>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas,

its The Cube, covering Dell Technologies World 2018.

Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners.

(soft electronic music)

>> Welcome to The Cube's live coverage

of Dell Technologies World 2018.

I'm Stu Miniman

And this is the second of three days

of wall to wall coverage we have here

at The Sands convention center and I am thrilled

to welcome to the program, back to the program,

Michael Dell, who is the CEO of Dell Technologies.

Michael thank you so much for having us here

and thanks for joining us on The Cube.

>> Oh, great to be here.

Thank you guys for all the great coverage.

You always do a wonderful job

getting into the technical details

and kind of exploring everything in depth

and we appreciate you and your team being here.

>> Well thanks so much.

You started off the keynote talking

about the platform for the possible,

said it was 34 years in the making.

Now this is my 15th year at the show

formally known as EMC World.

I'd attended the Dell Show for a number of years,

so tell us, start with what's really different now

about the company's all together,

it's renamed now, Dell Technologies World.

Why is this the platform for the possible?

>> I'm kind of amazed and inspired

when I step back and look at what our customers

are doing with our technology

and we have hundreds of technical sessions here

where we get in depth as we've always done

at, historically, EMC World,

but we're also taking a broader view

and saying, "Hey, what's this really all about?"

What's the impact on the world?

This was one of the motivations

for bringing together Dell and EMC and VMWare,

and Pivotal and the whole family

and it's working.

So we're telling the story through the eyes

of our customers and it is really an amazing time

when you think about what's going on in the world.

We have this incredible platform

that's been built over the last 30 years,

but now there are all these new enabling technologies

that are going to take it much further

and the domain of information technology

is not the IT department anymore

and we're seeing that in a big way,

so it's a super exciting time and obviously

we think we're a unique company

across digital transformation, IT, workforce security

and it's working.

So it's all good, Stu.

>> Michael, one of the great lines we liked

in the keynote was today we'll have the most change

that you've ever had in your life,

but compared to what we'll see tomorrow,

it's going to keep changing faster.

When I look at the Dell Technologies family,

I know a lot has changed.

Pivotal just went through an IPO.

I have to imagine the tax laws changing

in the recent administration has impact.

What's changed since the day one decision

to purchase EMC, the largest merger in technology history

to today, maybe give us a little bit of insight

as to what's happening inside the family that's different.

>> You know, there've been a lot of reports

about the tax law.

That actually was not much of a change.

Kind of inconsequential change.

It's very good for the broader industry growth

and kind of broader economic growth

and we're quite excited about that

and so I see it as a net positive.

You know, when we step back and go back a little bit

in time here to 2009 when Joe and I first talked

about this idea, 2008-2009.

Wasn't the right time, financial crisis.

We re-started it in 2014, announced it in 2015.

Here we are four years after

we had the last set of initial discussions

and it's all come together very well.

Look, I mean, the revenues are much stronger

that we thought.

Business is excellent.

The demand is very strong.

There's a portfolio effect.

I think you're seeing increasing integration

of the family of businesses,

particularly with VMware and Dell EMC and Pivotal.

And the relevance of what we are doing

has never been greater

and so we're able to have conversations

with companies that are very different

that we had before.

At the same time this is occurring,

the business leaders and the chief executives of companies

are waking up to the power of technology,

whether it's because of some new disruptor showing up

or because they realize that they have to change and evolve.

Used to be it was just us folks in the tech world

that were in this fast changing world

where everything was moving very quickly

and we used to, when people wanted to come work for us,

we'd say, "Hey, how do you like it when things change?

"How are you dealing with ambiguity?"

If they didn't like it, we'd say,

"Yeah, you probably shouldn't come work here

"because you won't be happy

"if things are changing all the time."

It's like that in every business now and,

like you said, it's only going to get faster.

>> Right.

So, wondering if, you look at the portfolio, Michael.

One of the things since the EMC acquisition

and it's a pretty broad portfolio.

There's some streamlining that I understand's happening.

How do you balance the streamlining

with the breadth of portfolio,

make sure you're reaching the customers?

>> There's absolutely some kind of simplification

and optimization of the expansive set

of capabilities we have.

We also have some incredible platforms

and so what you want to do is rally around the platforms

and that's exactly what we're doing,

so you'll see us not only create

a very seamless and logical path

for every customer, but rally around the winning platforms

and you already detect that as a theme here

at Dell Technologies World and it's going well.

>> When you look at your overall portfolio,

wonder if you could talk to some

of the macroeconomic things happening,

on margins that are happening.

If Dave Alonte was here, are we talking

a half of your business is client.

You've got the ISG portfolio.

That transformation of when Dell went private

and now bringing EMC in, which allows you to change things.

How do you look at that and what does Dell look like

when you get to, say, the 2020, 2030?

>> You know, right now it looks great

and I think it'll look even better in 2020.

What I see is we have positioned ourself

as the essential infrastructure company

and there's a massive infrastructure build-out

and it's on the edge,

it's a distributed core, and it's the cloud,

and cloud is not just the public cloud

and everybody's kind of figured that out now.

We were saying it before it was cool,

So if I think about the different businesses,

you know Pivotal's doing great

and we don't need to say too much about that

because it just went public and we're in a bit

of a quiet period,

but the Pivotal business is a great business.

VMware is doing fabulously well.

Pat did a great job yesterday with the keynote

and I think if you watch the keynote,

you see, wow, Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, VMware,

really, really working together at a very deep level.

And then you go into our client business.

Client business is growing really fast,

but not as fast as our data center business.

The data center business is growing even faster,

so we're gaining share.

You'll see it in the first quarter.

We'll gain share in storage, we'll gain share in servers,

we'll gain share in clients,

and there's a portfolio effect

where customers look across everything that we're doing

and they say, "Yeah, I don't really want

"to deal with 25 little companies.

"I want to have a bigger relationship

"with Dell Technologies."

So bringing everything together,

putting real effort behind these big platforms that we have,

and look, we've got some big new initiatives.

NSX, network virtualization.

You know I'm a big believer in that

and I think this is ultimately bigger

than server virtualization

and we're in an ideal position with our open networking

and VMware NSX to drive that forward.

>> Michael, both Allison and Jeff

brought some great customer stories up on stage.

One of the things sometimes you hear out there

it's like, well, Dell,

they're just an infrastructure company,

and infrastructure, you know, I care about my data,

I care about my applications.

What's the role of infrastructure

and maybe give us, what does infrastructure mean to you

when we talk about those digital transformations

that you're helping your customers through?

>> Well you sort of go back to what's the plot here?

And the plot is better outcomes, results,

and success for a business.

Well how do you do that?

Well you do that with data, right?

And people talk about clouds.

Well what are clouds?

The clouds are built on infrastructure.

It's a bit like the internet.

20 years ago we'd say, hey we have the internet,

we have the internet product strategy,

Vice President of the internet,

internet product division.

Where's all that now?

It's just everywhere.

Cloud, AI, very, very similar.

At the core of all this is the data

and the computer science.

You want to have artificial intelligence machine learning?

Got to have data, so that's infrastructure.

AI is eating software

and software is eating hardware,

but AI doesn't run on software.

Software doesn't run on software.

Software runs on hardware,

so you got to put it all together, right?

And that's exactly what we do.

>> Alright, Michael what learnings have you had

going through this?

I know there was a lot of planning.

We talked to Howard yesterday,

talking about some of the cultures coming together,

the big survey they did that like the top five things

across everybody.

It was like, not only were the top five things in agreement,

but even the order was in agreement,

but have to imagine that there were some things,

bringing these large companies together.

I might notice that in the keynote so far

it's been all people that came from the Dell side

that are up on stage.

PowerMax Bob I know is from the EMC side,

but mostly from the Dell side.

What have you learned so far?

How have some of those cultural pieces come together

and how do you keep a quite large organization

rallying and focused around what's an ever-changing

and broad portfolio?

>> You know, it's been a lot of fun,

first of all to have so many unbelievably talented people