TechPulse 360

Michael Dell explains the emphasis of his company for the small business market

Talking at Dell’s SMB Global Media Summit today (follow #DellTYOP on Twitter), Michael Dell touts itself as being the typical example of how technology can help a small business grow and be successful. Below is an edited transcription of his comments.

Michael Dell: The small and medium business space is one that I particularly identify with because we started out as a small company. But actually when you think about it, every company started out as a small company. There are no companies that just all the sudden were large companies.

The other real exciting thing for us is the incredible role that technology plays in enabling new businesses to be created, new businesses to be form. We actually see that all over the world. Which is why we take time to recognize the role that entrepreneurs and “heroes” play in creating these businesses.

It’s an incredible engine of creation. We’re seeing strengthening the economy and it really starts with small and medium businesses. We see that in our business.

When you think what’s going in the world today, we need these new jobs and we need entrepreneurs. And actually the entrepreneurs of this era are able to grow and expand much faster than when I was a young man. If you look at the growth rates in the various lists of the fastest growing new businesses, you actually see growth rates that many many times greater than in the age when Dell was a start-up. And it’s absolutely enabled by technology and cloud and virtualisation, etc..

VIRTUALISATION

When you think about virtualisation, there has been a lot of conversation about it, it’s been around for about 10 years and you see some really advanced companies that are heavily using virtualisation. But if you actually look at the enormous number of companies out there, there’s a still a long way to go in utilizing the power of virtualisation across a very broad section of businesses and enterprises around the world. We see a role for us in helping organizations taking advantage of that capability to be able to scale their businesses.

CLOUD

The cloud is even in an earlier stage of infancy where you a very very small percentage of IT occurring in a cloud like environment and that’s an area that we think is going to grow tremendously. We’re making investments in to help our customers embrace those kinds of technologies and have a seamless way of evolving from on-premise to cloud capabilities.

MOBILITY

And mobility is perhaps one of the most exciting things that is going on in our industry. First of all the incredible growth of high-speed networks that are creating this bandwidth so we can take information, use it in any form we want. And the way that is it changing and enabling new models, changing the form of how computing is consumed. And certainly a lot of computing platforms are springing up.

At the extreme you have 5 billion people in the world that have cell phones. The cell phone started out as simple voice phones and they went into feature phones and now we have the smartphones that is really a small computing platform. Yet only 200 million or so of those 5 billion cell phones are actually smartphones. So we see enormous growth in that area in the next 5 or 10 years. With that the need to create new capabilities to support that and to support the transition in mobile computing. But that enables all kinds of new ways of thinking. How does work actually get done and certainly enormous opportunities that we see.

So it’s a very exciting time to be a small business, to be a growing business. And certainly the world’s need more small businesses that are creating jobs and it’s really the engine of the global economy from the job creation and innovation standpoint.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2010 at 6:17 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.