As Dell kicked off its annual conference in Austin, Texas, attention was firmly on its $67 billion bid for EMC.
While the official line was about being “future ready” and reiterating Dell’s commitment to the hardware business, the potential impact of the deal between the two firms was at the forefront of the conversation.
Speaking ahead of the press conference to open the event, Michael Dell described EMC and Dell as "one big happy family", noting EMC's large presence in Ireland. EMC currently employs 2,500 people in Ireland, with Dell employing a similar number over three sites in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
The founder of the tech firm is due to visit Ireland next month and attend the Web Summit.
Mr Dell kicked off the press conference with a few words about the deal, which will see EMC become a part of Dell’s global business.
“We’re tremendously excited about this combination,” he said. “It gives us a world-leading company in the four significant areas in IT today - in servers, storage, virtualisation and PCs - and gives us an incredible position in the IT of tomorrow.
“The combination also gives us strong go to market engine with access to the world’s largest companies as well as an incredible reach into small and medium-sized businesses and emerging markets around the world.”
The end result, he said, would be a company with more than $80 billion in revenue. The merger, which requires regulatory approval and isn’t expected to close until mid to late 2016, is the largest tech deal ever.
Mr Dell will address thousands of attendees at the opening of the Dell World conference to outline his plans for the tech firm.
“This week I get to explain what I’ll call the version 1.0 of the unifying theory of the universe. We’ll have version 2.0 when the transaction closes,” he said. “You have that to look forward to.”
When asked about HP chief executive Meg Whitman’s memo criticising the merger, Mr Dell chose his words carefully.
“HP is a great VMWare partner. I don’t have any other comment,” he said, before adding: “I think she got some of the facts wrong. We’ll let the facts speak for themselves.”
He said Dell was taking a different tack to HP on how the company should evolve, with scale an important consideration.
“I think at this very moment there is an explosion in devices, not just PCs and smartphones, but embedded devices, internet of things, the connection between the device and the data centre is very important,” he said.
The company's executive team fielded questions on a perceived lack of innovation in the PC industry, and the move by Microsoft into the notebook business with its recently announced Surface Book.
"We've not seen the end of PC innovation, we're just seeing the beginning of it," president of client solutions Jeff Clarke said, hinting around developments to come in how we interact with PCs.
Dell said it was still committed to hardware, announcing the first refresh of its OptiPlex commercial PC portfolio in five years, bringing Intel's new Skylake processors to the line and and increased memory and storage capacity. Dell also announced cloud multifunction printers and the Wyse 5050 AIO zero client for VMware.
