Michael Dell talks about coronavirus impact on IT inudstry

IT legend and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, has said he’s never seen anything have such a significant impact on the IT industry as the coronavirus pandemic in his 35-year career, which is causing a spike in Dell remote-worker solutions.

“Having done this for 35 years or so, I’ve seen a lot of things,” said Dell. “There’s been nothing really like this. So the whole work-from-home movement is something our customers need a lot of help with. … Customers and partners need us more than ever.”

Dell said his $92bn tech company is “well prepared” for a dramatic increase in demand for PCs and notebooks as more and more employees will be working from home for the foreseeable future.

“Our supply chain is in relatively good shape, particularly in notebooks where we think that’s certainly a place where we’re seeing demand shortages because of the work from home strategy,” said Dell. “We are actively helping our customers and partners with solutions, not just the products. Because it’s not just as simple as, ‘Okay, here’s your computer, go work from home.’ There’s a lot more involved in how do you get teams to collaborative, be productive, share information and recreate the incidental communications and collaboration that occurs when people are physically together.”

Dell channel partners are seeing an uptick in remote worker technologies such as Dell laptops and teleconferencing products as partners are spending more time helping customers work securely at home.