At Dell, we work at the speed of a start-up: Karinne Brannigan

Post the buyout of EMC in 2016 and re-listing in the stock markets, Dell Technologies believes that it has to work like a start-up in order to sustain its business.

Karinne Brannigan, Senior Vice President, APJ Marketing, Dell Technologies, said, "From Day 1 of the integration (after Dell bought EMC for $67 billion) and even after the first year, we were working extra jobs of what our structure would look like, and how it would work. In spite of the size of our organization, we work at the speed of a start-up."

Dell, which shot to fame as a PC maker, bought EMC, a storage giant, in the largest tech deal, and since then Dell has also re-listed in the US stock markets after founder Michael Dell de-listed and kept it private for a few years.

Typically, such large mergers result in sizeable lay-offs too. According to Brannigan, the company took an approach of not resorting to large scale lay-offs and instead re-skilled some of their worlers. She said that there was some direct duplication of roles and that had to work through it. "There were areas where we had to look at the skills of people and we re-housed our team members into different roles which brings in positivity across the entire family of brands," she said. "It wasn’t the same structure that we were lifting and shifting, we redesigned the structure which actually meant there were more opportunities," she added.

While Dell Technologies does not give a region-wise breakup of its workforce, it has around 1,45,000 employees globally.

Transformation

The way the merger was done got a mention in the Harvard Business Review. It ranked Dell 19th out of the top 20 companies that have transformed. This listed included companies like Netflix, Adobe, Alibaba and others.

Th company's transformation has come at a time of many technological changes, including 5G, AI, machine learning and IoT, which will drive tech usage going forward. “5G will create much more data, and bringing the data together with AI, can drive massive technology infrastructural requirement,” Brannigan said.