Dell Says EMC Merger Pays Off as Customers Seek 'Fewer Partners'

Michael Dell, whose namesake company merged with EMC Corp. almost a year ago to create one of the biggest providers of computers, storage and software, said the deal is paying off as corporate customers seek to buy more of their gear from a smaller number of vendors.

"One of the things that we’ve seen in the combination is this idea that customers actually don’t want to have more partners -- they want fewer partners," Dell said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Tuesday at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas. "We’ve seen really a fabulous response -- revenue synergies greater than we thought, coming faster than we thought."

Dell Technologies Inc., facing pressure from cloud providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., merged with EMC last year to bring together two traditional hardware companies in one of the biggest corporate tie-ups in history, valued at about $67 billion when it was announced. As part of that deal, Michael Dell also picked up majority ownership in companies such as VMware, whose virtualization software lets businesses cram bigger workloads onto servers. VMworld is an annual event that features that company’s latest products.

“Dell, EMC, VMware go together like peanut butter and chocolate," Dell said.