25 Facts About Dell
1. Initially called PCs Unlimited, Dell got its start out of Michael Dell’s dorm room at the University of Texas in 1984. He was only 19.
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2. Started with just $1000 seed money, the company grew so rapidly that its 1988 IPO raised $30 million.
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3. When the company made the Fortune 500 for the first time in 1992, Michael was the youngest CEO to ever lead a company on the list.
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4. Michael has led the company as CEO for nearly its entire existence, taking a break between 2004 and 2007 to run his and his wife’s charitable foundation.
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5. He purportedly owns one of the largest homes in the world, a mansion that sprawls 22,000 square feet on 60 acres.
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6. Dell currently employs 96,000 people worldwide.
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7. The company has 22,000 employees in the United States alone.
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8. Last year Dell brought in $52.9 billion.
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9. Dell’s massive 2.1 million square feet campus is completely powered by gas converted from landfill emissions and by wind power.
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10. In 2007 the company shifted from the direct sales philosophy that had propelled it to early success in order to embrace the channel.
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11. Promoted to global channel chief in 2009, Greg Davis has had a large hand in helping to define Dell’s channel strategy.
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12. Dell recently announced that it had recruited enough channel partners to break the 1,000 partner milestone.
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13. This year the company has run over 42,000 partner training sessions.
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14. In the quarter ending in October, Dell approved 73 percent of 11,700 deal registration applications.
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15. That’s up from 70 percent of 7,181 deal registration applications submitted in the same quarter a year ago.
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16. Dell reports that its enterprise product revenue through the U.S. channel grew 50 percent year-over-year in the last quarter.
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17. Dell recently said that its campaign to market sales and discounts via Twitter made it $1 million.
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18. Dell recently announced that it will unveil a new global social media strategy in 2011, including a component for communicating with channel partners.
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19. Dell rounded out an acquisition-heavy 2010 with a deal to purchase storage vendor Compellent for $960 million.
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20. Dell’s purchase of Compellent calls into question a strategic partnership with EMC that began in 2001 and has been dubbed by some pundits as one of the most successful in IT.
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21. Also picked up by Dell in 2010: KACE Networks, Exanet, Ocarina and Boomi.
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22. And of course, there was the deal that wasn’t: 3Par. Dell’s bidding war with HP showed how serious the company was about adding important storage components to its arsenal.
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23. One Wall Street analyst called Compellent “a solid consolation prize for missing out on 3Par.”
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24. In 2009 Dell purchased just one company, but it was a big deal: Perot Systems for $3.9 billion.
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25. Dell’s CFO just recently reported that Dell isn’t just relying on acquisitions–the company is upping its R&D to grow its data center business from a single-digit percentage up to 10 percent of the company’s sales.