Dell’s infrastructure group posts record quarterly revenue
Investors reacted favorably late last week when Dell Technologies reported its Q1 fiscal 2023 results. The company reported record revenue, with particularly strong numbers from Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG). ISG is the business segment which includes data center servers, networking and storage.
Dell ISG reported $9.3 billion in revenue, up 16%, generating operating income of $1.1 billion. Storage revenue was up 9% to $4.2 billion, and servers and network revenue topped $5 billion, up 22% year-over-year (YoY).
Chuck Whitten, Dell’s COO, said in a statement that the company’s earnings demonstrated the success of its diverse business strategy, which covers the edge to the core data center to the cloud. He said these solid fundamentals put it in position to take advantage of emerging IT market business opportunities, despite the prevailing supply chain headwinds that plague the IT industry.
“…we are positioned to pursue growth wherever it materializes in the IT market, given the predictability, durability, and flexibility in our business,” he added.
The company reached a significant telco cloud milestone this past quarter with the introduction of Dell Telecom Multi-Cloud Foundation. The solution is aimed at communication service provider (CSP) modernization efforts, providing a turnkey network infrastructure solution to deploy on open, cloud-native networks. The solution pairs Dell server hardware with its bare-metal orchestrator management software. Dell touts support for Red Hat, VMware and Wind River telco cloud platforms.
At the time of its introduction, Aaron Chaisson, Dell’s VP of Telecom and Edge Solutions, said that his company is staking early mover advantage in the emerging Open RAN/vRAN disaggregation market.
“As the telecommunications industry is disaggregating and modernizing and moving into the next era of that industry, Dell Technologies was really looking to get into the game with our leadership over decades of working with open platforms and core IT and taking those people, those processes, and those technologies and being able to help the telecommunications industry modernize their infrastructure,” he said.
COO Jeff Clarke used the company’s recent quarterly call with analysts to highlight Dell’s work helping customers navigate multi-cloud challenges. Coming out of Dell Technologies World, the company counts CVS Health, USAA, General Motors and Boeing among the customers who are leveraging Dell solutions as part of their digital transformation efforts.
“We shared Project Alpine, which brings enterprise-class data services into the public cloud for cloud bursting, test and development, cloud-based analytics, data and container mobility. We are also unlocking the power of data through our partnership with Snowflake, the first of its kind that provides direct access to Dell object storage on-prem, and we are including cybersecurity throughout,” said Clarke.
Bill Scannell is president of Dell’s Global Sales & Customer Operations head. In a recent blog post, Scannell pointed to Dell’s efforts to help customers with digital transformation into multi-cloud environments.
As proof, Scannell presented Dell’s recent collaboration with cloud data warehousing service Snowflake. “We’re helping customers bring data to Snowflake Data Services within their Dell storage environment — and for the first time, bring Snowflake data services on-premises,” he said.
Apex is the brand for the company’s emerging on-demand cloud “as-a-service” solutions for enterprise. Another quarterly high point was the launch of Dell’s Apex Cyber Recovery Solutions. This marks the first in a series of full-stack Apex-branded solutions, said the company. Cyber Recovery Solutions are new managed services which simplifies corporate cyberattack recovery.
