Nexo is buying Vauld, marking more DeFi consolidation

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Dell Technologies

Power Score: 77.65

Momentum Score: 26.0 (T-6)

HQ: Round Rock, TX

CEO: Michael Dell

On Power

In recent years, Dell's strategy has been… unclear, to put it charitably, going private in 2013 , buying EMC for $60 billion in 2016 , coming back to the public market in 2018 and now spinning off its $64 billion stake in VMware this month. But now, Dell has less debt on its balance sheet and a streamlined business strategy focused on laptops, data center hardware and hybrid cloud solutions. Dell's $4 billion per quarter storage division is still massive, but revenue is stalling. The company is using lessons learned from the multi-cloud software suite of VMware (which is featured later in our list) to build its own hybrid cloud offering, Apex, that gives on-prem hardware similar management capabilities as what's available in the public cloud, with the ability to extend storage and compute into the major public cloud providers as well. Dell is finally, albeit reluctantly, acknowledging that the public cloud isn't going away anytime soon, and despite its obvious preference for on-prem hardware, is well positioned to take on the hybrid market for those that don't buy the vision of a cloud-majority future .

On Disruption

With its spinoff of VMware and sale of Boomi , a cloud application integrator, earlier this year, it's easy to think that Dell is moving out of the hybrid and public cloud space entirely. However, both of those moves came more down to Dell's debt obligations and focus on profit than a shift in company strategy. The company will continue to leverage its strategic partnership with VMware to build out hybrid and multi-cloud solutions, as evidenced by its Apex solution, which the company has been marketing to some traditional digital transformation targets, like health care companies. The upside of Apex, which, like most hybrid storage products, is said to be a marriage of the "flexibility of the cloud with the security of the data center," has extended the as-a-service model to Dell's on-prem offerings. But the uphill battle the company still faces is convincing customers that the 14-day window for hardware deployment is responsive enough to spiking workflows to keep pace with public cloud storage flexibility.

Tea Leaves

While Dell is increasingly acknowledging that public cloud has a place in the industry, the company didn't miss out on the opportunity to capitalize on the 2020 SolarWinds hack that hit Microsoft and other cloud-based companies to say that the cloud is not as secure as on-prem and hybrid environments . Of course, Microsoft and other cloud vendors disagreed with that, and industry analysts tend to side with Microsoft on this one .

They Said It

" This is where APEX comes in; to deliver the scale of the cloud with the ease of as-a-service. It's a critical component to how we modernize and grow our core businesses, grow private and hybrid cloud, and win the edge." — Vice Chairman and Co-COO Jeff Clarke in a May 2021 earnings call

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