So like I said last week, we got this problem looking for growth, and Cisco, HP and everything is keeping me up at night. So what have we got? I tell you what we got, we got an opportunity, and that opportunity is in Round Rock. Yeah, I know, sounds wacky, but think about it. Michael’s already retired once and had to come back because the yo-yo he left behind didn’t measure up. His heart’s not in it. The guy wants to let go, really, trust me.
And we can handle this. Dell is a $28.2 billion company now, market cap again, so we’re bigger. We run our storage racket, much, much better than Dell runs its system and server stuff, at least compared to HP and IBM. Think about it for a second: How much bigger could Dell be if we ran it and gave it the EMC smarts?
Look, the company is fading. Whatever Michael does, it’s fading. And it’s an EMC reseller, it fits. Think about it, it resells CLARiiON and Celerra. I know, the EqualLogic stuff is squeezing CLARiiON out but we can fix that problem quick. EqualLogic can become our iSCSI SAN brand or something, I mean its small potatoes.
Okay, my guys will be asking two things right? Where do we get the cash for the buy and won’t it piss off VMware’s server partners if we start selling our own servers. These guys are always seeing problems. It’s another opportunity, spelled out as in S – E – L – L – V – M – W – A – R – E.
Think about it. We sell VMware off for about $15 billion, keeping 10% and board representation so we don’t get screwed down the pike. Now we have $15 billion green ones cash plus our own shares to buy Dell. This gives us a $65 billion chunk of the pie and we’re up to half the size, sort of, against IBM ($173 billion), HP ($124 billion) and Cisco ($140 billion). We get our own integrated stack, D-Blocks, whatever, we don’t piss off VMware’s partners, and we get a chance to screw around with Microsoft and Intel by owning Dell servers and PCs. Look guys, we gotta grow, we gotta grow big and this is a plan to die for. I know, I’m the only one that can see this and that’s why I’m top dog around Hopkinton.
So we buy Dell in 2010/2011, integrate all that, and then it’s time for the big takedown. This will be a $50 billion buy that take us up into Cisco, HP and IBM territory. Then I can retire. I got an idea about that, about how we can do it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m telling my guys to have a look at Dell.
Trust me, Michael’s tired and he knows he can’t hack it. We could give it to Gelsinger as his proving ground. Something tells me he’s maybe good enough to run the whole show. It’s between him and Maritz but there’s plenty of time for that. I’m going to have me a little sit-down with Michael.
