as Dell Technologies CEO and founder Michael Dell’s right-hand man, leads the Round Rock, Texas-based company’s global supply chain and its products organizations including its Infrastructure Solution Group (ISG) and Client Solutions Group.

In a recent interview with CRN, Clarke talks about fostering more integration across Dell Technologies and the recent appoint of Jeff Boudreau as the new president of ISG, which includes server, storage, networking and hyper-converged infrastructure.

Why did you select Jeff Boudreau to take the lead for Dell’s $37 billion ISG business?

He’s the best candidate. He is by far the person who has embraced the change and led change and has helped us rebuild this organization into the innovation juggernaut that we have become and will be in the future. I’ve counted on Jeff [Boudreau]. I’ve counted on him for being an advocate of change. When I went into this job two years ago, it wasn’t an organization that wanted to make change. I forced a lot of change inside the organization and Jeff has been a key leader -- the key leader by far in [Dell EMC’s facility] Hopkinton, Mass., and has been significant in driving the change agenda. It makes perfect sense for him to be that natural continuity between me sitting in that role and Jeff taking him up. … I have great confidence that Jeff can lead that. He’s got a product mindset, believes in the technology and I like what he’s doing.

Talk about your role and focus at Dell right now?

I’m going nowhere. I have multiple roles in the company. I wasn’t going to be the long-term ISG leader with all of those multiple portfolios and all of the other responsibilities that I have. It’s come to a point where, I think we’ve stabilized and have built a solid foundation from Jeff to move from and I’ll be right here with them.

What I’m going to do is continue the journey that I’ve talked publicly for the past year and a half of driving broader levels of integration and innovation across the Dell Technologies estate, while driving our collaboration with our colleagues at VMware and the other Dell Technologies brands and continuing to build more tightly coupled, tightly integrated solutions for our customers so we can drive differentiated advantages at the Dell Technologies level.

Why should partners be excited about more collaboration across Dell EMC, VMware and other Dell Technologies brands?

If you think about Dell Technologies and working with our partners and what our partners can do, is help us service our customers with better solutions. Certainly my role across the broader Dell Technologies and the responsibilities that I have is to work on that next-level of integration and innovation to bring those differentiated solutions to the marketplace. We want to absolutely align with our partners to help bring that to a broad set of customers. That’s what we want to accomplish. Certainly, Jeff [Boudreau] on the ISG side, and then bringing things like Unified Workspace on the client side – we believe we have a tremendous opportunity to partner with our channel partners to bring the full capability of the Dell Technologies portfolio to the marketplace. … Innovation is key to what we do at Dell. It’s clearly something I’ve been involved in a very long time.

Talk about the changes you’ve made to Dell over the past two years?

We’ve spent the last two years retooling the innovation engine and the organization. It’s at a point where it can perform and produce the level of innovation we think is required in our industry.

We’re pretty excited about the go-forward state of Dell. If you think about what we accomplished over the past two years and the progress the organization has made: the stabilization of our operational performance, the work that we’ve done to simplify roadmap and modernize our roadmap, the Power branding – this is the representation of that and completing that work. We’ve reinvigorating our innovation engine inside our ISG organization to get it much more focused and shifted resources to make things move [faster]. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last two years setting up a wonderful foundation for Jeff [Boudreau] to accelerate. The progress we’ve made, that foundation that we build that made me sit back and reflect that, now it’s time to hand the reigns over to Jeff to continue the work we’ve done, put his fingerprints on it, and continue the progress in our ISG business across the board.