Dell software chief: why hardware is no longer enough

Dell launched its software group at the beginning of 2012, and since then the company has been defining a strategy for the group and populating it through acquisitions – the biggest and most recent of which was Quest Software.

Techworld caught up with John Swainson head of the new software group when he was on a recent visit to London, to find about how the strategy is going, how it compares with HP, and what customers can expect from Dell on the software front in the coming months.

Historically, Dell has brought software into its solutions by working with partners. Swainson said that this would continue to be part of the equation, because Dell is not going to try and recreate what companies like Microsoft have done. “On the other hand, you can never achieve the same level of integration working with a partner that you can achieve in your own development lab, so that was starting to necessitate some level of Dell owning its own IP.”