Continued from part one.

If there was an all too apparent feature of Dell Technologies’ IQT strategy event, held in New York last week, it was how much interesting information was crammed into a short amount of time. In a microcosmic fashion, so too was true of the exclusive roundtable with Dell Technologies CEO and founder, Michael Dell (read part one here) with plenty of insights offered in a mere half hour.

Dell’s response to a question about who he considers as the company’s competition was different from the usual assertion – “we will own the market and crush the competition.” Instead, he stressed the company’s value of collaboration. This extends beyond working with partners to also working with its customers, listening to their feedback and taking their requirements into the next iterations of its products and services on an ongoing basis.

Michael Dell, CEO and founder, Dell Technologies

Collaborate, rather than compete

Dell elaborated that those companies that one may assume would be Dell Technologies’ competition are often times their clients, with Pivotal (one of the companies in the Dell Technologies family) currently serving approximately half of the Fortune 500 businesses as they pursue their digital transformation. For customers that don’t necessarily want to spend money, he admitted that their alternative may be open source software.

“However, frequently we find clients, particularly those running mission critical applications, return to a paid route,” he added. The reason for this, he noted, is the support and mission critical services that Dell Technologies has built around their solutions.

Can big still be fast?

Admittedly, much has been written about the advantages of being a small company in order to be more agile and adaptive to the market. Dell Technologies, especially following the acquisition of EMC, is certainly not small. But can it still be agile? Dell believes so. He explained that the company has deliberately created a structure where it can respond quickly on important projects, but leverage the scale that being a global organisation provides.

However, he also pointed out that there are a few ways to be fast and agile, and one is to invest in innovative start-ups, and smaller companies, the likes of Moogsoft, Edico Genome and ZingBox. This then, brought the day full circle, which began by highlighting a few of those companies that Dell Technologies had invested in and which were working very particularly on a specific slice of IoT or machine learning.

One of the most pertinent questions that arises for leaders of companies that are succeeding is, What has been the secret of their success? For Dell, doing what he loved, and having fun were key.

“I was very lucky. At 19 years old I found what I loved to do and it has been a tremendous amount of fun and still is. To me, it has been an intersection between what I love to do, what is interesting, what is exciting and what enables me to make a difference in the world,” Dell concluded.

For further information on the Dell IQT event, head here.