Dell forms software group, names former CA CEO as head

New group will bring together disparate products under one roof as the company tries to sharpen its end-to-end enterprise offerings

By Agam Shah, New York | Friday, 03 February 2012
Dell on Thursday said it is forming a Software Group, which will bring together disparate products under one roof as the company tries to sharpen its end-to-end enterprise offerings.

The software unit will be led by John Swainson, who will assume the title of President of Software Group. He was previously senior advisor at Silver Lake, an equity firm, but also served as CEO and CA from 2005 through 2009.

The Software Group offerings will spread across all products and services, CEO Michael Dell said in a statement. Dell is primarily known for its PCs, servers, networking and storage products and also has a services unit, but the creation of a software group will help better server customer needs, the company said.

Dell has been increasingly intertwining software technologies with hardware as it moves beyond just servers to deliver more end-to-end enterprise offerings. Dell in July last year started offering a system with hardware, software and services for organizations to instantly deploy IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) operations based on the OpenStack cloud software.

Dell is also deploying software elements from recent acquisitions, including Boomi's cloud, RNA Networks' memory virtualization, Compellent's deduplication technologies and Force10's FTOS operating system into servers and appliances. The company has a small internal staff of software developers that are writing applications for PowerEdge servers and Kace management appliances, but the company in the past has said it does not look at itself as a software vendor.