William Scannell

President of Global Sales & Customer Operations, Dell Technologies

Search every verified William Scannell interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In August 2014, William Scannell, then President of Global Sales & Customer Operations at Dell, delivered a lecture and participated in an interview at COPPEAD as part of the launch of EMC's chair. During the lecture, he described EMC's strategy of organizing a "loosely coupled group of companies" — including Pivotal, VMware, EMC, and RSA — to provide customers with flexible solutions for what he called the "third platform" of computing, emphasizing that no single company could supply all applications or services without locking customers in. He recounted a conversation with a passenger on a flight to Rio de Janeiro, in which he discussed how EMC's federation could address the passenger's business challenges, including server virtualization and application rationalization. In the interview, Scannell stated that companies that prepare for disruption and are willing to disrupt themselves are more likely to succeed, while those that ignore technological changes risk going out of business. He noted that EMC had been investing in Brazil for nearly 25 years and described the country as a "rapid growth market" rather than an emerging one. He also discussed the benefits of the partnership with COPPEAD, citing access to talent and the exchange of ideas as key advantages, and mentioned that EMC had grown from roughly 60 employees to 65,000, making the search for talent a significant challenge.