Sweet on Dell Technologies: Value Creation

This is the second installment of an ongoing series “Sweet on Dell Technologies”.

If you open up a Merriam-Webster dictionary, you’ll see eight different ways to describe value. At Dell Technologies, we have a crystal-clear way to define what value means to us.

Value, to us, is all about creating long-term, sustainable growth for the enrichment of all of our stakeholders. To say we’re laser focused on it would be an understatement.

In an increasingly crowded technology market, we decided several years ago to differentiate ourselves by becoming the essential infrastructure company – not only for today’s applications, but for the cloud-native world that is driving the future of tomorrow. This innovative approach allows us to focus on delivering both absolute and relative value to all of our stakeholders every day.

What do we mean by absolute value?

Dell Technologies creates value through the financial and market performance of our operating units. We want to grow revenue faster than both our competitors and our markets, grow operating income and earnings per share faster than revenue and deliver solid cash flow growth over time.

In FY19, we achieved double-digit revenue growth across all reportable business segments, our Infrastructure Solutions Group business, Client Solutions Group business and VMware — that’s value that I’m very proud of. This is an important piece of the puzzle because it’s what allows us to invest in future growth opportunities. As a technology company, continuous innovation and investment in R&D is a critical component of our success and our ability to deliver tangible results for our customers, team members and investors. (It’s why at Dell Technologies, 85 percent of our engineers are now software engineers.)

There’s another side to the value coin, though, and that’s relative value creation. It’s how we drive value relative performance compared with other companies, via our unique collaboration model across Dell Technologies.

On a relative basis, the largest opportunities for incremental value creation will come from the way we bring our operating units together and to market. We’re already collaborating every day at Dell Technologies, but the great thing is we can still collaborate in new ways, to tap into even more synergy between our businesses. We’ve made significant investments to become the essential infrastructure company, with a unique family of businesses that make up the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio. Dell Technologies is strongest when our businesses and teams – Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream, VMware and Boomi – are innovating and bringing solutions to market together.

And we extend this concept of value further through game-changers like Dell Technologies Capital, which helps founders and their teams develop innovative technology solutions and bring them to market. You’ll also see it in how we offer special financial and flexible consumption models—pay-as-you-grow—and our Dell Financial Services business.

The reality of Dell Technologies today is that we’re nimble. We drive efficiencies, focus on the long-term, and strive to deliver against quarterly expectations. Our investments in R&D are not just focused on building products to be bigger, faster or cheaper – they are focused on innovating to make products and solutions smarter, more resilient and easier to use.

Ultimately, all of our efforts to create value come together to drive REAL transformation for the benefit of our stakeholders now and in the future.

And speaking of REAL transformation, check out what we’re doing in Las Vegas this week with customers at Dell Technologies World Live.

About the Author: Tom Sweet

Tom Sweet is Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Dell Technologies. In this role, he is responsible for all aspects of the company's finance function including accounting, financial planning and analysis, tax, treasury, investor relations and corporate strategy. Prior to being CFO of Dell Technologies, he was vice president of corporate finance, controller and chief accounting officer with responsibility for global accounting, tax, treasury and investor relations, as well as global financial services. Tom was responsible for external financial reporting for more than five years when Dell Technologies was a publicly-traded company. Prior to this, he served in a variety of finance leadership roles at Dell Technologies including vice president, responsible for overall finance activities within the corporate business, education, government and healthcare business units of Dell Technologies. He has also served as the head of internal audit and in a number of sales leadership roles in education and corporate business units since joining Dell Technologies in 1997. Prior to Dell Technologies, Tom was vice president, accounting and finance, for Telos Corporation. Before that, he spent 13 years with Price Waterhouse in a variety of roles primarily focused on providing audit and accounting services to the technology industry. Tom received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Western Michigan University and is a CPA. He currently serves on the Salvation Army Central Texas Advisory Board and also serves on the Advisory Board at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas Austin.