Interview: Dell software chief talks transformation - maxeyjact1957

John Swainson has one of the more challenging jobs in the tech industry just now.

As president of Dell's software package division, atomic number 2's polar with sort through all the software Dell has acquired and organizing it into coherent offerings that can further its effort to go a more profitable, software package- and services-driven company.

Swainson sat polish with IDG News Service after a Dell result in San Francisco Wed, where the company proclaimed much product packages for mobile device management.

John Swainson, president of Dell's software division

He talked about the challenges of marketing hosted applications, the tough job of consolidating Quest's software catalog from 200 products down to just about 40 and the state of innovation in enterprise software.

Following is an edited transcript of the interview.

IDGNS: First, the elephant in the room. What impact has Michael Dingle's fight to take the party private had on your efforts to build its software business?

Swainson: None. Every indication I've had from Michael and the potential investors is that they're equally curious in building a bigger, more diverse software business in the future as they always were in the noncurrent, and then it's full zip ahead.

IDGNS: People credit Michael Dell with making some smart software package acquisitions and having good technology, yet Dell's transformation isn't happening as quickly as people would like. Why is that?

Swainson: I think it's sledding about as fast equally some transformation of any business I've ever seen. That doesn't mean every intersection people have talked about has been successful. The whole feeling of the converged substructure for Dell has taken a trifle longer than we would have thought, we did a reset [connected Dell's first virtualization products] and started some other initiatives that we talked about last fall. But if you step back and spirit at where Dell is today from where it was three years ago, on that point's a deal out of get along.

Dell only a PC company?

IDGNS: In that location's lul a perception of Dingle being a PC company. How some of an issue is that when you're difficult to sell complex systems that include software package and services?

Swainson: It's a perception you give birth to address in the mart. We've shipped and integrated servers and software and done outsourcing for some of the most complex companies in the world. A couple of weeks ago we announced a supercomputer with the Texas Advanced Computing Meat and that's as bulky and complicated a system as anyone is doing in the world.

Our challenge from a stigmatisation perspective is getting people to recall of us more how we aspire to be and less how we were. Where it hurts you is when customers don't know you offer something indeed they Don River't think to ask, that's why you have to gain judicial mass and state your report in a visual way of life.

IDGNS: What's Dell's applications strategy? The applications area was one of the four rive areas you talked about last year, along with systems management, security, and information analytics. You offer hosted products from Salesforce.com, Adobe and Pardot, you were going to add Microsoft Great Plains, and Intuit Quickbooks. What's the be after now?

Swainson: It's an area we harbor't figured out so far, quite honestly. We successful combined change between then and now: we decided it was more of a services play than a software play, so we moved the hosted business I had over to the services division.

The hosted applications commercialise looks comparable it has a lot of potential but it's taking a years to set forth. What I decided to do after a year of experiment was to focus on the tierce other businesses I had that were growing faster. Sol Dell is still thinking roughly hosted applications, but I'm not.

IDGNS: It scarcely seems like such a fresh fit with your focus along small and mid-sized businesses.

Swainson: The challenge is that it's a divergent customer, it's a different selling cycle, it's rather heavily divided, and the only real way to make money out of it I think is to own your own IP [intellectual place], and the IP is selfsame expensive. Those were the conundrums we faced as we tried to enter taboo how to make money from this.

IDGNS: Hoi polloi have talked almost Quest as the glue that binds your other software acquisitions together. How arrange you view Bespeak? There seems to be technologies you can apply across all the other distinguishable areas.

Swainson: That's what makes it so attractive for us. I sometimes described [Dingle's software business] As not truly a company, it was more same a VC company masquerading as a business.

You had all these nonheritable businesses sitting there more or less loose. They had consolidated their Information technology systems and things like that, just the development teams and the product teams were still rather sitting in that location in virginal build, and that provided us with an enormous base to build on.

They had a data protection line of work and we put that put together with ours and now we feature a $200 million data protection business.

They had a relatively small endpoint management business concern, we had quite a big one, and we put those together and immediately we have a $150 one thousand thousand endpoint management business.

Excessively many products?

IDGNS: Having that many products is a blessing and a curse. Have you done much paring back? You have a few different data protection products, a few virtualization platforms.

Swainson: We had four data protection products, several virtualization, a bunch of operation direction. The first time we did the count we definite we had something same 200 products in Bespeak alone, and after we went through with in ghastly point and eliminated the axiomatic overlaps. We've got nigh 40 or 50 products.

IDGNS: That's a man-sized paring back out.

Swainson: A batch of this was features that were masquerading as products. So things that should never get been products, like utilities, we'd merge back into the performance direction ware and have a suite instead of difficult to betray information technology separately. Both of it was vertical overlap. In reposition management, we really did give birth four data protection products, so now we're going through the technical process of taking the best of each product and putting it together, along a common model. That's the long horny elbow room to bonk but sometimes it's worthy it because there's a $200 million tax revenue stream and it's worth protective.

IDGNS: Which one wins, the unrivaled with the most customers?

Swainson: The one that's the best architected and the most flexible and modern and that has the near features ordinarily wins, because it's the one you can bring back to that customer set and get in the upgrade. And you can usually qualify it enough so that the elevate is seamless.

IDGNS: So so you end-of-lifespan those products?

Swainson: Only maybe five of them have been literally oddment-of-lifed. You converge them, you sell them as packages. They're not discrete products any more, that's the big difference. The reason you don't want to [end of life them] is because in the software industry, all the gainfulness comes from the tail. You'ray better off putt information technology on upkeep. Even though it'll attrition away over time, it'll still be profitable. Exhibit A on this are people same Oracle.

IDGNS: The software industry went through with tremendous consolidation late, what's the state of the ISV market today? Is there very much of startups and innovation?

Swainson: There are a lot of startups. For a while there weren't. After 2001 there was a real wall, obviously, then there was a bit of a plateau, and then populate got distracted and a lot of inauguration money went to green tech and else things. Now people are coming rearmost, because of cloud and floating and some of these other areas. There's a lot of VC money departure in and a lot of corporate money being worn out besides. So there's a lot of innovation in the enterprise software space.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451516/interview-dell-software-chief-talks-transformation.html

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