On the one-year anniversary of its historic tie-up with EMC, Dell is showing that bigger can be better, according to Bloomberg.
The company demonstrated surging demand for servers, networking equipment and computers and signed on 10,000 new business customers in the past year. On Thursday it announced a deal to become General Electric’s primary IT infrastructure supplier, in one of Dell’s largest non-government contracts ever. Sales in the fiscal second quarter were up 48 percent from a year ago and prior to the merger, and 8.3 percent from the previous quarter. Operating losses also narrowed.
Michael Dell has assembled a massive company to help push back against the rising demand for cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft. The deal with EMC brought together the leading provider of key computer storage products and one of the top makers of servers and personal computers, allowing Dell to become a one-stop shop for business customers and address competition from rivals in the cloud. Now Dell is investing in new products and partnerships to woo dollars away from the encroaching rivals while also keeping traditional competitors at bay.
During the quarter that ended Aug. 4, sales were $19.3 billion, Dell said. It had an operating loss of $979 million. In the previous period, sales were $17.8 billion and the operating loss was $1.5 billion. The unit that includes computers had revenue of $9.9 billion, an increase of 7 percent from the year-ago period, as operating income rose. That was also the highest sales quarter for the group since the second fiscal quarter of 2015.
The group encompassing servers and storage had sales of $7.4 billion, and an operating income of $430 million. Server and networking revenue was $3.7 billion, up 16 percent from the year-ago period. Storage results were not as strong. During the last quarter, orders for that business declined. However, the company is hiring hundreds of sales specialists, and shaking up incentives for its staff, to help bolster results. Since completing the EMC deal, Dell has paid down about $9.5 billion in gross debt.
Automated systems and bots now generate more than half of internet traffic, forcing hosting companies to manage performance, security, and infrastructure costs at the same time. Ivan Čačija argues that business users are no longer buying only storage and computing resources, but the availability and performance of their own operations. AI will reshape both data-centre management and infrastructure requirements, while regional providers can compete through local presence, predictable costs and hybrid models. Fastserver sees its partnership with Blackwall as part of a broader shift towards an integrated platform combining infrastructure, security, traffic protection and automation.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has unveiled comprehensive plans to restrict children’s access to social media platforms through the proposed EU Kids Act.
Ericsson Nikola Tesla no longer views artificial intelligence solely as a tool that helps developers write code, but as part of the entire software development lifecycle. At the upcoming ENT Technology Days, taking place from 21 to 25 September, artificial intelligence will also be among the central topics.
Siniša Krajnović, PhD, President of the Management Board of ENT, sees the transformation brought about by artificial intelligence through products, internal processes, and changes in the way work itself is performed, while Jelena Jurišić, Director of Technology of the ENT Group (CTO), explains how specialized AI agents are now part of analysis, design, implementation, testing, and verification. In such a model, autonomy increases gradually, with quality control and human decision-making at critical points. At the same time, the change does not diminish the importance of engineers, but increasingly shifts their role toward architecture, domain understanding, and the management of complex automated systems.
