Truth be told, for the last couple of years I’ve been a bit disappointed with Dell, our favorite local $78 billion revenue startup. From what I could tell, it wasn’t involved much at all with blockchain (well, apart from its VMware unit) and when on a couple of occasions Dell execs spoke publicly about the technology at conferences, they weren’t very positive about it.

Today, wearing my #AustinBlockchain hat, I am much happier, and hopeful … for it has recently emerged that Dell does indeed have a blockchain strategy and it is beginning to articulate it to the world — more on that below.

It’s worth noting that Dell itself is organized as a ‘holding company’ called Dell Technologies, which owns a number of key operating units/brands, including:

• Dell — the PC manufacturer for the masses that started it all
• Dell EMC — the enterprise IT company, with a focus on servers, storage and networking
• Boomi — which provides integration software to connect applications and datastores
• RSA — which offers business security and identity management systems (and has a very long pedigree in cryptography)
• Pivotal — which offers application development tools for cloud deployment of applications
• Secureworks — provider of enterprise security software
• Virtustream — which offers public, private, hybrid cloud solutions to enterprises
• VMware — provider of data center virtualization and cloud platform software (which is playing a key role in Dell’s blockchain strategy)

To put it simply, the Dell portfolio is pretty much focused on (extended) enterprise infrastructure (hardware, systems software, networking) to securely deploy applications, with a heavy emphasis on cloud delivery. By extended enterprise, I mean including IoT devices and Edge Computing architectures.

Given the capabilities that it has built over recent years, it’s been surprising to me that Dell has not been a much bigger blockchain player (compared to, say, IBM or Microsoft). True, VMware has been an active player in the Hyperledger movement but the blockchain word has yet to be spoken publicly by its CEO.

Now, it has emerged that a team working across Dell’s operating units — it’s called the Blockchain Interest Group, or BIG — has in fact been quietly hard at work for around four years (!) on defining a blockchain architecture and a strategy to roll out. Now, it has begun to tell the world, a little bit, about what it has to offer …