Dell is in the right business for 2020, Sam Burd, president of the company's PC hardware and software business, told Cheddar.
"One thing that we've seen in 2020 is technology has become really important to how people get things done," he said. "Getting that technology in the hands of our customers has been really important to keeping the world operating."
The computer giant pulled $23.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter, beating analyst's expectations of $21.9 billion, largely through increased demand for laptops and PCs.
Burd explained that we've quickly gone from a world where maybe one PC was sufficient for a single household to one where multiple are needed, as students and employees alike work remotely amid the coronavirus pandemic.
This trend also applied to the public sector, which increased its spend on technology to offer remote education options.
On the back-end, Burd added, this has increased the need for cybersecurity.
"The world we're in today, we have a very distributed set of how people are doing work, so that attack surface has gotten a lot bigger for companies or for even people in their household," he said.
He noted that a Dell study found that 44 percent of businesses have had a hardware-based breach in the past year, and that the number is likely much higher.
Dell's success in 2020 also shows that earlier predictions that the PC was dead — in light of competition from products like tablets and smartphones — missed the mark, Burd noted.
"We're kind of hitting the 10-year anniversary where some of the press started to say that the PC was dead," he said. "Since that point in time, as an industry we have shipped over two billion systems. Customers had had demand for $3 trillion of PCs. So the death of the PC was highly overhyped."
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