With the curtain falling on Dell EMC World 2017, it's time to take stock of what exactly this year's show had in store for attendees, and boy howdy, is there a lot to unpack here.
First off, let's get the traditional conference weirdness out of the way. There's usually at least one slightly baffling moment in every enterprise tech show, and this one was no exception. As part of the final keynote, Dell EMC executive Chad Sakac flew in on a stunt rig, dressed as 'Captain Canada', complete with shield and hockey stick.
It's not quite as crazy as the on-stage wedding at last year's Red Hat Summit, but seeing the president of the company's converged platforms business being winched down onto the stage while dressed as a knock-off superhero is definitely going to stay with me for a while.
As the first proper Dell EMC World since the two companies merged last lear, this show is effectively the blueprint for how it means to go on, and it's fair to say that the company brought its A-game. Never has a tech convention been more appropriately named.
For starters, the show itself is gigantic, with reportedly north of 13,000 attendees swamping Las Vegas' Palazzo hotel. Not only that, but the vendor also announced massive product refreshes for virtually all of its data centre products, including a new 14th-generation PowerEdge server, new data protection tools and updates to its entire storage lineup.
The show also cements Dell EMC's position as a fully-unified company. Every member of the company's executive branch was singing from the same song-sheet, with themes of multi-cloud adoption, digital transformation and security innovation being repeated by several separate business units. The company's numerous product likes have been much more closely-integrated too, particularly in the storage and converged spaces.
I've been thinking about this for the past few days, and I genuinely can't think of a single area of enterprise technology that the now-monolithic Dell Technologies doesn't have at least some kind of hand in. From client devices like laptops and tablets all the way down to servers, storage and infrastructure, the company can now cover almost every business IT requirement.
Dell EMC's portfolio is now seriously formidable, and there's a firm argument that the company is now in an excellent position to assume a place as king of the data centre. With such a comprehensive and sophisticated product lineup, can anyone stand against the new world order that is Dell Technologies?
