The $67 billion merger (the biggest ever in tech) between computer maker Dell and data storage company EMC is a case of two giants…
Two giants who are getting creamed by market shifts and the advance of software defined networks (don’t worry I’ll explain that later) and are stumbling into an ungainly, protective bear hug.
It’s a deal that had to happen, if it had to happen at all, while interest rates remain on the floor, and it took all the ingenuity of Jamie Dimon’s JP Morgan Chase to stitch together a fiendishly complex financial package to enable it.
Dell is being hit by the global fracture of the PC sector hit by smart phones, tablets and laptops, while EMC is being undermined by the march of software defined networks and storage and the growing presence of the Cloud.
Between them, these disruptive forces render costly proprietary hardware and software systems redundant. Cheap commodity silicon running open-source, Linux software, can now do the job, while more and more computer power and storage is being supplied from the Cloud, rather than from on- site company IT farms. The Cloud is dominated by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
As so often Google led the way by creating its own vast data centers by stringing together zillions of cheap, commodity microprocessors running its own version of Linux instead of going with the costly, stomping ‘enterprise’ solutions offered by IBM, HP, Cisco, Oracle —in fact, the computer industry does not provide ‘solutions’: every solution is the forcing ground for new problems.
This is why Ashlee Vance, the author of a fascinating book about Tesla founder Elon Musk, is thus quoted in Wired and his tongue is not firmly planted in his cheek – “why don’t IBM, HP, EMC, Dell and Cisco merge and get this thing done with?’’
Well, Dell and EMC are doing it to create a kind of IT ‘incredible hulk.’
The zombie giants will all continue to make and sell things, maybe for a decade or more, as they slummock into the mist, throwing off huge weights of legacy luggage en route to the beckoning cliff.
Ace hedge fund investor Stan Drucknmiller, who together with George Soros turfed the pound out of bed in September 1992, puts the turning point for the zombie giants two years ago when the CIA awarded a signal $600 million Cloud contract to upstart Amazon instead of the establishment favourite IBM. A new era dawned.
Amazon, Google and, yes, ‘born again’ Microsoft are the future filled companies in IT arena together with tech savvy insurgents with names like Pure Storage, Cumulus Networks, Quanta and Big Switch.