I'm surprised Dell leadership let PPDM continue for as long as it did. BAIN, on the other hand, appears to have looked at the business objectively and concluded that enough was enough.
PPDM was a loser from the beginning. Engineering consistently failed to deliver on the promises made. Deadlines slipped, key deliverables were continually missed, quality issues persisted, and eventually leadership stopped publishing roadmaps altogether. Instead of making commitments, they lowered expectations.
Meanwhile, the competition was innovating three to five times faster, continually widening the gap while PPDM fell further and further behind.
Much of this traces back to poor leadership. Travis and his Data Management organization made one questionable decision after another, all while operating with no sense of urgency. Customers paid the price. We lost account after account as organizations abandoned PPDM because they couldn't get it to work reliably at enterprise scale. Eventually, we stopped actively pitching it or selling it because confidence—both internally and externally—had eroded. One customer even told us they would show us the door if we ever mentioned PPDM again.
The layoffs under BAIN are difficult, and no one enjoys seeing people lose their jobs. But restructuring is sometimes the inevitable consequence of years of poor execution and weak leadership. At least there now seems to be a willingness to make difficult decisions based on business fundamentals rather than continuing to pour resources into a failed strategy that wasn't delivering results.