Against a backdrop of continued uncertainty regarding founder Michael Dell’s proposal to Dell private via leveraged buyout (LBO), Dell hosted its Enterprise Forum recently in Santa Clara, CA for about 1,600 attendees that included customers, channel partners, analysts, and Dell executives. And in spite of the fact that servers and converged systems got more attention at this event than storage during the keynotes, we note that storage earns more than twice the gross margin of servers for Dell (50% for storage vs. 20% for servers). Clearly, storage will remain a critical product segment within Dell’s enterprise portfolio regardless of the final outcome of the proposed LBO.
