Last night I received a message from Compellent about their new organization: the acquisition process was over without a glitch and now they will work as a single company (or at least this is what I can see from the field).
never change a winning team
First of all I’m glad to see Compellent’s team will be left untouched, especially the customer’s beloved support and the engineering team! I have got no visibility of what will happen to sales forces but I’m sure that Compellent people will easily find a fit in the Dell’s organization (CML hasn’t direct sales forces on the field and all the business was delivered via partners). This strategy is quite similar to the one applied in the past with Equallogic and I think there are many chances the success will repeat!
there is strength in numbers
The second good news of the day is that Compellent and Equallogic will host a single bigger event “The Dell Storage Forum”. (no more C-Drive nor Equallogic user conference) I can’t wait for that event! It will be a great opportunity for customers and partners to share knowledge, meet the engineering and take a look at future developments of the whole Dell storage offering (indeed, I’m pretty sure we will see much more than EQL+CML there).
attack is the best defense
Dell’s sales people are already attacking the “black” installed base! (Dell refers to Black Boxes to all OEMed EMC CX installations while “Purple” is used to describe the EMC branded ones) . They are moving as fast as they can to convince customers to move from old CXs to Compellent before EMC will be ready to commercially counteract and try to save the customers know-how with a move to VNX. Dell is very committed to show the news to customers and partners, I’ve been told about a lot of successful presentations.
the bottom line
What’s really streaking me is the speed the integration took place (more or less the same happened about HP-3Par). Just a bunch of weeks between the announcement of the acquisition and the formulation of integrated commercial offerings. It surely means just all that needed was the time to let the sales forces merge and presto, on the field.
