For You Believers in DELL

[compoundinglife]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Honestly I thought Darren Thomas did a poor job of answering that question. He only touched on storage and he only talked about "virtualization" and storage not how Dell's storage offering fits into or adds value in the cloud space, cloud is not just a virtualization and in fact most clouds will probably have bare metal storage underneath not virtualized storage. But honestly I am not surprised given he is the VP/GM of storage. He is rooted in the sales of SAN/Storage products and probably not the best person to talk about Dell's cloud strategy.

 

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

[compoundinglife]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Explain to me what happens to their Force10 acquisition in the era of SDN and what happens to their server business in the era of open compute. Why did they buy Force10? What market segment (not vertical) does Force10 target?

 

At some point they will have to decide to build or buy. IBM uses switches made by these guys http://www.interfacemasters.com/.  At some point Force10 may just become a brand or a group that does SDN software/integration on top of a ODM switch. Ideally having it currently will allow them to provide better end to end solutions today and get embedded with customers so they continue to provide solutions when shifts in technology happen.

 

Same thing with open compute.

 

They are complete solutions provider at this point. At some point down the line differentiation between the vendors products (specifically servers and switches/routers) will be negligible (almost are today) but customers will still need solutions and the hardware will be cheaper but the billable hours will be higher.

 

Looking at how much large companies depend on consulting and service companies today, I don't see cloud changing that it may just move the $$$ into different areas of spending. To embrace cloud companies will need different solutions than they have today.

[ERICOPOLY]

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

I think this is the one, from two weeks ago:

 

http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/corporate/secure/en/Documents/2012_DB_Conf_Transcript_WEB.pdf

 

[ItsAValueTrap]

Folks I know in the large scale data center area are excited about ARM. I think its a long way out before it will be replacing all their PC based systems. James Hamilton talks about it a little bit on his blog: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/01/02/ARMV8Architecture.aspx

 

Maybe I am crazy here, but his opinions do not seem grounded in practicality.  For example, he talks about Project Denver here:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/01/16/NVIDIAProjectDenverARMPoweredServers.aspx

"This is interesting for a variety of reasons, first they are entering the server CPU market."

 

Project denver is a combination of CPU and GPU on the same chip.  That combination has very little use in the server market.  There are some niches that take advantage of GPGPU / GPU co-processing.  But we're definitely not talking about a mainstream server market here.

 

Semiaccurate has some good coverage on various technical issues:

 

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/08/05/what-is-project-denver-based-on/

Project Denver explained

 

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/03/01/why-purchasing-seamicro-was-important-for-amd/

Seamicro explained (Dell is now a reseller of Seamicro btw)

 

Currently, ARM has made very few inroads in servers.  Project Moonshot ditched ARM.  Facebook didn't choose ARM/calxeda.  Servers are about performance over total cost of ownership, whereas ARM products have typically targeted low power consumption (i.e. how much performance you can get within a certain level of very low power consumption).  Among Intel, AMD, ARM, and RISC (e.g. power, sparc)... I think Intel has the advantage (its process technology lead makes its chips more power efficient) and will dominate servers.

[Guest valueInv]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Explain to me what happens to their Force10 acquisition in the era of SDN and what happens to their server business in the era of open compute. Why did they buy Force10? What market segment (not vertical) does Force10 target?

 

At some point they will have to decide to build or buy. IBM uses switches made by these guys http://www.interfacemasters.com/.  At some point Force10 may just become a brand or a group that does SDN software/integration on top of a ODM switch. Ideally having it currently will allow them to provide better end to end solutions today and get embedded with customers so they continue to provide solutions when shifts in technology happen.

 

Same thing with open compute.

 

They are complete solutions provider at this point. At some point down the line differentiation between the vendors products (specifically servers and switches/routers) will be negligible (almost are today) but customers will still need solutions and the hardware will be cheaper but the billable hours will be higher.

 

Looking at how much large companies depend on consulting and service companies today, I don't see cloud changing that it may just move the $$$ into different areas of spending. To embrace cloud companies will need different solutions than they have today.

 

What are you seeing in the private vs public cloud?

[txlaw]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Honestly I thought Darren Thomas did a poor job of answering that question. He only touched on storage and he only talked about "virtualization" and storage not how Dell's storage offering fits into or adds value in the cloud space, cloud is not just a virtualization and in fact most clouds will probably have bare metal storage underneath not virtualized storage. But honestly I am not surprised given he is the VP/GM of storage. He is rooted in the sales of SAN/Storage products and probably not the best person to talk about Dell's cloud strategy.

 

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

Yeah, he didn't answer the full question, but as you pointed out, he's the storage guy.  He may have also been avoiding giving an answer because there are active discussions going on in the company.

 

You're exactly right -- build or buy is the question.  DELL will adapt.

[txlaw]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Explain to me what happens to their Force10 acquisition in the era of SDN and what happens to their server business in the era of open compute. Why did they buy Force10? What market segment (not vertical) does Force10 target?

 

At some point they will have to decide to build or buy. IBM uses switches made by these guys http://www.interfacemasters.com/.  At some point Force10 may just become a brand or a group that does SDN software/integration on top of a ODM switch. Ideally having it currently will allow them to provide better end to end solutions today and get embedded with customers so they continue to provide solutions when shifts in technology happen.

 

Same thing with open compute.

 

They are complete solutions provider at this point. At some point down the line differentiation between the vendors products (specifically servers and switches/routers) will be negligible (almost are today) but customers will still need solutions and the hardware will be cheaper but the billable hours will be higher.

 

Looking at how much large companies depend on consulting and service companies today, I don't see cloud changing that it may just move the $$$ into different areas of spending. To embrace cloud companies will need different solutions than they have today.

 

+1

[txlaw]

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

I think this is the one, from two weeks ago:

 

http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/corporate/secure/en/Documents/2012_DB_Conf_Transcript_WEB.pdf

 

That's the one. 

 

DELL may be one of the best companies I've seen in terms of disclosing info to shareholders.  They're very shareholder friendly.

[Guest valueInv]

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

I think this is the one, from two weeks ago:

 

http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/corporate/secure/en/Documents/2012_DB_Conf_Transcript_WEB.pdf

 

That's the one. 

 

DELL may be one of the best companies I've seen in terms of disclosing info to shareholders.  They're very shareholder friendly.

http://www.footnoted.com/buried-treasure/dell-quietly-settles-shareholder-suit/

 

[Guest valueInv]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Honestly I thought Darren Thomas did a poor job of answering that question. He only touched on storage and he only talked about "virtualization" and storage not how Dell's storage offering fits into or adds value in the cloud space, cloud is not just a virtualization and in fact most clouds will probably have bare metal storage underneath not virtualized storage. But honestly I am not surprised given he is the VP/GM of storage. He is rooted in the sales of SAN/Storage products and probably not the best person to talk about Dell's cloud strategy.

 

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

Yeah, he didn't answer the full question, but as you pointed out, he's the storage guy.  He may have also been avoiding giving an answer because there are active discussions going on in the company.

 

You're exactly right -- build or buy is the question.  DELL will adapt.

Perhaps a more forthcoming answer would have been "Sorry, we can't comment on this right now but stay tuned." Providing a rambling, evasive answer filled with buzzwords that seeks to confuse is not what I call shareholder friendly.

[ERICOPOLY]

Personally I have a little bit of trouble with the way DELL pushes information out to shareholders.  I don't trust people who talk like salesmen.

 

http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/videos~en/Documents~Dell_Q2FY13_Results.aspx.aspx

 

Follow that link above and listen to Steve Schuckenbrock.

 

I own shares and I don't really think they are lying, but they verbally communicate in a way that I just don't feel comfortable about.  It's the body language and the overly confident tone.  I feel like I'm going to drive off the lot with a used car.

 

I'd rather hear the same message from guys with less polish -- they wouldn't look like something isn't quite right.

 

Perhaps it just comes across as unnatural communication because well, it is -- that interview is done in a studio, they've rehearsed the lines...  I usually see videos of people fielding questions where they haven't had the time to rehearse the answers.

[txlaw]

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

I think this is the one, from two weeks ago:

 

http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/corporate/secure/en/Documents/2012_DB_Conf_Transcript_WEB.pdf

 

That's the one. 

 

DELL may be one of the best companies I've seen in terms of disclosing info to shareholders.  They're very shareholder friendly.

http://www.footnoted.com/buried-treasure/dell-quietly-settles-shareholder-suit/

 

I take it you think the lawsuit was legit?  Would love to see your analysis there.

[txlaw]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Honestly I thought Darren Thomas did a poor job of answering that question. He only touched on storage and he only talked about "virtualization" and storage not how Dell's storage offering fits into or adds value in the cloud space, cloud is not just a virtualization and in fact most clouds will probably have bare metal storage underneath not virtualized storage. But honestly I am not surprised given he is the VP/GM of storage. He is rooted in the sales of SAN/Storage products and probably not the best person to talk about Dell's cloud strategy.

 

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

Yeah, he didn't answer the full question, but as you pointed out, he's the storage guy.  He may have also been avoiding giving an answer because there are active discussions going on in the company.

 

You're exactly right -- build or buy is the question.  DELL will adapt.

Perhaps a more forthcoming answer would have been "Sorry, we can't comment on this right now but stay tuned." Providing a rambling, evasive answer filled with buzzwords that seeks to confuse is not what I call shareholder friendly.

 

An AAPL shareholder talking about confusing answers with buzzwords?  LOL.

 

I guess you don't read many CCs.  This is standard practice with analysts calls.  You gotta read between the lines.   

[tombgrt]

Personally I have a little bit of trouble with the way DELL pushes information out to shareholders.  I don't trust people who talk like salesmen.

 

http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/videos~en/Documents~Dell_Q2FY13_Results.aspx.aspx

 

Follow that link above and listen to Steve Schuckenbrock.

 

I own shares and I don't really think they are lying, but they verbally communicate in a way that I just don't feel comfortable about.  It's the body language and the overly confident tone.  I feel like I'm going to drive off the lot with a used car.

 

I'd rather hear the same message from guys with less polish -- they wouldn't look like something isn't quite right.

 

Perhaps it just comes across as unnatural communication because well, it is -- that interview is done in a studio, they've rehearsed the lines...  I usually see videos of people fielding questions where they haven't had the time to rehearse the answers.

 

Thank you Eric, very good point. That performance by Steve sure is funny (in a very sad way...)!

[txlaw]

Personally I have a little bit of trouble with the way DELL pushes information out to shareholders.  I don't trust people who talk like salesmen.

 

http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/videos~en/Documents~Dell_Q2FY13_Results.aspx.aspx

 

Follow that link above and listen to Steve Schuckenbrock.

 

I own shares and I don't really think they are lying, but they verbally communicate in a way that I just don't feel comfortable about.  It's the body language and the overly confident tone.  I feel like I'm going to drive off the lot with a used car.

 

I'd rather hear the same message from guys with less polish -- they wouldn't look like something isn't quite right.

 

Perhaps it just comes across as unnatural communication because well, it is -- that interview is done in a studio, they've rehearsed the lines...  I usually see videos of people fielding questions where they haven't had the time to rehearse the answers.

 

Yes, the videos they post every quarter are also very salesman-like.  But then the heritage of this company is a sales company.  I've met some of the DELL salesman, and boy are they what you would expect as the stereotypical salesman.

 

IBM is also notorious for its people using buzzwords and terms of art when selling their productivity solutions, whether through the consulting biz or the hardware biz.  Maybe CIOs just like to hear that sort of thing.

 

But I would agree, I like to see straightforward answers.  I love, for example, to listen to Charlie Ergen speak on CCs.  But that's few and far between in the corporate world.

[compoundinglife]

Folks I know in the large scale data center area are excited about ARM. I think its a long way out before it will be replacing all their PC based systems. James Hamilton talks about it a little bit on his blog: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/01/02/ARMV8Architecture.aspx

 

Maybe I am crazy here, but his opinions do not seem grounded in practicality.  For example, he talks about Project Denver here:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/01/16/NVIDIAProjectDenverARMPoweredServers.aspx

"This is interesting for a variety of reasons, first they are entering the server CPU market."

 

I don't think your crazy, a lot of what he is saying may not be relevant to *todays* market for companies like Dell. But I mentioned Jame's blog because it seemed like people were interested in what big data center people are thinking about and he is one of them. I don't think he cares about the general server market that much because his data centers are using custom servers and switches designed to be as cheap and efficient as possible in attempt to create a competitive advantage. But I don't know him personally so I can only speculate on what he thinks.

 

I think when looking at people that are considered visionaries in their respective field you are going to have some off the wall ideas that stick and some that don't.  Keep in mind he works at Amazon which offers GPUs as part of their web services offering already. Also people thinking about large data center stuff are thinking about it differently than just servers. They are thinking about the work that computers that do and how to do that work more efficiently.

 

Project denver is a combination of CPU and GPU on the same chip.  That combination has very little use in the server market.  There are some niches that take advantage of GPGPU / GPU co-processing.  But we're definitely not talking about a mainstream server market here.

 

Semiaccurate has some good coverage on various technical issues:

 

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/08/05/what-is-project-denver-based-on/

Project Denver explained

 

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/03/01/why-purchasing-seamicro-was-important-for-amd/

Seamicro explained (Dell is now a reseller of Seamicro btw)

That is great site! Adding it to my reading list. Thank you.

Currently, ARM has made very few inroads in servers.  Project Moonshot ditched ARM.  Facebook didn't choose ARM/calxeda.  Servers are about performance over total cost of ownership, whereas ARM products have typically targeted low power consumption (i.e. how much performance you can get within a certain level of very low power consumption).  Among Intel, AMD, ARM, and RISC (e.g. power, sparc)... I think Intel has the advantage (its process technology lead makes its chips more power efficient) and will dominate servers.

 

Ok so I will try and explain where ARM comes into play in my thinking...

 

You will see a slow trend (already started) towards looking at the "stuff" we do on servers as "work" and instead of people buying or renting servers they are putting together their workloads or apps and paying someone to do them. There are currently people that do that with genome sequencing and other sorts of big data stuff. You just go their with your data and you don't care nor need to care about the underlying servers/chips etc... They find the most efficient way to run your work and deliver your results.

 

Platform as a service is sort of like this. You write an application or job on platform, lets say some sort of java framework though it could be anything and then you can push to that app out to different platform as a service providers. Over time the people that build applications and tools care less and less about the underlying systems. They just want to write some software and be able to run it anywhere.

 

Well all the apps can be run on ARM. So right now while you may go out looking for an X86 server or virtual machine instance to run your application. Eventually you will look for a an app container (this already exists with things like heroku, google app engine, and dotcloud) you could care less what is under the cover. It could be a virtual machine at amazon, it could be your app running on an ARM core somewhere. All you know if you write the app and upload it somewhere and it runs.

 

Right now this exists in the public cloud offerings and it is starting to crop up in the private cloud stuff as well. Internally companies will start to have their applications written at a high enough level that they can run them on an internal platform as a service system or external. The more applications being built are abstracted from the underlying platforms the more this becomes possible and the more likely things like high density ARM cores will be desired.

 

Not ARM but relevant to this discussion look at things Tilera is doing with their chips in term of performance per watt of power consumed:

 

http://www.tilera.com/solutions/cloud_computing

 

At this point I think this discussion is probably off topic to the original thread and might be good to start a new one. Thoughts?

[compoundinglife]

What are you seeing in the private vs public cloud?

 

Should we start a new thread for this topic? Not sure what the protocol is on the board with regards to what is or isn't off topic for a thread.

[compoundinglife]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Honestly I thought Darren Thomas did a poor job of answering that question. He only touched on storage and he only talked about "virtualization" and storage not how Dell's storage offering fits into or adds value in the cloud space, cloud is not just a virtualization and in fact most clouds will probably have bare metal storage underneath not virtualized storage. But honestly I am not surprised given he is the VP/GM of storage. He is rooted in the sales of SAN/Storage products and probably not the best person to talk about Dell's cloud strategy.

 

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

Yeah, he didn't answer the full question, but as you pointed out, he's the storage guy.  He may have also been avoiding giving an answer because there are active discussions going on in the company.

 

You're exactly right -- build or buy is the question.  DELL will adapt.

Perhaps a more forthcoming answer would have been "Sorry, we can't comment on this right now but stay tuned." Providing a rambling, evasive answer filled with buzzwords that seeks to confuse is not what I call shareholder friendly.

 

An AAPL shareholder talking about confusing answers with buzzwords?  LOL.

 

I guess you don't read many CCs.  This is standard practice with analysts calls.  You gotta read between the lines. 

 

I don't a daily or weekly basis but I have read and listened to my share and that was just my honest opinion on the quality of the response. I don't really think there was much in between the lines there. 

 

Actually that type of response IMO is very typical of people that sell traditional storage solutions like SAN and NAS. It's a "we have been doing this forever and know our stuff and these new kids haven't learned the lessons we have, do you want to trust your data to some new fangled thing?". Sometime they are right sometime they are wrong.

 

[PlanMaestro]

Should we start a new thread for this topic? Not sure what the protocol is on the board with regards to what is or isn't off topic for a thread.

 

I guess it's about time to have an official Dell thread in the investment ideas section ... does anyone feel confident enough to right a short investment thesis? (txlaw?)

 

 

[compoundinglife]

Personally I have a little bit of trouble with the way DELL pushes information out to shareholders.  I don't trust people who talk like salesmen.

 

http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/videos~en/Documents~Dell_Q2FY13_Results.aspx.aspx

 

Follow that link above and listen to Steve Schuckenbrock.

 

I own shares and I don't really think they are lying, but they verbally communicate in a way that I just don't feel comfortable about.  It's the body language and the overly confident tone.  I feel like I'm going to drive off the lot with a used car.

 

I'd rather hear the same message from guys with less polish -- they wouldn't look like something isn't quite right.

 

Perhaps it just comes across as unnatural communication because well, it is -- that interview is done in a studio, they've rehearsed the lines...  I usually see videos of people fielding questions where they haven't had the time to rehearse the answers.

 

Yeah his section was very rehearsed. He might of been reading a teleprompter.

[compoundinglife]

Should we start a new thread for this topic? Not sure what the protocol is on the board with regards to what is or isn't off topic for a thread.

 

I guess it's about time to have an official Dell thread in the investment ideas section ... does anyone feel confident enough to right a short investment thesis? (txlaw?)

 

That sounds good to me. I was specifically though thinking of a thread for all the cloud talk since it had drifted away from Dell specifically.

[txlaw]

So, I think we're headed to a world where that just is one more bee in the beehive, to be quite honest. Does that make sense?

 

Actually it makes no sense. Compounding life posted about networkings (SDN), you responded by cutting and posting about storage. Two different things.

 

I thought that Compounding Life's post about software defined networking (SDN) was very useful, and I wasn't trying to refute anything he said.  Instead, I wanted to point out that DELL is thinking about this very interesting shift, which is occurring not just in networking but also in storage, which is a big part of DELL's IP portfolio.

 

Clearly, you didn't read the excerpt that closely.  The DELL guy's answer to the question he got -- which was about software-defined networking, software-defined storage, "cloud orchestration", etc. --  was interesting to me because it indicates that DELL has been thinking about the importance of software for provisioning cloud infrastructure.  True, the guy focused on storage because DELL-owned IP is very storage heavy.  But I would not be surprised if DELL had actually been looking at Nicira when VMware snapped it up. 

 

Just another sign that DELL sees where the puck is going.

 

Honestly I thought Darren Thomas did a poor job of answering that question. He only touched on storage and he only talked about "virtualization" and storage not how Dell's storage offering fits into or adds value in the cloud space, cloud is not just a virtualization and in fact most clouds will probably have bare metal storage underneath not virtualized storage. But honestly I am not surprised given he is the VP/GM of storage. He is rooted in the sales of SAN/Storage products and probably not the best person to talk about Dell's cloud strategy.

 

Dell has made some moves with SDN in conjunction with their Force10 product line. What was the date on that conference call transcript?

 

Yeah, he didn't answer the full question, but as you pointed out, he's the storage guy.  He may have also been avoiding giving an answer because there are active discussions going on in the company.

 

You're exactly right -- build or buy is the question.  DELL will adapt.

Perhaps a more forthcoming answer would have been "Sorry, we can't comment on this right now but stay tuned." Providing a rambling, evasive answer filled with buzzwords that seeks to confuse is not what I call shareholder friendly.

 

An AAPL shareholder talking about confusing answers with buzzwords?  LOL.

 

I guess you don't read many CCs.  This is standard practice with analysts calls.  You gotta read between the lines. 

 

I don't a daily or weekly basis but I have read and listened to my share and that was just my honest opinion on the quality of the response. I don't really think there was much in between the lines there. 

 

Actually that type of response IMO is very typical of people that sell traditional storage solutions like SAN and NAS. It's a "we have been doing this forever and know our stuff and these new kids haven't learned the lessons we have, do you want to trust your data to some new fangled thing?". Sometime they are right sometime they are wrong.

 

Point well taken.  Perhaps I'm giving him too much credit, and I was filling in the gaps myself.  I do think that DELL is almost certainly aware of the SDN phenomenon, despite the fellow's non-response.

 

I actually happen to know one of the Nicira engineers -- who I'm pretty sure is quite well off now that the company was acquired -- and we were discussing Openflow and the effect it might have on the Ciscos of the world.  I actually specifically brought up DELL, but I can't really recall having much of a discussion about the company itself.  The discussion was more about the commoditization of networking hardware and having all the value in the software/management side of the networking space.

 

In any case, it is indeed a risk that we must be aware of when thinking about the cloud infrastructure hardware portion of the biz.

[txlaw]

Should we start a new thread for this topic? Not sure what the protocol is on the board with regards to what is or isn't off topic for a thread.

 

I guess it's about time to have an official Dell thread in the investment ideas section ... does anyone feel confident enough to right a short investment thesis? (txlaw?)

 

I'll start a thread. 

 

It will probably incorporate most of what I wrote in my initial post on this thread, which was in response to a question from Sanjeev.

[Guest valueInv]

What are you seeing in the private vs public cloud?

 

Should we start a new thread for this topic? Not sure what the protocol is on the board with regards to what is or isn't off topic for a thread.

 

I think this question is very relevant to Dell. If you look at the large public cloud vendors like Google or Amazon, they use cheap custom hardware. Their software stacks consist of stitched together open source and proprietary software. They are going to buy very little software, services or hardware from Dell. Effectively, Dell gets locked out. So if a future customer buys SFDC licenses instead of implementing some part of it in a private  cloud and if SFDC hosts it on AWS, there are very few dollars up for grabs for companies like Dell.

 

If on the other hand, private clouds form a big portion of spending, enterprises need to buy a lot of hardware, software, services. Then Dell has a bigger play. The question then is, will they be able to compete against IBM and Oracle?

[compoundinglife]

What are you seeing in the private vs public cloud?

 

Should we start a new thread for this topic? Not sure what the protocol is on the board with regards to what is or isn't off topic for a thread.

 

I think this question is very relevant to Dell. If you look at the large public cloud vendors like Google or Amazon, they use cheap custom hardware. Their software stacks consist of stitched together open source and proprietary software. They are going to buy very little software, services or hardware from Dell. Effectively, Dell gets locked out. So if a future customer buys SFDC licenses instead of implementing some part of it in a private  cloud and if SFDC hosts it on AWS, there are very few dollars up for grabs for companies like Dell.

 

If on the other hand, private clouds form a big portion of spending, enterprises need to buy a lot of hardware, software, services. Then Dell has a bigger play. The question then is, will they be able to compete against IBM and Oracle?

 

Ok, random stream of thoughts on this subject...

 

So clearly public cloud is a big deal. Amazon web services which is hidden under "other income" on their income statements is over 1 Billion now. One of these days I will start a thread on to value Amazon's AWS business properly, because I am trying to figure out what the IV of that part of their business is.

 

Interest in private cloud ATM is big, I can't provide a real number because I don't know but maybe Gartner has an estimate somewhere. Companies want the ability to have an AWS like service behind their firewall. IMO the reason is not always because they want to buy cheaper hardware, its because of operational efficiency. Developers go to amazon and turn on 20 servers in 1 minute, they get excited about how much easier it can make their job. But they can't do their day to day work there because company policy prohibits it. No traditional company wants their IP or customer data on a public cloud. Even though the reality might be that Amazon's IT security folks are better skilled than theirs.

 

IMO a fortune 500 company would pay normal prices for Dell or HPQ hardware and pay for services on top of that to have a private cloud because it would increase efficiency so much. You need a server to do some testing? You need 30? Well instead of going through the procurement process and waiting 3 months or more you can have it right now. IT can bill your department internally based on long you used those instances. You are spinning up these instances on a large pool of resources that are centrally manage by IT but you don't even have to talk to them to get your work done. They just setup a quota on your account for how many instances you can use. I think for Enterprise companies the cost savings in just getting "more work done faster" is a huge value by itself. Plus they already have IT staff and data center staff that they have to pay for their legacy systems, so migrating to a public cloud does not save then OPEX unless they move ALOT of stuff and lay off some IT folks shut down data centers.

 

Where companies like Dell and HPQ play into this is by helping customer get it done. Currently Dell helps companies build private clouds using software called Openstack (http://openstack.org). Openstack is essentially an open source clone of amazon web services. It does not do everything AWS does, but its under very active development on a 6 month release cycle and is getting better all the time. Dig around the website and look at the companies who have developers working on openstack. You will see the usual suspects, IBM, HPQ, DELL, RAX, RHT and many smaller companies.  The Openstack project was created by Rackspace and NASA, they were both working on private cloud software internally and decided to opensource their respective pieces.

 

  Dell's cloud website:

 

  http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing

 

  Dell also has software tool they built to help provision openstack based clouds called crowbar: http://content.dell.com/us/en/gen/d/cloud-computing/crowbar-software-framework

 

  HP appears to be focusing more on building it's own public cloud: https://www.hpcloud.com/ 

 

When looking at companies like DELL and HPQ I don't think commodity servers are the end of their enterprise IT business and here is why...

 

Google, Amazon and Facebook hire the brightest and the best and pay them handsomely to build solutions that allow them to utilize cheap hardware at scale. They had to build their own solutions because not even a 747 full of IBM consultants could do this for them, granted they would try and rack up the billable hours, three years later they would have something that doesn't work. I know a bunch of engineers that work at all of the companies I just mentioned and I can tell you what they do currently can't be done by normal companies. It requires a technology skill set and operational agility that can't be done at even the largest non-tech companies.

 

Companies that are not in the large scale computing business want stuff that works and people to help them when its 3:00AM and stuff is down for some unknown reason. Data centers is not their competitive advantage so they are not going to innovate there. Instead they want something that can be run by someone with an average IT skill set and a support contract as a kicker in case stuff really goes wrong.

 

So in short while there are tons of changes coming down the road in IT/Cloud/Servers/Networking, I still think customers want services, solutions and support. I think Dell has some real opportunities there. But in the end my enthusiasm is mainly based on the beaten down stock price and it goes up as the price goes down. I just read that GS put Dell on the sell block with a $9 price target, music to my ears :)