Today we announced actions to further globalize our operations around four key customer segments including large enterprise, public, and small and medium businesses. The leadership for these new units will be Steve Schuckenbrock (large enterprise), Paul Bell (Public) and Steve Felice (Small & Medium Business).
The globalization of our customer segments began over a year ago with our Consumer business, led by Ron Garriques. Today’s announcement is a natural evolution for Dell as we heard from customers they are not bound by regional difference, rather they are bound together by their needs to simplify IT and deploy information technology in better ways to meet specific business requirements.
Dell has significantly improved its competitiveness, reengineered its supply chain, broadened the product portfolio and introduced Dell to more people in more places than ever before. Four distinct business organizations capitalize on the company’s competitive advantages and will strengthen our execution and increase collaboration going forward. By organizing globally around these additional three commercial customer segments we expect to accelerate innovation, increase responsiveness and drive competitiveness.
Realigning is nothing new to Dell. We have a history of segmenting as our clients’ IT needs often present opportunities for us to further improve how we serve them. These changes facilitate quicker decision making and each business group will possess greater global accountability and responsibility for responding to customer needs, and for anticipating and leading industry change. As a result of these changes our customers will benefit from more comprehensive solutions and products specific to their industries, and services that best meet their specialized requirements. And when we do the right thing for our customers, shareholders also benefit.
We speak to business opportunities and financial results in these terms as we move forward. As our new segmentation evolves, we plan to align our financial reporting to reflect this new structure during the first half of Dell’s fiscal-year 2010.
In a related move, the company announced that Mike Cannon, president, Global Operations, will retire from Dell effective Jan. 31, leaving many contributions to transforming the company’s supply chain and improving its cost competitiveness. Mr. Cannon will be succeeded by Jeff Clarke who, in addition to his responsibilities as head of Dell’s Business Client Product Group, will become vice chairman, Global Operations. Mr. Cannon will serve as a consultant to Dell. Also, having completed the transformation of Dell’s marketing organization, including revitalizing the brand and instilling new levels of marketing effectiveness and efficiency, Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Jarvis, will leave Dell this fiscal quarter and provide ongoing counsel to Dell through the consulting business that brought him to the company.
All of these actions are part and parcel of our efforts to streamline our operations and remove $3 billion plus in annualized costs from our business by fiscal-year 2011. Our cost optimization strategy remains unchanged and we will continue to look for opportunities to improve our operations and reduce costs in ways that benefit customers, add to our long-term success and drive value for shareholders.
I encourage you to read our press release today and as always, we will respond to your questions and comments posted on this blog site as well as via email and over the phone. So please feel free to post on this site or contact us directly. We look forward to hearing from you!