The 10 Top Dell Technologies News Stories Of 2020

From PowerStore and VxRail to a new global channel chief and Project Apex, CRN breaks down the top ten biggest Dell Technologies news stories of 2020.

The Biggest Dell Stories Of 2020

Dell Technologies captured headline after headline in 2020 -- from announcing the potential spin-off of VMware to the unveiling of its as-a-service future with Project Apex.

The Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant had a stellar year on the innovation front despite the massive disruption caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Dell’s total net revenue from February to October was $68.1 billion, representing flat growth year over year, with big client sales growth offsetting some infrastructure revenue declines.

From Dell’s COVID-19 response to hiring a new worldwide channel chief, CRN breaks down the ten most important news stories of 2020 from Dell Technologies.

10. Dell Combats COVID-19 Head On

Dell Technologies tackled the COVID-19 pandemic head-on this year – from Michael Dell taking a pay cut and a company-wide salary freeze to making a whopping $9 billion in financing available to help fund customers’ critical technology needs as soon as possible.

Just one month after COVID-19 forced much of America into lockdown, Dell Technologies launched its new Payment Flexibility Program that included zero-percent interest rates for infrastructure solutions and up to 180-day payment deferrals to help customers and partners cope with the financial uncertainties many organizations were facing.

Dell Financial Services doubled down on helping channel partners financially get through the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer by offerings the “lowest rate ever” on everything from servers and storage to laptops and desktops.

Throughout this year, Dell donated millions to help fight the coronavirus such as providing surgical masks and eye protectors for hospitals, as well as donating technology to front-line organizations who were working on treating and containing the spread of the virus.

Michael Dell himself, through the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, dedicated $100 million in April to initiative and projects related to COVID-19 relief.

9. Dell’s Client Business Hits All-Time High

As remote working and learning became the new norm in 2020, the company’s Client Solutions Group – which includes Dell PCs, notebooks and tablets – flourished.

Dell Technologies reported record revenues of $12.3 billion for its Client Solutions Group (CSG) during its third fiscal quarter, which ended Oct. 30, representing an increase of 8 percent year over year.

“Our client solutions group had an outstanding quarter delivering record shipments, revenue and operating income,” said Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies during the company’s third quarter earnings report in late November. “Our wide range of PCs, including Chromebooks, are providing students everywhere with the essential learning tool they need. The pandemic has expanded consumer use of online purchasing, which is a big area of focus for us.”

On the innovation front this year, Dell unveiled a new XPS 13 laptop, primed for work at home, as well as a new Latitude 9000 series of business notebooks.

8. Dell To Spin Off VMware

Dell Technologies sent shockwaves through the industry this year by confirming it’s exploring the spin-off of its 81 percent stake in VMware. Dell owns the majority stake in the virtualization kingpin and rising hybrid cloud software star through its blockbuster acquisition of EMC in 2016.

However, CRN discovered that Dell plans to spin off its 81 percent stake in VMware to Dell Technologies and VMware shareholders, versus simply selling off VMware. In an interview with CRN, Dell Technologies CEO and VMware Chairman Michael Dell said the move will boost both companies.

“It simplifies the capital structures, it enhances strategic flexibility and gives both companies more flexibility, while we continue with the mutually beneficial strategic and commercial partnership that we’ve had for many, many years that has worked extremely well and it continues to,” said Dell. “So this is different from selling VMware—we are not selling VMware, by the way. Some people are a little confused about that.”

If all goes as planned, Dell will not spin off its shares of VMware before September 2021 for tax reasons. Dell is seeking to get it to qualify as tax-free for federal income tax purposes.

7. VxRail Continues To Lead HCI; New Innovation At The Edge

Not only did Dell Technologies remain the clear champion in hyperconverged infrastructure in 2020, but launched new innovation aiming to drives sales around hybrid cloud and edge computing.

Dell launched its first-ever ruggedized VxRail D-Series, the company’s smallest and lightest hyperconverged system ever that is available targeting edge use cases. The new compact and durable D-Series is only 20 inches deep and designed for the edge to withstand extreme temperatures, sustain 40G of operational shock and operate at up to 15,000 feet.

Additionally, VxRail has been equipped for the first time ever with AMD-based processors with the launch of the VxRail E-Series. The new VxRail E-Series includes 2nd generation AMD EPYC professors that offer customers up to 64 high performance cores and support for PCIe 4.

As of the third quarter 2020, Dell owns more than 33 percent share of the worldwide hyperconverged systems market.

6. Dell Technologies Cloud In Full-Swing

The innovation engine around the Dell Technologies Cloud was taken up a notch in 2020 as the company launched a slew of new offerings and capabilities for its flagship hybrid cloud platform such as new integration with Google Cloud, VMware Horizon and Kubernetes. The Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is the company’s flagship turnkey hybrid cloud architecture that includes VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation.

In May, Dell teamed with Google Cloud on its Dell Technologies Cloud to help customers simplify management of private and public cloud storage.

At Dell Technologies World 2020 this year, the company made its cloud compute resources more accessible with a new instance-based offering that lowers the barrier of entry for the hybrid cloud platform and extended subscription availability. Dell Technologies Cloud Platform customers can now get started with hybrid cloud for as low as $47 per instance per month with subscription pricing.

“Dell Technologies Cloud brings the best of the public cloud to the data center and the best of the data center to the public cloud, removing complexity so companies can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time delivering value to their customers,” said Deepak Patil, senior vice president and general manager of Cloud Platforms & Solutions at Dell Technologies earlier this year.

5. Restructuring Dell’s Channel And Sales Go-To-Market

In an effort led by Dell Technologies global sales leader Bill Scannell (pictured), Dell realigned its global channel structure and transformed its sales organization around a strategy dubbed “One Dell Technologies” with the sole purpose of driving more revenue through channel partners.

Dell Technologies North America President John Byrne is now overseeing Dell’s North America channel, with Dell’s North America Channel Chief Gregg Ambulos reporting to Byrne. Dell President of International Markets Aongus Hegarty is now overseeing the international sales regions. As part of this, Dell introduced a new International Channel Lead, Diego Majdalani, who will report into Hegarty.

Scannell said bringing Dell’s channel and core sellers together will make the predictability of engagements for partners even better than before.

“Now when I have my most senior sales leaders John Byrne and Aongus Hegarty also own the channel, then now I can hold them accountable for the success of the channel,” said Scannell, President Global Sales & Customer Operations in an interview with CRN this year. “So as we come up with our go-to-market strategy, vision and our programs–it’s not just [global channel chief] Rola [Dagher] and I saying, ‘The channel is important’—it’s every sales leader around the world saying, ‘OK, we got the marching orders. Now we’ll go execute and grow the business.’ So it’s much tighter alignment and accountability.”

4. Storage Woes In 2020

Although still the clear cut worldwide market leader in storage, Dell Technologies had a disappointing 2020 around storage sales. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing many companies to pause on large hardware purchases, Dell reported storage sales declines for each quarter in its fiscal year 2021, which ends Jan. 29, 2021.

Looking at each fiscal 2021 quarter in terms of year over year storage growth: Dell’s storage sales dropped 5 percent to $3.81 billion in its first quarter; fell 4 percent in its second quarter to approximately $4 billion; and declined 7 percent to $3.86 billion in its recent third quarter. Dell hasn’t witnessed year over year sales growth in more than a year.

“Our storage business was down 7 percent for the quarter, we were disappointed in that result,” said Dell’s Jeff Clarke (pictured), during the company’s third quarter earnings report in November. “Our midrange [market] is shrinking. It’s why PowerStore is so important. PowerStore is the catalyst to change our share trajectory in the midrange.”

3. Dell Launches Its ‘Greatest Product Ever’: PowerStore; As Well As ‘Home-Run’ PowerScale

Dell will look to turn around its storage business in 2021 through two new next-generation storage architectures: PowerStore and PowerScale.

Launched this year, PowerStore is arguably Dell’s biggest storage launch in years with Dell’s Scannell going to far as saying, ‘PowerStore is perhaps the greatest product we’ve ever launched.”

PowerStore is Dell’s midrange all-flash storage platform that is a scale-up, scale-out container-based architecture with built-in future-proof technology. With built-in machine learning and automation, PowerStore is a programmable infrastructure that aims to streamline application development and reduce deployment time from days to seconds. The storage offering has a machine-learning engine to optimize performance and reduce cost by automating labor-intensive processes, while it also contain Dell’s new PowerStoreOS software.

Also launched this year was Dell’s new all-flash, NVMe storage line: PowerScale.

Called a “home run” by channel partners, PowerScale looks to create a new industry standard for how businesses capture and capitalize on unstructured data such as videos, images, social media content and documents. PowerScale’s OneFS operating system introduces new software capabilities including enhanced data reduction technology, support for Ansible, Kubernetes and Red Hat’s OpenShift, as well as access to Amazon’s S3 object storage.

2. New Global Channel Chief; Mullen Departs

In a move that shocked some of Dell’s largest channel partners, Joyce Mullen (pictured) – a 21-year Dell veteran who was instrumental in elevating the company’s partner program and consistently growing channel sales – announced she would be leaving the company in August as its worldwide channel leader.

After more than a month of searching both internally and externally to replace Mullen, Dell nabbed Cisco’s President of Canada, Rola Dagher, as the company’s new global channel chief.

“I have a degree in getting things done,” she told CRN after being hired to lead Dell’s over $50 billion channel business. “And getting things done really quickly.”

Dagher came back to Dell after serving three years as president of Cisco in Canada. Prior to Cisco, she held sales and leadership roles in Dell’s enterprise segment and Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), including vice president and general manager of ISG.

Mullen’s went on to become Insight Enterprises new president of North America.

1. Dell’s As-A-Service Future Is Unveiled: Project Apex

Dell Technologies lifted the curtain on its long-term as-a-service strategy that will impact the way Dell develops future products, sells solutions to customers and enables channel partners to drive recurring revenue.

Project Apex aims to simplify how customers and channel partners access Dell’s as-a-service portfolio, from servers and HCI to PCs and client offerings, starting with the launch of Dell Technologies Storage as a Service. Project Apex unifies Dell Technologies’ as-a-service and cloud strategies, technology offerings and go-to-market efforts to provide a consistent experience wherever a workload runs, including on-premises, at the edge or in public clouds.

In a CRN interview with Michael Dell this year, the CEO said Dell is in the process of “moving the vast majority of our offerings to consumption and as-a-service.”

Dell’s new Storage as a Service is an on-premises as-a-service portfolio of scalable and elastic storage resources that will offer block and file data services and a broad range of enterprise-class features. Another significant launch for Project Apex is the new Dell Technologies Cloud Console, which provides customers with a single, self-service online interface to manage every aspect of their cloud and as-a-service strategy.

Dell plans to add many more as-a-service offerings to Project Apex in the future such as PC as a Service, Compute as a Service and Data Protection as a Service.

“This is directionally where we’re going with the portfolio that will bring those solutions together and allow us to simplify not only how we message and deliver these solutions to customers, but even internally—this is a transformation across the company,” Sam Grocott, senior vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies told CRN this year. “This is how we sell products, how we market products, how we build products, how we finance products—the whole end-to-end value chain is moving toward Project Apex.”