OK Cris
... so, what is it you talked about?
This is the way of it: you're sitting there, at a table in a general meeting room at the Dell World event in Austin, talking to a distant colleague about what happened to Don, did I know Liem had moved to such and such an office, when an ordinary-looking guy comes over and sits down at the same table, saying: "How's it going …
"In my trade as an IT hack I've been lucky enough to meet several CEOs and many have shared a characteristic of presence, of somehow making you feel they are a stronger, better, more forceful, persuasive, more dominant person than you,"
That's what a shitload of money in the bank does for you.
I was a contractor at Dell in the early 90s when they'd just opened their Bracknell office. My friends (all lowly techies, not managers) who'd been to Austin and had met him all said the same thing - he's a nice guy.
Shame that being a nice guy and successful is so unusual.
+1 to Mr Dell for not being an alphahole, and for doing the rounds at his own show. You don't have presence if you're not there.
On presence: To meet Eddie Merckx is to know what goes through the mind of prey seconds before death. In one second I knew he was an unblinking, unsentimental killing machine. In retrospect I'm glad he had a bicycle to play with and not a country.
It's in the eyes.
OK for a little balance I nominate Rob Salmon of NetApp fame as an alphahole.
After a stirring speech at one of the recent 'kick-off' meetings I tried to engage him in a corridor to ask him a question or two about it.
The bellend completely ignored me, in fact, he almost walked through me. OK, I'm a minion on the street but it might help management to understand that the minions make the company. When all is said and done, these are just people, people who happen to have made good decisions, but people nonetheless.
Needless to say that I no longer work for NetApp.
In my corporate life I've met some big kahunas and most had the "common touch" and were approachable, other less so but obviously leaders of men/women and companies.
I will always remember discussing a restructuring with one managing director. Having suggested (as the wimp I am) that it would be unfortunate to lose certain people - he looked over his specs right at me and said "Widgetbox I have fired many people I really like". That has always stuck in my mind.
I often wondered if the "nice guys" found it really hard when they had to be complete and utter bastards or if they put it in a box marked"it's not personal - it's just business".
When working Bracknell (their third office in Bracknell if I recall = Farley Hall --->>Cookham Road--->>Milbanke House), from 89-95 in Andy Harris / Martin Slagter MD days. Both excellent MDs in my opinion. But boy, when this guy landed for a visit, you might as well have been IN silicon valley. Bear in mind this is Bracknell. True, he could be tough when needed (nature of the beast), but I won't forget the 'effect' he had on the whole company from just walking in the door. It really was 'we're here because you had a vision and started off small - now look at all of us'.
We were still buzzing for weeks after. Didn't do our sales figures any harm either. Yes, I was lucky enough to meet him F2F, and I also had the unfortunate experience of leaving my PC unlocked and some monkey thinking it would be funny to send Michael a cheeky cc:Mail. The next day I was terrified to see a response from Michael. Christ, I had a mail personal from Michael Dell. No one got those in my department. Opened it and it was just 'This wasn't really you was it?' and loads of smileys. Nice bloke, as we say in the UK.
Analysis Lenovo fancies its TruScale anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform as a more flexible competitor to HPE GreenLake or Dell Apex. Unlike its rivals, Lenovo doesn't believe it needs to mimic all aspects of the cloud to be successful.
While subscription services are nothing new for Lenovo, the company only recently consolidated its offerings into a unified XaaS service called TruScale.
On the surface TruScale ticks most of the XaaS boxes — cloud-like consumption model, subscription pricing — and it works just like you'd expect. Sign up for a certain amount of compute capacity and a short time later a rack full of pre-plumbed compute, storage, and network boxes are delivered to your place of choosing, whether that's a private datacenter, colo, or edge location.
Dell has pulled the lid off the latest pair of laptops in its XPS 13 line, in the hopes the new designs, refreshed internals, and an unmistakably Apple-like aesthetic of its 2-in-1 approach can give them a boost in a sputtering PC market.
Both new machines are total redesigns, which is in line with Dell's plans to revamp its XPS series. Dell users considering an upgrade will want to take note, especially those interested in the XPS 13 2-in-1: There is quite a bit of difference, for both enterprise and consumer folks.
The XPS 13 maintains its form factor – for the most part – but gets a new smooth aluminum chassis that makes it look more like a MacBook Air than ever. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing: the new design is reportedly lighter and thinner, too.
Orders for PCs are forecast to shrink in 2022 as consumers confront rising inflation, the war in Ukraine, and lockdowns in parts of the world critical to the supply chain, all of which continue.
So says IDC, which forecast shipments to decline 8.2 percent year-on-year to 321.2 million units during this calendar year. This follows three straight years of growth, the last of which saw units shipped rise to 348.8 million.
Things might be taking a turn for the worse but they are far from disastrous for an industry revived by the pandemic when PCs became the center of many people's universe. Shipments are still forecast to come in well above the pre-pandemic norms; 267 million units were shipped in 2019.
IBM and Dell are the founding members of a new initiative to promote sustainable development in IT by providing a framework of responsible corporate policies for organizations to follow.
Responsible Computing is described as a membership consortium for technology organizations that aims to get members to sign up to responsible values in key areas relating to infrastructure, code development, and social impact. The program is also operating under the oversight of the Object Management Group.
According to Object Management Group CEO Bill Hoffman, also the CEO of Responsible Computing, the new initiative aims to "shift thinking and, ultimately behavior" within the IT industry and therefore "bring about real change", based around a manifesto that lays out six domains the program has identified for responsible computing.
Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.
This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.
"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.
Desktop Tourism If you drop Dell's Latitude 5430 laptop from hip height onto vinyl flooring that covers a concrete slab, it lands with a sharp crack, bounces a little, then skitters to a halt. Drop it two meters onto sodden grass and it lands with a meaty squish on its long rear edge. The impact pushes a spray of water and flecks of mud through the crack between the screen and keyboard, with a spot or two of each making it onto the keyboard's ASDF row.
I know this, because I did it. And more.
If you put it in a domestic freezer after that drop onto wet grass, then pull it out after ten minutes, a couple of water and mud flecks freeze into little teardrops on the keyboard. The latch that holds the screen to the body of the laptop takes a little extra effort to open.
Broadcom is in early talks to buy VMware, according to The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Reuters.
VMware is not commenting on the matter.
This one is interesting, because the three sources we've linked to above all say they've got the news from "a person familiar with the matter." All say the deal is nowhere near done, a price has not been discussed, and a transaction is far from certain to happen.
Analysis At this month's Dell Technologies World show in Las Vegas, all the usual executives were prowling the keynote stages, from CEO Michael Dell to co-COOs Chuck Witten and Jeff Clark, all talking about the future of the company.
Noticeably absent were the big servers or storage systems that for decades had joined them on stage, complete with all the speeds and feeds. Though a PC made an appearance, there was no reveal of big datacenter boxes.
It's a continuing scenario that is likely to play out to various degrees at user events for other established IT hardware vendors, such as when Hewlett Packard Enterprise later next month convenes its Discover show, also in Las Vegas. It's having to adapt to the steady upward trend in multicloud adoption, the ongoing decentralization of IT and the understanding that in today's world, data is king, Hardware is still needed, but the outcomes they deliver are what is most important.
Dell Technologies World Zero-trust architectures have become a focus for enterprises trying to figure out how to secure an IT environment where data and applications are increasingly distributed outside of the traditional perimeter defenses of central datacenters.
With the attack surface expanding and cyberthreats growing in number and complexity, many organizations are sorting through a cybersecurity space that has myriad vendors and products to choose from, according to Chad Dunn, vice president for product management for Dell's Apex as-a-service business.
Zero trust – which essentially dictates that any person or device trying to access the network should not be trusted and needs to go through a strict authentication and verification process – will be foundational for companies moving forward, but it has to be more than simply buying and deploying products, Dunn told The Register in an interview here in Las Vegas at the Dell Technologies World show.
LAS VEGAS – Dell is giving enterprises new ways to protect the data they store in public clouds.
At the Dell Technologies World event Monday, the company unveiled a full-stack cyber-recovery managed services offering in its Apex -as-a-service portfolio and data protection technologies that will be available in both the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds.
In addition, Dell is partnering with high-profile cloud-based data analytics vendor Snowflake to enable organizations to take the data they're keeping in their data centers in Dell object storage and run it in Snowflake's Data Cloud while keeping the data on premises or copying it to the public cloud, an important capability for companies with data sovereignty or privacy concerns who can't freely move it around.
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