This article is more than 1 year old

What the bleedin' Dell is this? IT giant mulls unit selloffs – report

AppAssure becomes RapidRecovery becomes RapidDeparture...?

Reuters reports Dell is thinking of selling off non-core assets to clear the decks before the EMC acquisition and raise $10bn.

Four candidate businesses are mentioned:

  • Quest Software IT management with its systems management, security and business intelligence functions
  • SonicWall email encryption and security
  • Rapid Recovery (was AppAssure)
  • Perot Systems, its services arm

Dell has refused to comment on this Reuters report.

The four candidate products overlap EMC products or are relative failures. Thus SonicWall would be positioned against RSA security products from EMC. The Rapid recovery product overlaps with EMC's data protection portfolio with, for example, with Mozy doing the end-points and Networker looking after data centres along with Data Domain.

Perot Systems doesn't have an EMC equivalent but it has struggled to fulfil its potential from when Dell bought it in 2009 for a then massive $3.9bn.

Quest Software overlaps some of EMC's own management products. It was acquired by Dell in 2012 for $2.36bn. It, along with Rapid Recovery and SonicWall, is in Dell's Software Group which has been run by Jon Swainson since 2012. Suresh Vaswani runs the Services business for Dell.

Dell is going to take on almost $50m in debt when the $67bn acquisition of EMC completes sometime next year.

Dell and EMC have two executives, Rory Read from Dell and Howard Elias from EMC, looking at the overall portfolio and seeing what fits where – and, presumably, what doesn't fit at all. Possibly they have already been busy and this is one of the fruits, if that's the right term, of their labours.

It's sad, if true, for the AppAssure/Rapid Recovery people as that product was given a major upgrade recently. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like