Friday, May 08, 2009

An Audience with Michael Dell

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Michael Dell speak in a briefing session organised by BCS ELITE.

Michael started off by giving his views about industry trends and the current economic situation. In particular he spent quite a lot of time talking about cloud computing and how Dell are working with large technology organisations such as Amazon and Yahoo. He talked about the emergence of private clouds - cloud based solutions with limited shared infrastructure to provide some of the benefits of cloud computing while at the same time assuaging concerns about security and integrity of data.

After Michael’s presentation there was a Q&A session. The questions varied from “are you getting too close to Microsoft” to “what would you do if you weren’t running Dell”. Michael answered all of these questions head-on, without any kind of hesitation. What really came across very strongly was his deep passion for technology - he very clearly would rather spend time with his engineers than with his bean counters. In this respect his attitude was similar to Bill Gates’s, when I heard him speak last year (albeit in a more constrained forum). It was great to hear Michael speak - my congratulations and thanks go to BCS ELITE for organising this event.