Name: What IBM CEO Ginni Rometty thinks about the Dell-EMC merger
Uploaded: 2015-10-13
Duration: 3 min 58 s
Description: The tech leader explains the difference between her company, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.

[ MUSIC ] I wanna start with the news, because we had fairly big news yesterday. Dell and EMC announced they were merging. And it was at this summit exactly one year ago today when HP, which is in many of the same businesses that Dell and EMC are in, announced it was doing the opposite. It was splitting. Now you compete to some degree against both of them, who's got it right? Well, it's a good question to talk about strategy, and I think when you say who's got it right, I actually believe in an important lesson is, you build your own strategy. You don't define it but what another competitor is doing, and And honestly, I kinda feel as I was saying to Allan, many of us have kinda been with me on this journey of transforming IBM, as I've been here, this is I think my fourth year, right? I think so, and so in lots of familiar faces, I feel like we've been through this together, and when I look at the IBM of today versus those companies. I mean, our profiles are entirely different. And so, you make your choice on strategy. Some people make a choice for size. I happen to not be a believer of that. You know I've often said, especially in, and it is Industries that's clamoring for growth, right? If I had wanted size, I wouldn't have divested $ 8 billion of businesses. And in fact, IBM has been getting smaller and smaller each year. Oh, by design. I mean, and so just because currency, you wouldn't go divest countries. And because businesses that I think are no longer about the future You know we've divested them. So, that's the right thing. Others make a choice and if you look at the kind of image between the announcement yesterday and us that's mostly a hardware announcement. We are 0. 1 % hardware. Important, but only 0. 1 %. You use to be in all those businesses, but you're not anymore. We were in all those businesses and made choices. And I think this is back to, I mean one of the lessons I always keep saying. Steward for the long term. That is not always easy but you do it. You checked your course, you stay on it, and this idea that, for us, that long term is higher value and we're an enterprise innovation company and that means you have to keep transforming what you are. You don't get to be a hundred years- old doing the same thing, and so you've gotten, particularly in this industry, but I think it's true for lots of people here. So, one of the things that distinguishes those two companies is that Dell is doing it in the private markets. We did a survey of CEOs earlier this year, Fortune 500 CEOs, and I don't know if you responded or not, but we asked the question Could you manage your company better if you were private? Yeah. 84 % said yes. Would you be able to be a steward for the longterm better if you didn't have to deal with the pressures of the public markets? I think of that question different. As long as every decision I make I make it as if I was private. And I think when you look at your shareholders and you manage the company for long term shareholders and you manage the company for your clients as to the biggest stakeholders here, you will make the right decisions. Now that means, and you'll do it as we've done it many times in the public eye. But you make your decisions thinking would I make the decision, right, if it was my own money? On behalf of these people, would I do it And that's what I think is actually the most important point. And will your shareholders let you do that? Your long term shareholders will. And in fact, I think what Warren just said a second ago about communicate, and we've been very clear about in technology, you have to reinvent yourself, right? And this is why as we've reinvented ourself, as I've talked about here, around big data, around cloud, around what we call engagement I mean, already those are 27 % of IBM. When we ended last year they were already 25 billion in size and in the first half grew 30 %. And other business, like all of us here, have business that we do for clients that's important, while those may not be great growing businesses, you have to modernize those. So you do those both. You invest for the future, you modernize your core at the same time. And I think those are two important principles and they can be done as we are doing them. You just have to stick to it and stay with a plan and communicate it.

The tech leader explains the difference between her company, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.