When Dell completes its acquisition of EMC and its subsidiary VMware, the combined Dell Technologies will become one of the largest technology employers in Ireland.

But with role duplication almost inevitably raising the spectre of job losses as the firms integrate, the elimination of product overlaps will also have a job reduction aspect.

How many peoples' livelihoods are at stake here, and do the cultures of the three component businesses provide any clue as to the Dell Technologies attitude towards making job losses?

Headcounts

EMC opened up in Cork in 1988, and has a Centre of Excellence there. It has another 50 staff in a Dublin office.

EMC established its presence in Ireland with its first manufacturing facility outside of North America, followed by sales offices in the Irish capital (1990) and Belfast (2005). The Cork facility has become a multi-functional campus and in 2009 became a Center of Excellence (CoE) incorporating research and training. It is EMC's largest manufacturing facility outside the USA, with 640,000 square feet in use on a 45 acre area with some 28 business functions.

EMC Ireland's growth history

1988 – 47,000ft 2 , six acres, 22 employees

, six acres, 22 employees 1993 – 95,000ft 2 , nine acres, 128 employees

, nine acres, 128 employees 1996 – 175,000ft 2 , 15 acres, 490 employees

, 15 acres, 490 employees 1997 – 200,000ft 2 , 15 acres, 788 employees

, 15 acres, 788 employees 1998 – 250,000ft 2 , 24 acres, 923 employees

, 24 acres, 923 employees 1999 – 475,000ft 2 , 1500 employees

, 1500 employees 2001 – 494,000ft 2 , 43 acres, 1,600 employees

, 43 acres, 1,600 employees 2002 – 90,000ft 2 expansion completed, more than 1,200 employees

expansion completed, more than 1,200 employees 2005 – 28,000ft 2 of offices leased in Ballincollig town - additional 200 employees

of offices leased in Ballincollig town - additional 200 employees 2008 – EMC celebrates 20 years in Ireland. Multi-functional and multi-lingual campus now occupies 650,000ft 2 , and employs over 1,600 people

, and employs over 1,600 people 2010 – EMC Campus in Cork awarded Centre of Excellence status. VMware & Decho support expanded in Ballincollig

2011 – EMC Research Europe established from Centre of Excellence

There are another 50 staff in a Dublin office and VCE has an office in Mahon, Cork.

Altogether, EMC employs some 3,000 people in Ireland.

VMware also has a facility in County Cork. It opened up in Ballincollig, Cork in 2005. There are now 750 people working at its European headquarters there. In April 2014 it added another 40 jobs at Ballincollig to the existing jobs there. It signed a lease in 2015 for another Ballincollig property with space for up to 350 additional employees.

The staff at the Ballincollig facility cover sales, finance and HR departments and also management and technical support roles within its global tech support team, including looking after VMware’s network virtualisation platform, VMware NSX.

Dell has around 2,800 staff in three facilities in Ireland, in Cherrywood, Dublin, a Limerick facility, and a smaller Cork office. The functions covered include:

Global IT Services

EMEA Commercial Sales

EMEA Software

Global Supply Chain

Customer Briefing Centre

Global Solutions Innovation Centre

Global Services Command Centre

Global Finance

Global Services Support

Marketing, Finance & Support Teams

Cloud Engineering Centre

Business Operations

A large number of employees work in the services area.

There are more than 1,000 staff at the Raheen business park in Limerick, where Dell first started operations in 1990. Many jobs there are in research and development. It is also home to one of Dell’s 12 global solutions centres and houses one of Dell’s three Internet of Things (IoT) laboratories.

These labs are jointly funded by Intel and customers visiting them, both small and large enterprises, can develop proof of concept systems there, with data collection from remote sensors, aggregation and analysis of collected data by Dell Edge Gateway 5000 systems, and transmission of data to the cloud.

The Limerick facility used to employ 5,000 people in the manufacturing area, but some 1,900 manufacturing jobs were exported to Poland in early 2009 as a way of cutting costs. Dell Ireland is no stranger to large-scale and sudden lay-offs.

Altogether the three companies employ:

EMC - 3,000+

VMware - 750

Dell - 2,800

This is a total of 6,550 staff. It won't be Ireland's biggest employer but it'll be biggest among those firms engaged in high tech. Its closest rivals by size of staff are Apple, with a headcount of 5,000, and Intel on 4,000.

Merger progress

Dell is buying EMC and changing the Dell name to Dell Technologies. The PC part of the business retains the Dell name and produces client systems; workstations, desktops, notebooks, etc.

The EMC part becomes Dell EMC and has responsibility for making and selling and supporting products for enterprises. All the existing Dell enterprise servers, storage networking products move to that part of the new organisation.

The acquisition should complete sometime between June and October this year. Regulatory body approvals are on track.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner in charge of competition policy, has approved the Dell takeover of EMC: “Given the strategic importance of the data storage sector, I am pleased that we have been able to approve Dell’s multi-billion dollar takeover of EMC within a short space of time while making sure that there would be no adverse effects on customers. I appreciate the close cooperation we have enjoyed with our US counterparts at the Federal Trade Commission.”

Her concern is customers and supplier competition, not the jobs of the great unwashed.

Product overlap

There are are three reasons why job losses could result following Dell’s take-over of EMC and VMware.

Firstly, privately owned Dell Technologies will take on tens of billions of dollars of debt to pay for the take-over, and this will need to be paid off, putting cost pressure on the business.

Typical reasons for such takeovers include growing the total addressable market, or making and selling products and services more efficiently. Single back office functions, such as HR, legal, accounting, facilities management and so forth, can replace the now duplicated individual functions that pre-dated the take-over.

Secondly, product overlaps can also be eliminated, and these are quite glaring:

Dell and EMC product overlaps. Note a glorious typo; Avatar in column 3 should be Avamar.

As we have pointed out there are;

Four mainstream backup software products

Three mid-range arrays

Two mainstream data protection appliances

Four hyper-converged offerings

Thirdly, there are changes in the disk drive market as SSDs are substituted for disk drives, with a single SSD replacing up to 10, or possibly more, disk drives in a storage array. That means less manufacturing effort is needed to build an all-flash array than a disk drive array; there are fewer components to fit into a chassis, and so therefore fewer workers might be needed.

So we have two sets of European headquarters, two Centres of Excellence and four areas of product overlap. It would make financial sense to get rid of the duplicated functions and rationalise these product overlaps.

Having a single Dell European headquarters office would likely cause job losses in the tens to hundreds area.

Rationalised products would, in general, lead to lower manufacturing needs. That could affect both Dell and EMC manufacturing facilities in Ireland depending upon which products are eliminated. Again we think we are looking at potential job losses in the tens to hundreds range.

Altogether we think combining EMC, Dell and VMware to create Dell Technologies could lead in the next two to three years to job losses in Ireland. The only question will then be on what scale. ®