Dell Inc. is now Dell Technologies.
Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell in May announced that the tech vendor would change its name as it pursued buying storage data vendor EMC and its family of federated companies in a massive deal worth around $62 billion. Dell made the announcement during the first day of the EMC World show.
“We wanted to convey a family of businesses and aligned capabilities, and as family names go, I’m kind of attached to Dell,” Michael Dell said during his keynote address at the show.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Aug. 26, Dell officials said the company made the change effective the day before. The SEC filing comes a week after a report surfaced in the New York Post saying that Chinese antitrust regulators had given their approval to the Dell-EMC deal, which was seen as the final major hurdle the two companies had to clear for the acquisition to go forward.
The deal is expected to close by October. It represents the largest acquisition in the history of the tech industry, bringing together two companies that are stalwarts in a vast array of market segments, from PCs and storage systems to enterprise IT and virtualization.
Like other established players in the industry—such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems and Intel—Dell and EMC also are looking to quickly adapt to a changing business world that is being impacted by such trends as the cloud, the proliferation of mobile devices, data analytics, the internet of things (IoT) and the years-long contraction of the global PC market.
Dell, the world’s third largest PC vendor, for several years has been looking to transform itself from being simply a client box maker to an enterprise IT solutions and services provider that can better compete with the likes of HPE and IBM, spending billions of dollars to build up its capabilities in such areas as software, security, enterprise hardware and the cloud. EMC under CEO Joe Tucci has created a federated business model where other companies it owns—including VMware, RSA Security, software maker Pivotal and cloud software vendor Virtustream—operate as independent but cooperating businesses to make the entire EMC Federation stronger.
According to Dell officials, the PC business will keep the Dell brand, while the combined enterprise IT business will be called Dell EMC and will headquartered in Hopkinton, Mass., where EMC is currently based.
Earlier this year, antitrust regulators in both the United States and the European Union gave their approvals to Dell’s acquisition of EMC, and in July, EMC shareholders overwhelmingly voted in support of the deal, with 98 percent of them accounting for 74 percent of company shares voting in favor. That left the approval of China as the last major challenge. Reports indicated that Dell’s announcement of Chinese regulator support could come this week.
Dell has changed its name several times since Michael Dell launched the company as PCs Ltd. from his dorm room at the University of Texas, Austin more than 30 years ago. It had been Dell Computer Corp. until 2003, when it became Dell Inc. as it looked to expand into such areas as the data center.