>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Hello. Welcome to the cube here at Dell tech world. I'm John furry host of the cube with Dave Alon here with Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell technologies cube alumni comes on every year. We have the cube here. It's been two years. Michael, welcome to the cube. Get to see you. >>Hey, John, Dave, great to be with you guys. Thanks for being here. Wonderful to be back here in Vegas with >>You. Well, great to be in person two years ago, we had the cue with the pandemic a lot's happened. We were talking end to end solutions here at Dell tech world in person two years ago, pandemic hits. Thank God you had all that supply for the, for the people having the remote remote end to work now back in person. What's it look like now with, with Dell tech end to end, the edge is important. What's the story, >>You know, edge is, is the physical world. And if you, if you step back from clouds and, you know, multi-cloud, you sort of think about what is the purpose of a cloud or a data center? Well, it's to take data out of the physical world and move it to this place, to somehow enhance it or do something with it and create business value and hopefully create better outcomes. Well, it turns out that, you know, increasingly a lot of that data is gonna stay in the physical world and all of those nodes are gonna be connected. They're gonna be intelligent and we're seeing it in manufacturing and retail and healthcare, transportation, logistics. We're seeing this rapidly intelligent edge being formed. And then of course, with the new networks, the 5g we're seeing, you know, all, all this develop. And so here on the show floor, we're showing a lot of those solutions, but our customers are, are highly engaged. And certainly we think that's a, a big, a big growth factor for the next decade. >>And it's been ING to watch the transformation of the it world and cloudification and the as service, uh, consumption model, which you guys are putting out there has been very successful, but cloud operations is more prominent now on premises and edge and cloud. So the combination of cloud on-premise and edge hardware matters more now than ever before Silicon advances, um, abstraction layers from modern cloud native applications are what people are focused on. What's the story that you cite to the CIOs saying, we're here to help you with that new architecture cloud multi-cloud on premise and edge. What's the main story for you guys with the customers? >>Well, you know, customers want to go faster, right? And they want to accelerate their transformation. And so they wanna shift more resources over to developers, to applications, to access their data, to create competitive advantage. And so we talk a lot about the value line and what are those things below the value line, where we can provide that as a service on a consumption based model and accelerate their transformation, kind of, you know, do for them what we've done inside our own business. And, you know, it's absolutely resonating. We're seeing great growth there. People continue to, to need the solutions, but as we can automate the management and deployment of infrastructure and make it super easy, it gives them a lot of cycles back. >>You know, Michael, my, the favorite part, my favorite part of your book was you were in, I think you were in his, in his home court, in his dining room at Carl Icahn's house. And you said, well, why don't you just buy the company? And then you'll do what you're doing. I I'll buy it back for cheaper. Now, thankfully, you didn't have to do that. Cuz you had an environment of low interest rates and you obviously took it into the other direction, added tremendous value, 101 billion in revenue last year, 17% revenue growth, which was out astounding. When you think about that, um, now we're entering a new chapter with VMware untethered of course you're the chairman of both companies. So how should we think about the new Dell what's next? >>Well, so look, we, we have some unbelievable core businesses, right? We have our client system business and we've all learned during these last two years, how incredibly important it is to enable and empower your workforce with the right tools in the remote and high hybrid work. And we're showing off all kinds of new innovations here. That's a huge business force continues to grow, continues to be super important. Then we have our ISG, the cloud data center, the network of the future, the edge, you know, the, the sort of epicenter of where we're embracing, consumption based business models. That's absolutely huge. Then we have these new, new businesses that we're building with telco with edge, put it all together. It's a 1.3 trillion Tam that we operate in, as you said, more than a hundred billion dollars last year. So there's plenty of room for us to continue to grow and, and expand. And you know, as we make this shift to outcomes, it's obviously more valuable for customers and that, you know, increases our opportunity, increases the, the value we can create for all our stakeholders. >>And number one, number one, share in PCs, by the way, congratulations, again, hit that milestone. All of our gamer, uh, fans in our discord want to know what's the hottest chips coming. What's the fastest machines. What, how's the monitors coming? They want faster, cheaper. What's the coolest, uh, monitors out there right now and, and machines. >>Well, uh, you know, what what's, what's amazing is the, the pace of innovation continues to improve. So whether it's in the GPU, the CPU, the, the resolution, I I'm pretty partial to our 41, uh, display 11 million pixels of fun. And look, I mean, we, we it's, it's, it's clear that people are more productive when they have large screens and all the performance is enabling photo realistic, uh, you know, uh, gaming and photo realistic, everything. And these are immersive experiences. And, you know, again, uh, what companies have figured out to bring it back to, to, to a little bit of business here, John, is that when you, uh, give people the right tools, they're more productive, they're more engaged and look, people are smart. They know what tools are available. And, you know, uh, the thing that actually is most representative of how a person thinks about the tools they have at their organization is actually the thing that's right in front of 'em. And so, you know, this ability for us to provide a pool set of solutions for organizations to keep their workforce productive, to run their applications and infrastructure securely anywhere they want. That's, that's a winning proposition. >>Michael trust was a big theme of your keynote yesterday. And when you acquired EMC and got VMware, it really changed the dynamic with regard to your ability to, into new parts of organizations. You became a much more strategic supplier. I, I would argue. And now with VMware as a separate company, do you feel like you have built up over the, you know, five or whatever years that muscle memory you kinda earn that trust. So how do you see the customer relationship with that regard to that integration that they, they loved the eco. So system competitors might not have loved it so much, but the customers really did love. In fact, the, the U S a, a gentleman yesterday kind of mentioned that, how do you see it? >>You know, customers, uh, are not as interested in the balance sheet and what you know, where different holdings are, what they, they want things to work together, right? And they want partnerships in ecosystems. And certainly, you know, with VMware, even before the combination, we had a powerful partnership. It obviously solidified in a super special way. And now we have this first and best relationship and I've remained the chairman of VMware and super excited about their future. But our ecosystem is incredibly broad. And you see that here in this show floor, and again, making things work together better and more effectively building these engineered solutions that allow people to very quickly deploy the kind of capabilities they want, whether it's, you know, snowflake now working with the on premise and the edge data and more of these, you know, multi-cloud, uh, eco of systems that are being built. It's not gonna be just one company >>You called the edge a couple years ago. You're really prominent in your, in your speeches. And your keynotes data also is a big theme. You mentioned data now, data engineering seems to be the hottest track of, of, of students graduating with data engineering skills, not data science, data engineering, large scale data as code concepts. So what's your vision now with data, how's that fitting into the solutions and the role of data, obviously data protection with cybersecurity data as code is becoming really part of that next big thing. >>Yeah. I mean, if, if you look at anything that is interesting in the world today, uh, at the center of it is data, right? Whether it's the blockchain or the defi or the AI drug discovery, or the autonomous vehicles or whatever you wanna do, there's data in, in, in the middle of that. And of course with that data, well, you've gotta manage it. You, you need compute engines, right? You need to be able to protect it, secure it. And, you know, that's kind of what we do, and we're not going to create all those solutions, but we are gonna be an enabling layer to allow that data to be accessed no matter, you know, where, where it is. And, and, and of course, you know, leading in storage continues to be a super important part of our business. Number one, larger than number two than number three, number four, combined, and, and most of number five as well, and, and growing share. And, and you saw today, the software defined innovations, allowing that, you know, data layer to exist across the edge, the colos, the OnPrem, and the public clouds >>Throughout a stat yesterday. I can't remember if it was a keynote of the analyst round table, but it was 9 million cell towers. And if I heard, right, you kinda look at those as potential data centers talk about that's >>Right. It it's actually 7 million, but, but probably will be 9 million and not, not too long, I don't have the update, but so yeah, the public clouds all together is about 600 data centers. They're about 7 million cellular base stations in the world. Every single one of those is becoming a, you know, multi access, edge compute node. And what are they putting in there? They're putting many data centers of compute and GPS and storage. And, you know, 5g is not about, uh, connecting people that was 4g and before 5g is about connecting things. And there are way more things than there are people, right? And, uh, you know, this, this, this edge is, is rapidly developing. You'll also have private 5g and you'll have, you know, again, embedded intelligence I believe is gonna be in everything this next decade is going to be about that intelligent, connected future, taking that data, turning it into useful outsides in insights and outcomes. And, you know, lots of new businesses will be existing. Businesses will be transformed and also disrupted. >>Yeah. I mean, I think that's so right on and not to pat ourselves on the back day, but we called that edge distributed computing a couple years ago on the cube. And that's, what's turning into the home with COVID you saw that become a workplace, basically compute center, these compute nodes, tying it together as we, what everyone's talking about right now. So as customers say, okay, I want to keep my operations steady, steady, and secure. How do I glue it together? How do I bring these compute node together? That seems to be the top question on, on top of people's minds. And they want it to be cloud native, which means they want it to run cloud-like and they want to connect these compute node together. That's a big discussion point. What's your view on, >>Well, you know, if you, if you sort of have a, a cloud here, a cloud there cloud everywhere, and you, you know, have lots of different Kubernetes frameworks, uh, and you've got, you know, everything is, is spread out, it's a disaster, right? And, and, and it's, it's a, it's a, it's a real challenge to manage all that. So what people are trying to do is create ruthless standardization. It's like, how do you drive cost out and get speed? It's ruthless standardization create consistent environments where you can operate the across all the different domains that, that you want. And so, uh, you know, this is what we're bringing together in, in, in the capabilities that we're delivering. >>And that chaos is great opportunity for you. Um, how are you feeling about VMware these days, new team, uh, give us the update there. >>Yeah. The team is doing well. You know, I think the tons message is resonating. You know, people want Kubernetes and, and, and container based apps, for sure. That's the main, you know, growth in, in, in, in, in new, in new workloads. Uh, but they also want it to work with what they have. Yeah. And they don't want it to be locked into one particular infrastructure. So software finding everything, making it run in all the public clouds, you know, we've had a great success with VxRail, you know, that, that absolutely continues. We have, uh, 200,000 plus nodes, 15,000 customers and growing, we have edge satellite nodes and we continue to work together in SD wan in software defined networking in VMware cloud foundation, uh, you know, expressed, uh, in, in, in all locations. >>You know, one of the things that we've been seeing with the trend towards, um, future of work, which is a big theme, here is a lot of managed services are popping up where the complexity is so ha high that customers want to manage services. Uh, and also the workforce of it's kind of changing. You got a younger generation coming in, how do you see that future of the workforce? The next level? It's not gonna be like, yesterday's it, it's gonna be distributed computing dashboard based. And then you've got these managed services, you know, need to have the training and expertise maybe to run something at scale. How do, how do you see that connecting? Cuz that seems to be another big trend people are talking about, Hey, it's complex someone manage it for me. And I want ease of views. I want the easy button in it. >>Yeah. Well we we've all been at this a while. So we can remember, you know, the beginnings of converged infrastructure and then hyperconverged, which wasn't that long go. And now we have consumption based business models. These are all along the trajectory of the easy button that you're talking about and customers really thinking about the value line, where are the things that really differentiate and add value for their business. And it's not below the value line in those infrastructure areas are creating that easy button with appliances, with consumption based models and allowing them to deploy the scarce resources. They have to the things that really drive their unique differe. And you know, if you look at our managed services flex on demand, all the sort of ancestors and predecessors of apex, those have been great businesses for us. And now with apex, we're kind of industrializing this and, and making it, you know, at scale for all >>Customers, you know, the three of us, we go back, we, we, our first interactions with you separately, we're in the nine. And then we reconnected in the 2012. I think it was Tarkin Mayer had a little breakout session with CIOs. You brought us to early on a Dell tech world in Austin. And of course it was, >>It was just Dell world. Then Dell >>Four, we had Dell tech, you and then EMC world in 2010 was our first cube. And now that's all come together here in Las Vegas. So, you know, it's been great. Uh, the three of us come together and so really appreciate that. Yeah. >>Awesome. Absolutely awesome. >>Well, you know, really appreciate you guys being here, the wonderful work you do in thank you in, you know, bringing out the, the, the stories and, and showing off and helping us show off the innovations that, you know, our team has been working on. You know, during the past year >>It's been great in conversations and, and on a personal note, it's been great to have, uh, chat with all the top people and your company. Appreciate it. Um, someone told me to ask you this question, I want to ask you, you, we've all seen waves of innovation cycles up and down. We're kind of on one. Now you're seeing an inflection point, this next gen, uh, computing and, and web three cultural shit F with workforces and distributed computing decentralization. You mentioned that DFI earlier, how do you see this wave coming? Cause we've seen cycles come and go.com. Bubble kind of looks the same as the web three NFTs and stuff. Now it seems to be Look different, but how do you see this next wave? Cuz looking back on all the other ones that you you have lived through and you rode >>Well. So, you know, the, the way I see it is is, uh, to some extent, these are like foundational layers that have to be built for the next phase to occur. And if you look at the sort of new companies that are being founded today, and we see a lot of those, you, you, you, you see'em, we invest in a bunch of 'em, you know, they're, they're not going and, and kind of redoing the old foundational layers, they're going deeply into vertical businesses and, and disrupting and adding value on top of those. And I think that's, that's really the, the point of, of technology, right? It's enabling human progress us in, in all fields, it's making us healthier. It's making us safer. It's making us more successful in everything that, that we as humans do. And so all these layers of technology are enabling further progress and I think it's absolutely gonna continue. It's all been super exciting. Yeah. You know, so far for the first several decades, but as I, as I believe it, it's, it's just a pre-game show. >>And it's clear your strategy is, is, is really building that foundation of a layer, hardening it, but making it flexible enough, anybody read your book, you're a technology, visionary. A lot of people put you in a, you know, finance bucket, but you can, you can see that you can connect the dots. And that's what you're doing with your foundation of layers. You that's where you're making the bets, isn't it? Uh, you don't can't predict the future. You've said that many times, but you can sort of see where it's going and be prepared for >>It. Well, you, you, you know, you think about any company in, in the industry or any public sector organization, right? Uh, they're, they're, they're wanting to evolve more quickly and transform more quick, more quickly. Right. And we can give them an infrastructure or set of tools, a set of capabilities to help them go faster. >>Yeah. And the other one thing in the eighties, when you started Dell and we were in college, there was no open source really then if look at the growth of open source, talk about those layers, open source, better Silicon GPS, faster, cheap >>More now and now we even have, uh, open source instruction sets for processors. So I mean the whole world's changing. It's exciting. You have people around the world working together. I mean, when you see our development teams, uh, whether they're in Israel or Ireland or Bangalore or Singapore, Hopton Austin, Silicon valley, you know, Taiwan, they're, they're all, they're all collaborating together and, you know, driving, driving innovation and, and, and our business is not that dissimilar from our customers >>Like great to have you in the queue. Great. To have a physical event. People are excited. I'm talking to people, Hey, haven't been back in Vegas in two years. Thanks for having this event. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you guys. >>Michael Dell here in the cube CEO of Dell technologies. I'm John far, Dave Volante. We'll be right back, more live coverage here at Dell tech world.

(upbeat music) >> In 1946, the acerbic manager of the Dodgers, Leo the Lip Durocher famously said of baseball, great Mel Ott who was player manager of the Giants at the time. You know what happens to nice guys. They finished in last place. The phrase nice guys finish last was born. It became popular outside of baseball. Well joining me today is someone who was a consummate gentlemen and a nice guy who proves that idiom absolutely isn't true at all. He's also written a new book "Play nice and Win" Michael Dell chairman and CEO of Dell technologies, welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much, Dave, always great to be with you. Wonderful to be on the CUBE and thanks for your great coverage of Dell technologies world. >> Yeah. We're very excited to be covering the virtual version this year, next year we're back face to face I'm Sure. And we're going to talk about your book but I want to start by asking you to comment on the past 12 months, how are you going to remember 2020? >> I'm going to remember it by the resiliency of the world and our team, the adaptability the acceleration of digital transformation which is pretty amazing around the world. The vital role that technology played in addressing some of the biggest challenges, whether it was the creation of vaccines or, you know, decoding the virus itself or just addressing all the challenges that the world had. You know, I think it's a game changer in terms of disease identification and how we prevent these kinds of things going forward. You know, there's still a long way to go in terms of how do we get 7.5 billion people vaccinated and safe. I also think it exposed, you know some of the fault lines in our society. And that's a great learning for all of us in terms of access to healthcare and education and, you know, the digital resources that power the world. And so, yeah, those are some of the things that really stand out for me. >> Well, I mean, I think leaders like yourself and position of influence, absolutely passionate about some of those changes that we see coming in society. So hopefully we'll have time to talk about that but I wanted to get into the business. I think a lot of people, myself included felt that 2020 was going to be a down year for big tech companies like yours and that relied heavily on selling products that data centers and central offices but the remote work trend and the laptop, boom offset, some of those on-prem softness and headwinds combined with VMware the financial performance of Dell technologies was actually quite amazing. Why were you able to do so well last year? >> Well, first of all, you're right. We did, we had record pretty much everything record revenues, record operating income, record cashflow and be also paid down a record amount of debt. And so I think the strength and resiliency of our supply chain, as well as the broad diversified nature of what we provide our customers continue to serve us very well as they moved to this sort of do anything from anywhere in the world. And it continues the first part of this year, business is very strong >> You know, a few weeks ago, of course you officially announced the spinoff of Dell technologies. Wasn't a huge surprise but the 81% equity ownership of VMware are you worried about untethering VMware from Dell or maybe you can share more on what this means for the future of, your two companies and your customers. >> Right? So, I think this will drive additional growth opportunities for both Dell Tech and VMware, while it unlocks a lot of value for our stakeholders. What we've done is to formalize the commercial relationship into a series of agreements and those are unique and differentiated and they provide lots of flexibility and we've driven a tremendous amount of innovation together and that's going to continue and it will, one of the things we said back in 2015 you'll remember is our commitment to keep the VMware ecosystem open and independent and working across the whole industry. We've done that. You'll continue to see us innovate together with Edge solutions, certainly all the great work we've done with VxRail SD LAN, you know Tanzu creates this platform to modernize applications and VMware Cloud and Dell technologies are the easy path to a multi-cloud architecture. And, that continues to work super well and is not going to be slowed down at all. So... and of course, I'll continue to be a chairman of both companies and we're not selling VMware we're distributing our ownership to our shareholders. >> Well, of course, Dell is the largest sort channel if you will, for VMware. So that's ... you guys got a tight relationship but I want to ask you about digital transformation and everybody talked about it pre COVID but nobody really knew exactly what it was but COVID sort of brought that into focus very quickly. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So going forward, how do you see that whole digital transformation playing out? >> You know I think the plot of any company is to figure out how it can use its data and turn that into insights and outcomes and better results and ultimately competitive advantage faster. And as you said, you know, if it's not able to do that, it's probably going to go out of business. And that agenda just got massively accelerated because it was kind of digital was sort of the only thing that worked during this, this past period. So every organization has figured out that technology is not the IT department, it's actually the fulcrum of progress in the entire company. And so we're seeing sort of across the board a dramatic acceleration in the investment in digital technologies, you know, Edge is growing very fast. I think 5G just accelerates this and, you know you're seeing it in all the demand trends. It's quite positive and, you know, I think you'll see even a more rapid separation from those companies that are able to take advantage of this and quickly adjust their businesses their organizations, and those that are >> You better hop on board or get left behind, you know, the Edge. You mentioned the Edge it's a little bit like digital transformation, you know kind of pre COVID and even post COVID. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people but the telecoms transformation and 5G they have there certainly real. How do you see the Edge? >> You know, the Edges is ... think of it as actually the real world, right? It's, not a data center sitting in the center of the universe somewhere. And look today, you know only 10% of data is processed outside of the data center, but, you know, it's estimated by 2025 you got 75% of enterprise data will be processed outside of a traditional data center or a Cloud. And so as everything becomes intelligent connected 5G accelerates that it's going to be a huge acceleration of this whole process of digital transformation. And you know, again, think about this. I mean, the cost of making something intelligent used to be really expensive. Now it's asymptotically approaching zero. And of course all those things are connected. They're talking to each other and exactly what does this mean for every industry. Nobody's really quite sure and not everything is going to work, but, you know we're seeing it in manufacturing, in retail, in healthcare and the growth on the Edge is really accelerating in a meaningful way. And it's not so much about, you know people talking people with machines, we know how to do that. Now it's about the thing right And, you know you've got like 200 billion arm processors, you know out there in the last couple of years, all those things talking to the other things, generating data it happens in the real world. That's what the Edge is. >> Yeah as you know, we're a big fans of the arm model. And I think it just presents huge opportunities for companies like Dell. I want to ask you about Cloud. And I have to say, I think, you know companies like Dell have been maybe a little bit defensive over the last several years when it comes to Cloud but I think you starting to see the Cloud as a gift with all that CAPEX that's being built out by these hyperscalers. You know, thank you. It seems to me, you can build on top of that. How are you thinking about the Cloud as an opportunity for you and your customers especially as the definition of Cloud evolves? >> Well, first, you know, what we see is and the Edge is kind of the third place or the third premise, right? You got Clouds in the public form, you've got the Colo which is really growing fast and, you know the private hybrid Clouds, and now you've got the Edge. And so you've got infrastructure all over the place with Edge being the fastest growing. You know, one of the big things we see is that customers want a consistent way to operate and execute across that whole platform. And, you know, one of the other things that we've been focused on at Dell technologies is how can we move our business to more of a service and subscription on demand and provide customers that flexibility to to pay as they consume. And so, to some extent this is an evolution of, you know, products to services to managed services, to everything as a service. And so, you know, looking at our balance sheet you'll see over $40 billion in remaining performance obligations as we moved the business to that kind of model and it's been growing double digits for several quarters in a row. And so, you know, we're embracing Cloud and on-demand, and as a service, and obviously here at Dell technologies world we're talking a lot about Apex and our continuing initiatives to move our whole business in that direction. >> Yeah. Apex is a real accelerator for that model. I want to switch topics a little bit. I got a long list of things I want to talk about ESG, sustainability, inclusion, you know, is another topic that, that I'm interested in. I want it. And I said before, people like yourself in a position of influence to influence public policy and obviously the employees and your ecosystem why is it not just the right thing to do? Why is... why are those things good business, Michael? >> Well, it's good business because people want to be part of something that is important and purposeful. You know, it's not just make a profit and earn a living right? You know, people want to be inspired and feel that they're part of something special. And look, I think if you look at the positive changes that have occurred in the world certainly you could turn on the news and see the horrible things that happened in the last 24 hours or something like that. But if you step back and think about the amazing progress that's happened in the last several decades, you know a lot of it's been driven by technology and by businesses that have stepped up and made a difference and made commitments. And, you know, we're one of those companies that has made a series of commitments you know, 10 years ago, we set out with our 2020 goals. We accomplished significant majority of those retired those. Now we set out our progress made real 2030 goals all around the ESD themes. And it's not only the right thing to do but it is good for business. It inspires our team members, our customers and I think initiatives like progress made real at Dell and thousands of other companies. Ultimately, those are the things that are going to drive progress forward. I believe, you know, more so than government edicts or regulation, those can play a role. But I think, companies voluntarily driving things like the circular economy and how we include everyone in our business and provide opportunities for everyone to succeed no matter where they come from. I think those are the things that are really going to drive the world forward. >> Well, I want to ask you about public policy because as you say, it's not just the government, but of course sometimes the government can get in the way. You're seeing a lot of vitriol around Val break up big tech but the same time, you're seeing the US government and the EU very willing to help out with the semiconductor competitiveness in the like I know you were tapped with the new administration President Biden, tapping, you know, the best minds in tech and you were asked to part sort of participate give feedback. What can you tell us about, you know your advice to the US government? >> Well, you know, lots of great discussion with the new administration and it's a delight to see that they're focused on semiconductors and sort of the industries of the future. This is a big deal. I mean, you know, we've got some big global competitors out there other nations that are with a deterministic strategy very focused on the industries of the future. But US, you know if you think about the atomic age and, you know the Apollo missions that created the whole semiconductor industry ARPANET and ultimately the Internet and that kind of stopped right there, you know, there wasn't as much government investment in some of those big R and D initiatives that really drove an enormous creation of industries and success for the United States and its citizens. And so I think focusing on semiconductors and how you build the infrastructure of the future really important for the United States to continue to be a leader in that you know, we were, you know, producing a one point about 37% of the world's semiconductors. It's now down to 12% and dropping and really important that more investments are made in that area. It's a combination of capital, talent, you know education knowledge, and also, you know, the policies that promote the development of these kinds of businesses. >> Yah well, Pat's got a very big challenge ahead of them. And so that's why but we've said Intel's too strategic to fail in our view but I wanted to plug your book a little bit. My former boss, you and I have talked about this. He was also a gentleman who proved Leo Durocher wrong. He was very nice guy, but also a winner, Play Nice But Win, why did you decide to write another book? >> Well, you know, Dave, a lot has happened in the last 20 years and especially the last nine or so years since we went private and, you know merged with EMC and VMware and went public again. And, you know, I'd say we... first of all, you know when I wrote the first book in 1998 I wasn't comfortable disclosing a lot. And, and I wasn't vulnerable enough and didn't feel, you know, able to do that. Now I do, you know, I'm older, you know hopefully a little wiser. And so I think everybody's going to like hearing some of the fun stories about not only my childhood but you know, the dorm room and beyond, and leading up to, you know the pivotal changes that have occurred the last decade my alligator wrestling with Carl Icahn and other, you know there's lots of fun stories in there. I got arrested one time. It was only for speeding tickets, don't worry but you know, lots of fun. I'm really looking forward to the book coming out and being able to talk about it. >> I can't wait. You know, I've said many times anybody who could beat the great icon is interesting to me. I wanted to ask you, I mentioned my old boss, Pat McGovern. I used to say to them all the time, "Pat how come you don't buy more companies?" And he'd say," Dave, you know the vast majority of acquisitions and mergers they failed to meet their objectives." Did you ever imagine, I mean... I did the EMC acquisition. Did... how could it not have exceeded your expectations? I wonder if you could give us your final thoughts on that. >> You know, and I talk about this a lot in the book. I mean, these are kind of the ultimate considered decisions. And in the case of the EMC combination it was something that we had thought about going back to 2008, 2009. And then, you know, started thinking about it in 2014 worked on it for a full year before it got announced in 2015 and finally closed in 2016. But yeah, I mean, you know, we thought it would be great. It turned out to be even better than We thought the revenue synergies were far greater. The teams were quite energized. Customers liked what we were providing and you know it's ... and, of course the markets were supportive Right? You know, we were paying close attention to interest rates and how we could structure the merger in a attractive way. And, you know, thank goodness, lots of hard work lots of determination, you know, it's worked out quite well. >> Yeah, great commitment from the Dell team as well. Congratulations on that. Go ahead, please. >> And any adventure continues right? It's...( both chuckles) >> I can't wait to see the next chapter and I can't wait to get the book, but congratulations on that, all your tremendous success you're you are a winner and a gentleman and a friend of the CUBE, Michael Dell. Thanks so much. >> Thank you so much Dave. >> And thank you for watching. And this is the CUBE continuous coverage of Dell tech world 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, right back. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has had a long, strange trip to IPO. How so you ask? Well, the company was started in 2005. But it's culture, is akin to a frenetic startup. The firm shunned conventions and instead of focusing on a narrow geographic area to prove its product market fit before it started to grow, it aggressively launched international operations prior to reaching unicorn status. Well prior, when it had very little revenue, around a million dollars. Today, more than 60% of UiPath business is outside of the United States. Despite its headquarters being in New York city. There's more, according to recent SEC filings, UiPath total revenue grew 81% last year. But it's free cash flow, is actually positive, modestly. Wait, there's more. The company raised $750 million in a Series F in early February, at a whopping $35 billion valuation. Yet, the implied back of napkin valuation, based on the number of shares outstanding after the offering multiplied by the proposed maximum offering price per share yields evaluation of just under 26 billion. (Dave chuckling) And there's even more to this crazy story. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our learnings, from sifting through hundreds of pages (paper rustling) of UiPath's red herring. So you didn't have to, we'll share our thoughts on its market, its competitive position and its outlook. Let's start with a question. Mark Roberge, is a venture capitalist. He's a managing director at Stage 2 Capital and he's also a teacher, a professor at the B-School in Harvard. One of his favorite questions that he asks his students and others, is what's the best way to grow a company? And he uses this chart to answer that question. On the vertical axis is customer retention and the horizontal axis is growth to growth rate and you can see he's got modest and awesome and so forth. Now, so I want to let you look at it for a second. What's the best path to growth? Of course you want to be in that green circle. Awesome retention of more than 90% and awesome growth but what's the best way to get there? Should you blitz scale and go for the double double, triple, triple blow it out and grow your go to market team on the horizontal axis or should be more careful and focus on nailing retention and then, and only then go for growth? What do you think? What do you think most VCs would say? What would you say? When you want to maybe run the table, capture the flag before your competitors could get there or would you want to take a more conservative approach? What would Daniel Dines say the CEO of UiPath? Again, I'll let you think about that for a second. Let's talk about UiPath. What did they do? Well, I shared at the top that the company shunned conventions and expanded internationally, very rapidly. Well before it hit escape velocity and they grew like crazy and it got out of control and he had to reign it in, plug some holes, but the growth didn't stop, go. So very clearly based on it's performance and reading through the S1, the company has great retention. It uses a metric called gross retention rate which is at 96 or 97%, very high. Says customers are sticking with it. So maybe that's the right formula go for growth and grow like crazy. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. Go fast horizontally, and you can go vertically. Let me tell you what I think Mark Roberge would say, he told me you can do that. But churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies and perhaps the better path is to nail product market fit. And then your retention metrics, before you go into hyperbolic growth mode. There's all science behind this, which may be antithetical to the way many investors want to roll the dice and go for super growth, like go fast or die. Well, it worked for UiPath you might say, right. Well, no. And this is where the story gets even more interesting and long and strange for UiPath. As we shared earlier, UiPath was founded in 2005 out of Bucharest Romania. The company actually started as a software outsourcing startup. It called the company, DeskOver and it built automation libraries and SDKs for companies like Microsoft, IBM and Google and others. It also built automation scripts and developed importantly computer vision technology which became part of its secret sauce. In December 2015, DeskOver changed its name to UiPath and became a Delaware Corp and moved its headquarters to New York City a couple of years later. So our belief is that UiPath actually took the preferred path of Mark Roberge, five ticks North, then five more East. They slow-cooked for the better part of 10 years trying to figure out what market to serve. And they spent that decade figuring out their product market fit. And then they threw gas in the fire. Pretty crazy. All right, let's take a peak (chuckling) at the takeaways from the UiPath S1 the numbers are impressive. 580 million ARR with 65% growth. That asterisk is there because like you, we thought ARR stood for annual recurring revenue. It really stands for annualized renewal run rate. annualized renewal run rate is a metric that is one of UiPath's internal KPIs and are likely communicate that publicly over time. We'll explain that further in a moment. UiPath has a very solid customer base. Nearly 8,000, I've interviewed many of them. They're extremely happy. They have very high retention. They get great penetration into the fortune 500, around 63% of the fortune 500 has UiPath. Most of UiPath business around 70% comes from existing customers. I always say you're going to get more money out of existing customers than new customers but everybody's trying to go out and get new customers. But UiPath I think is taking a really interesting approach. It's their land and expand and they didn't invent that term but I'll come back to that. It kind of reminds me of the early days of Tableau. Actually I think Tableau is an interesting example. Like UiPath, Tableau started out as pretty much a point tool and it had, but it had very passionate customers. It was solving problems. It was simplifying things. And it would have bid into a company and grow and grow. Now the market fundamentals for UiPath are very good. Automation is super hot right now. And the pandemic has created an automation mandate to date and I'll share some data there as well. UiPath is a leader. I'm going to show you the Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA. That's kind of a good little snapshot. UiPath pegs it's TAM at 60 billion dollars based on some bottoms up calculations and some data from Bain. Pre-pandemic, we pegged it at over 30 billion and we felt that was conservative. Post-pandemic, we think the TAM is definitely higher because of that automation mandate, it's been accelerated. Now, according to the S1, UiPath is going to raise around 1.2 billion. And as we said, if that's an implied valuation that is lower than the Series F, so we suspect the Series F investors have some kind of ratchet in there. UiPath needed the cash from its Series F investors. So it took in 750 million in February and its balance sheet in the S1 shows about 474 million in cash and equivalent. So as I say, it needed that cash. UiPath has had significant expense reductions that we'll show you in some detail. And it's brought in some fresh talent to provide some adult supervision around 70% of its executive leadership team and outside directors came to the company after 2019 and the company's S1, it disclosed that it's independent accounting firm identified last year what it called the "material weakness in our internal controls over financial report relating to revenue recognition for the fiscal year ending 2018, caused by a lack of oversight and technical competence within the finance department". Now the company outlined the steps it took to remediate the problem, including hiring new talent. However, we said that last year, we felt UiPath wasn't quite ready to go public. So it really had to get its act together. It was not as we said at the time, the well-oiled machine, that we said was Snowflake under Mike Scarpelli's firm operating guidance. The guy's the operational guru, but we suspect the company wants to take advantage of this mock market. It's a good time to go public. It needs the cash to bolster its balance sheet. And the public offering is going to give it cache in a stronger competitive posture relative to its main new competitor, autumn newbie competitor Automation Anywhere and the big whales like Microsoft and others that aspire and are watching what UiPath is doing and saying, hey we want a piece of that action. Now, one other note, UiPath's CEO Daniel Dines owns 100% of the class B shares of the company and has a 35 to one voting power. So he controls the company, subject of course to his fiduciary responsibilities but if UiPath, let's say it gets in trouble financially, he has more latitude to do secondary offerings. And at the same time, it's insulated from activist shareholders taking over his company. So lots of detail in the S1 and we just wanted to give you some of those highlights. Here are the pretty graphs. If whoever wrote this F1 was a genius. It's just beautiful. As we said, ARR, annualized renewal run rate all it does is it annualizes the invoice amount from subscriptions in the maintenance portion of the revenue. In other words, the parts that are recurring revenue, it excludes revenue from support and perpetual license. Like one-time licenses and services is just kind of the UiPath's and maybe that's some sort of legacy there. It's future is that recurring revenue. So it's pretty similar to what we think of as ARR, but it's not exact. Lots of customers with a growing number of six and seven figure accounts and a dollar-based net retention of 145%. This figure represents the rate of net expansion of the UiPath ARR, from existing listing customers over a 12 month period. Translation. This says UiPath's existing customers are spending more with the company, land and expand and we'll share some data from ETR on that. And as you can see, the growth of 86% CAGR over the past nine quarters, very impressive. Let's talk about some of the fundamentals of UiPath's business. Here's some data from the Brookings Institute and the OECD that shows productivity statistics for the US. The smaller charts in the right are for Germany and Japan. And I've shared some similar data before the US showed in the middle there. Showed productivity improvements with the personal productivity boom in the mid to late 90s. And it spilled into the early 2000s. But since then you can see it's dropped off quite significantly. Germany and Japan are also under pressure as are most developed countries. China's labor productivity might show declines but it's level, is at level significantly higher than these countries, April 16th headline of the Wall Street Journal says that China's GDP grew 18% this quarter. So, we've talked about the snapback in post-COVID and the post-isolation economy, but these are kind of one time bounces. But anyway, the point is we're reaching the limits of what humans can do alone to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. And automation is one key to shifting labor away from these more mundane tasks toward more productive and more important activities that can deliver lasting benefits. This according to UiPath, is its stated purpose to accelerate human achievement, big. And the market is ready to be automated, for the most part. Now the post-isolation economy is increasingly going to focus on automation to drive toward activity as we've discussed extensively, I got to share the RPA Magic Quadrant where nearly everyone's a winner, many people are of course happy. Many companies are happy, just to get into the Magic Quadrant. You can't just, you have to have certain criteria. So that's good. That's what I mean by everybody wins. We've reported extensively on UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Yeah, we think we might shuffle the deck a little bit on this picture. Maybe creating more separation between UiPath and Automation Anywhere and the rest. And from our advantage point, UiPath's IPO is going to either force Automation Anywhere to respond. And I don't know what its numbers are. I don't know if it's ready. I suspect it's not, we'd see that already but I bet you it's trying to get there. Or if they don't, UiPath is going to extend its lead even further, that would be our prediction. Now personally, I would have Pegasystems higher on the vertical. Of course they're not an IPO, RPA specialist, so I kind of get what Gartner is doing there but I think they're executing well. And I'd probably, in a broader context I'd probably maybe drop blue prism down a little bit, even though last year was a pretty good year for the company. And I would definitely have Microsoft looming larger up in the upper left as a challenger more than a visionary in my opinion, but look, Gartner does good work and its analysts are very deep into this stuff, deeper than I am. So I don't want to discount that. It's just how I see it. Let's bring in the ETR data and show some of the backup here. This is a candlestick chart that shows the components of net score, which is spending momentum, however, ETR goes out every quarter. Says you're spending more, you're spending less. They subtract the lesses from the mores and that's net score. It's more complicated than that, but that's that blue line that you see in the top and yes it's trending downward but it's still highly elevated. We'll talk about that. The market share is in the yellow line at the bottom there. That green represents the percentage of customers that are spending more and the reds are spending less or replacing. That gray is flat. And again, even though UiPath's net score is declining, it's that 61%, that's a very elevated score. Anything over 40% in our view is impressive. So it's, UiPath's been holding in the 60s and 70s percents over the past several years. That's very good. Now that yellow line market share, yes it dips a bit, but again it's nuanced. And this is because Microsoft is so pervasive in the data stat. It's got so many mentions that it tends to somewhat overwhelm and skew these curves. So let's break down net score a little bit. Here's another way to look at this data. This is a wheel chart we show this often it shows the components of net score and what's happening here is that bright red is defection. So look at it, it's very small that wouldn't be churn. It's tiny. Remember that it's churn is the killer for software companies. And so that forest green is existing customers spending more at 49%, that's big. That lime green is new customers. So again, it's from the S1, 70% of UiPath's revenue comes from existing customers. And this really kind of underscores that. Now here's more evidence in the ETR data in terms of land and expand. This is a snapshot from the January survey and it lines up UiPath next to its competitors. And it cuts the data just on those companies that are increasing spending. It's so that forest green that we saw earlier. So what we saw in Q1 was the pace of new customer acquisition for UiPath was decelerating from previous highs. But UiPath, it shows here is outpacing its competition in terms of increasing spend from existing customers. So we think that's really important. UiPath gets very high scores in terms of customer satisfaction. There's, I've talked to many in theCUBE. There's places on the web where we have customer ratings. And so you want to check that out, but it'll confirm that the churn is low, satisfaction is high. Yeah, they get dinged sometimes on pricing. They get dinged sometimes, lately on service cause they're growing so fast. So, maybe they've taken the eye off the ball in a couple of counts, but generally speaking clients are leaning in, they're investing heavily. They're creating centers of excellence around RPA and automation, and UiPath is very focused on that. Again, land and expand. Now here's further evidence that UiPath has a strong account presence, even in accounts where its competitors are presence. In the 149 shared accounts from the Q1 survey where UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Microsoft have a presence, UiPath's net score or spending velocity is not only highly elevated, it's relative momentum, is accelerating compared to last year. So there's some really good news in the numbers but some other things stood out in the S1 that are concerning or at least worth paying attention to. So we want to talk about that. Here is the income statement and look at the growth. The company was doing like 1 million dollars in 2015 like I said before. And when it started to expand internationally it surpassed 600 million last year. It's insane growth. And look at the gross profit. Gross margin is almost 90% because revenue grew so rapidly. And last year, its cost went down in some areas like its services, less travel was part of that. Now jump down to the net loss line. And normally you would expect a company growing at this rate to show a loss. The street wants growth and UiPath is losing money, but it's net loss went from 519 million, half a billion down to only 92 million. And that's because the operating expenses went way down. Now, again, typically a company growing at this rate would show corresponding increases in sales and marketing expense, R&D and even G&A but all three declined in the past 12 months. Now reading the notes, there was definitely some meaningful savings from no travel and canceled events. UiPath has great events around the world. In fact theCUBE, Knock Wood is going to be at its event in October, in Las Vegas at the Bellagio . So we're stoked for that. But, to drop expenses that precipitously with such high growth, is kind of strange. Go look at Snowflake's income statement. They're in hyper-growth as well. We like to compare it to Snowflake is a very well-run company and it's in hyper-growth mode, but it's sales and marketing and R&D and G&A expense lines. They're all growing along with that revenue. Now, perhaps they're growing at a slower rate. Perhaps the percent of revenue is declining as it should as they achieve operating leverage but they're not shrinking in absolute dollar terms as shown in the UiPath S1. So either UiPath has applied some magic automation mojo to it's business (chuckling). Like magic beans or magic grits with my cousin Vinny. Maybe it has found the Holy grail of operating leverage. It's a company that's all about automation or the company was running way too hot on the expense side and had a cut and clean up its income statement for the IPO and conserve some cash. Our guess is the latter but maybe there's a combination there. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And just to add a bit more to this long, strange trip. When have you seen an explosive growth company just about to go public, show positive cashflow? Maybe it's happened, but it's rare in the tech and software business these days. Again, go look at companies like Snowflake. They're not showing positive cashflow, not yet anyway. They're growing and trying to run the table. So you have to ask why is UiPath operating this way? And we think it's because they were so hot and burning cash that they had to reel things in a little bit and get ready to IPO. It's going to be really interesting to see how this stock reacts when it does IPO. So here's some things that we want you to pay attention to. We have to ask. Is this IPO, is it window dressing? Or did UiPath again uncover some new productivity and operating leverage model. I doubt there's anything radically new here. This company doesn't want to miss the window. So I think it said, okay, let's do this. Let's get ready for IPO. We got to cut expenses. It had a lot of good advisors. It surrounded itself with a new board. Extended that board, new management, and really want to take advantage of this because it needs the cash. In addition, it really does want to maintain its lead. It's got Automation Anywhere competing with it. It's got Microsoft looming large. And so it wants to continue to lead. It's made some really interesting acquisitions. It's got very strong vision as you saw in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and obviously it's executing well but it's really had to tighten things up. So we think it's used the IPO as a fortune forcing function to really get its house in order. Now, will the automation mandate sustain? We think it will. The forced match to digital worked, it was effective. It wasn't pleasant, but even in a downturn we think it will confer advantage to automation players and particularly companies like UiPath that have simplified automation in a big way and have done a great job of putting in training, great freemium model and has a culture that is really committed to the future of humankind. It sounds ambitious and crazy but talk to these people, you'll see it's true. Pricing, UiPath had to dramatically expand or did dramatically expand its portfolio and had to reprice everything. And I'm not so worried about that. I think it'll figure that pricing out for that portfolio expansion. My bigger concern is for SaaS companies in general. I don't like SaaS pricing that has been popularized by Workday and ServiceNow, and Salesforce and DocuSign and all these companies that essentially lock you in for a year or two and basically charge you upfront. It's really is a one-way street. You can't dial down. You can only dial up. It's not true Cloud pricing. You look at companies like Stripe and Datadog and Snowflake. It is true Cloud pricing. It's consumption pricing. I think the traditional SaaS pricing model is flawed. It's very unfairly weighted toward the vendors and I think it's going to change. Now, the reason we put cloud on the chart is because we think Cloud pricing is the right way to price. Let people dial up and dial down, let them cancel anytime and compete on the basis of your product excellence. And yeah, give them a price concession if they do lock in. But the starting point we think should be that flexibility, pay by the drink. Cancel anytime. I mentioned some companies that are doing that as well. If you look at the modern SaaS startups and the forward-thinking VCs they're really pushing their startups to this model. So we think over time that the term lock-in model is going to give way to true consumption-based pricing and at the clients option, allow them to lock-in for a better price, way better model. And UiPath's Cloud revenue today is minimal but over time, we think it's going to continue to grow that cloud. And we think it will force a rethink in pricing and in revenue recognition. So watch for that. How is the street going to react to Daniel Dines having basically full control of the company? Generally, we feel that that solid execution if UiPath can execute is going to outweigh those concerns. In fact, I'm very confident that it will. We'll see, I kind of like what the CEO says has enough mojo to say (chuckling) you know what, I'm not going to let what happened to for instance, EMC happen to me. You saw Michael Dell do that. You saw just this week they're spinning out VMware, he's maintaining his control. VMware Dell shareholders get get 40.44 shares for every Dell share they're holding. And who's the biggest shareholder? Michael Dell. So he's, you got two companies, one chairman. He's controlling the table. Michael Dell beat the great Icahn. Who beats Carl Icahn? Well, Michael Dell beats Carl Icahn. So Daniel Dines has looked at that and says, you know what? I'm not just going to give up my company. And the reason I like that with an if, is that we think will allow the company to focus more on the long-term. The if is, it's got to execute otherwise it's so much pressure and look, the bottom line is that UiPath has really favorable market momentum and fundamentals. But it is signing up for the 90 day short clock. The fact that the CEO has control again means they can look more long term and invest accordingly. Oftentimes that's easier said than done. It does come down to execution. So it is going to be fun to watch (chuckling). That's it for now, thanks to the community for your comments and insights and really always appreciate your feedback. Remember, I publish each week on Wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for the Breaking Analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And we'll see you in clubhouse. Follow me and get notified when we start a room, which we've been doing with John Furrier and Sarbjeet Johal and others. And we love to riff on these topics and don't forget, please check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Be well everybody. And we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier join Dave Vellante for a special report and analysis on the Dell technologies VMware spin out transaction, contemplation, story, circulating rumors, thanks for joining. Dave, great to see you. Yesterday we filmed a Zoom, I was at home, you were in the office. We had to get the story out for the hot take on the news at Dell technologies is spinning out VMware. We had a lot of hot takes, you got some amendments to make but one of the things that came out of was that we, after we had the interview, we said look let's just go get some more data so I went out off on my own, you went off on your own to get some digging, get some data and get some reporting on this, investigate this further. Here's what I've found. I've heard a rumor and have confirmed from a great source that Michael Dell isn't selling so the story's off. Which would mean our half hour analysis is off. But I also got some data that points to some of the other things that we said are consistent. So one, I want to get your thoughts. The rumor that I'm hearing is that Dell is not selling, from my sources. What are you hearing? >> Yeah I think there's a different take here, John. I mean everybody assumed when the press release came out in the 13D that Dell was spinning off its stake, people inferred from that that they were selling. And I think in fact this is not a sale. I think everybody was wrong about that. I think in fact what Dell is going to do is distribute its stake, it's 81% stake to shareholders and so to Dell shareholders and of course what's going to happen is Michael Dell owns a very large portion of Dell technologies. I think by recollection it's over 60% and as a result he's the largest shareholder of Dell and he's that 81% is going to get distributed to the Dell shareholders, so he's going to end up with more than half of the ownership of VMware all said and done. So Michael Dell is I think ultimately going to have more than half of the ownership of Dell Technologies, I think it's 65%, probably 63, 65% somewhere in there by my recollection and he's going to end up with more than 51% of VMware, John and so you're going to have. I mean it would make sense wouldn't it that the majority shareholder is going to be chairman of both companies. >> And so you've talked to a bunch of people on this, is that right? So just to get some background, where'd you? >> Yeah I think some people on Wall Street have figured this out but it's definitely not hit the main stream news. I think if you read the news, you read the register I mean essentially we made the same inference that Dell was becoming untethered to VMware. I don't think that's happening at all. Also, I've talked to a number of customers, John about this, asking them what they thought about the news yesterday and there was a big shrug. I mean I talked to one customer, said hey you know in the old days I bought block from EMC, I bought file from NetApp, they both made great products, they both were VMware friendly, this doesn't affect me one bit. And other customers I talked to said yeah I don't really see any big change here. And I don't think anything's going to change. I think if Michael Dell is the chairman of both companies, I don't think anything changes. >> Alright so to correct what we had, our hot take which was untethering, spinning out VMware implying that there's going to be an untethering or VMware can make it on their own which I think our analysis was right on on the value of VMware. So I stand by that report no problem, it's the specifics of Dell Technologies appearing as if they're unloading it okay. So that's the nuance here. >> That's right. >> So the nuance is Michael Dell actually is going to maintain staying in control, he's not going anywhere. That's what you're just saying. Is that true? >> Yeah, picture the block diagrams you got Dell over here and inside of Dell you have 81% ownership of VMware and over here you have VMware and essentially what Dell is doing is saying okay all you Dell shareholders, we're going to allow you to now directly own those VMware shares and so they're going to transfer essentially from owning Dell to owning VMware directly, of course Michael Dell now is going to own VMware directly as opposed to owning it through his ownership of Dell. As a result, it cleans up the hair on this conglomerate structure which means it's, and you've seen it in the stock market today in the last month, it's unlocking value for Dell, it's unlocking value for VMware. John, on June 22nd, prior to the Wall Street Journal breaking that they were contemplating this, Dell's core value, in other words, the value net of VMware was around negative 23 billion, today it's negative 4 billion so they've already compressed about 20 billion dollars out of that negative value and that's the arbitrage play now and I think it just goes up from here. The second thing is a lot of investors that I talked to won't touch VMware stock because it's controlled by Dell. This liquidity hangover that I always talk about. I think this is going to bring other investors you know in from the sideline. So that is everybody inferred that Dell was becoming untethered, Dell becomes a lot less interesting without VMware. That's wrong, nothing really changes in terms of the commercial relationship between these two companies and the impact on customers. >> So essentially if I over simplify it for my simple brain here, Dell is IPOing shares of VMware to the shareholders of Dell. What a benefit that is. >> Yeah I mean again they're just-- >> I mean it's not an IPO in the sense of an IPO, it's basically saying. Hey, shareholders of Dell, good job, if you want the value of VMware go take it. >> So you remember how this all came about? Remember when Dell bought VMware they had a gap, I mean the amount of cash they could raise, the amount of debt they took on, the amount of cash that Michael Dell in Silver Lake and a couple other partners threw in, it was only about four billion to get 67 billion and the way they covered that gap was they created a tracking stock called DVMT and DVMT was supposed to track VMware value, it really didn't. And so what happened was, DVMT was a public company, Dell wanted to go public again and said okay we're going to do this through the DVMT vehicle and we're going to issue shares of Dell. And remember, Carl Icahn, and Elliot they were very active and they sort of got Michael in a head lock and said we need more if you're going to do that and they did. Ultimately Dell goes public but then they face this liquidity hangover and so also you might recall that Dell floated Pivotal and monetized that to delever, they paid down some debt and then basically went to VMware and said okay you're going to buy Pivotal back. They used some cash and they issued shares so Dell's ownership of VMware escalated to 81% at the time. That's how they got to 81%. I remember thinking wow how much of this company are they going to own? Well this is what it allowed them to do. It now allows them to distribute the shares and allows Michael Dell personally to have the majority ownership of VMware, it's absolute genius and it cleans up the structure of the organization so instead having to own VMware through Dell which by the way I've always said it's a cheap way to own VMware, good move if you bought Dell stock to own VMware, now you own VMware directly and of course Michael Dell owns it directly. Absolute genius move over the last three, four, five, years. >> Yeah, and one of the things we did say in our hot take yesterday was that that negative value of Dell technology world, Dell Technologies gets shrunk and also can create value. Here they're even gettin' more value into ownership of VMware but I got to ask you, you mentioned a comment about this liquidity hangover and they have this dividend, could you explain that 'cause I'm just not followin' this liquidity problem ? >> Well this is very interesting, so Dell because it has so much debt, number one, number two because it has controlling ownership of VMware and it has 90 plus percent voting power. Shareholders penalize Dell and so the big thing here is the debt. What essentially Dell is doing and people always joke that VMware is Dell's piggyback and it's true. And here it comes again, we saw that with Pivotal, we saw that with DVMT. What I think is happening, John is Dell is going to essentially transfer some of its debt to VMware so it's going to have VMware take on a little bit more debt. It is said that they want to maintain investment grade ratings for VMware which currently has great ratings, Dell does not have investment grade rating, it needs to pay down more debt so essentially it's going to shift some of that debt to VMware through a special dividend of which Dell will be a great beneficiary and will allow Dell to pay down some of that debt so that it can become investment grade and they want to take on an amount of debt that will not crush VMware's balance sheets so that it will also be investment grade. So they're creating this equilibrium if you will. Now, I've heard the ceiling on VMware's debt in order to get to equilibrium or in order to maintain investment grade is no more than five billion but I've also heard much much higher numbers. As high as eight to 10, to maybe even 12 billion. I don't know if VMware can take on that much debt and maintain investment grade. The point is there's some number there which Dell is going to force VMware to take on that debt, now one last thing I'll say is despite Michael Dell, Dell Technologies' ownership and control 90 plus percent control, it has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders but my view is it's meeting that responsibility because the value it's unlocking value so who can complain? Again it's absolutely fascinating and brilliant but that's what that dividend is all about is Dell saying okay VMware you're going to take on more debt and you're going to help us pay down the Dell debt and you're going to take on more. We'll both be investment grade. >> And they both get value increase. >> Yeah, yes, correct. >> So it's a financial engineering deal, Michael Dell still can run both companies. Do you still think he will be running both companies? >> Yeah, I think there's no question that Michael Dell will be the chairman, he is the chairman of Dell Technologies, chairman of VMware and he's going to continue to be. And so this commercial agreement that they're going to sign, it's a wired deal. VMware and Dell and by the way there is every incentive for VMware to do this. People may say hey they're strong arming Dell blah blah blah but VMware, Dell is a huge distribution channel for VMware and I'll tell you something that Dell has done better than EMC and Joe Tucci ever did and you know we're big fans of Joe Tucci, but Dell has unlocked a channel for VMware the way EMC never did. VMware through Dell has seen incredible growth and it really is Dell as I would say VMware's most important partner, biggest partner because Dell didn't apologize for super gluing itself and VMware to it. Whereas EMC was always much more cautious, trying to play the ecosystem game. >> Well they were saving their storage business with VMware, I mean VMware saved EMC, some would say. >> Yeah, I would say. I mean if it weren't for the acquisition of VMware back for $650 million in the early 2000s you know EMC would've been a really uninteresting company over its last five to seven years. >> So they milked that storage dry but then they had that uplift with VMware, Michael says hey I'll put this right in the family and this is what it is. It's a deal where it's in the Dell family portfolio and what Michael's doing is to your point and what you're saying is, he's unlocking all this value for both Dell and VMware and saying okay, let's go to market and figure it out. >> I got to tell you this John I mean as a founder, the co founder you know obviously we're a little smaller than Dell but you got to appreciate what Michael Dell has done here. He went through hell taking his company private. You know he took on Carl Icahn, I said yesterday who beats the great Icahn? Well Michael Dell beat the great Icahn. You know who out maneuvered Elliot? I mean Elliot is a very influential player in the market. Michael Dell said you know what I'm not goin' through that again, I have control of Dell Technologies, I have voting control over VMware, I'm going to do what's right for me, for my company and my shareholders and Michael Dell's making his shareholders money. I mean who can complain about it. >> I'll tell you I mean there's two playbooks I look at, from Andy Jassy and Michael Dell. I mean Michael Dell knows how to make money right, he's always been a great money maker, he's also a geek, he loves to get down and dirty in the tech, he's got two 49 inch Dell monitors since it's his company he gets the best gear. All kidding aside you know he built a company, went public, took it private and that was a reset. I mean in his stage of his life it was his reset, this is his swan song. He's havin' a ball and he's financially engineered this success with the power that he built and it's a whole 'nother level, whole 'nother chapter in his life and he's a money maker. He knows how to make money. You put Silver Lake and Michael Dell together. You put Michael Dell with these kinds of brains, with his asset base, as you say the cash flow of Dell, with the asset of say a crown jewel like VMware that literally can pave the path to the future. He can ride on the cloud backs all day long, he doesn't need a public cloud for anything. >> Yeah well so before we talk about that I just want to double down on what you said. People just always say yeah Michael Dell he's a finance guy. It's not true, yes, well he's got a finance team that is amazing, no doubt Michael is instrumental there but he's a business genius, I mean he really business visionary guy built his own PCs in college so he's obviously like you said, he's a geek, technically extremely savvy, he's a visionary, he's one of the top I don't know 10 visionaries in the computer industry, I would say history. So, now you're absolutely right, well you said doesn't need a cloud. I think my concern about this whole deal yesterday when I misunderstood that this was spinning off and coming untethered is what about the edge? What about multi cloud? You know what's Dell's play there? Well Dell's play is still VMware, their strategy hasn't changed one bit. I mean nothing changes, the only change is the direct ownership of VMware stock which unlocks value. Nothing else changes. >> Let me tell you, to wrap my piece up here and then we can wrap it up. Just in interface with Michael over the years and knowing him personally, seeing him up close, here's how I think his mind works. You mentioned he assembled PCs in college. He built out you know pioneered you know putting suppliers and supply chain, getting prices lower, direct mail, he pioneered that direct to consumer all these successes. This whole world that's in there is like assembling a PC in his dorm room. Accept he's got it with billions of dollars. Little VMware here, processor, IO, I mean he's essentially a financial geek at this point, and although he likes to look in and he loves Pivotal, he loves some of the things he's doing with VMware, he likes to look under the covers and see the engine but he's a financial assembler now so he's looking at this and you can see how it's all working and to your scoop here. Yeah I guess it looks like a spin out if that's what people want to call it and the press jump on that but if pieces, takes the hair off the deal that's basically makes the IO move better, he's got a you know good bus there, 32 bits. Again, and assembling a PC, assembling companies and creating value. He makes money, Dave. >> I love it, that's a great analogy, the PC parts are a little bit more valuable but the other thing I just want to clarify what I said. The other thing that changes is the income statement. Dell will no longer recognize you know VMware revenue and so that changes and of course the balance sheet changes, that's a huge change. Now and I guess the caveat is, this in theory couldn't happen but it just makes so much sense. I was kind of sniffin' around it in my breaking analysis when this thing first leaked and I said in that, John if the financial geniuses at Dell can figure out some way to monetize this well here it is. It now is becoming much much more clear and I'm impressed. >> Well Dave, he was assembling PCs in college, now he's assembling companies, what did we do in college? Don't even go there. >> Let's end it there. >> I will end it right there. Dave, great scoop, top story. Michael Dell is not selling VMware. It's a transaction, it's going to have all that value and it's unlocking more Dell tech value. Look for the shares to be distributed to the Dell Technologies shareholders. It's the same game, super gluing together, creating value for both. Dave, great scoop, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John, thanks for having me. >> Cube Special Report and Analysis here in the studio in California, Dave Vellante in Massachusetts. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld2018 brought to by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, John Furrier, Stu Miniman at the end of day two of our continuing coverage, guys, of VMworld 2018, huge event, 25+ thousand people here, 100,000+ expected to be engaging with the on demand and the live experiences. Our biggest show, right? 94 interviews over the next three days, two of them down. Let's go, John, to you, some of the takeaways from today from the guests we've had on both sets, what are some of the things that stick out in your mind? Really interesting? >> Well we had Michael Dell on so that's always a great interview, he comes on every year and he's very candid and this year he added a little bit more color commentary. That was great, it was one of my highlights. I thought the keynote that Sanjay Poonen did, he had an amazing guest, Nobel Peace Prize winner, the youngest ever and her story was so inspirational and I think that sets a tone for VMware putting a cultural stake in the ground around tech for good. We've done a lot of AI for good with Intel and there's always been these initiatives but I think there's now a cultural validation that people generally want to work for and buy from companies that are mission driven and mission driven is now part of it and people can be judged on that front so it's good to see VMware get some leadership there and put the stake in the ground. I thought that was the big news today, at least from my standpoint. The rest were like point product announcements. Sanjay Poonen went into great detail on that. Pat Gelsinger also came on, another great highlight and again we didn't have a lot of time, he was running a bit late, he had a tight schedule but it shows how smart he is, he's really super technical and he actually understands at a root level what's going on so he's actually a great CEO right now, the financial performance is there and he's also very technical, and I think it encapsulates all of it that Dell Technologies, under Michael Dell, he's making so much more money, he's going to be richer and richer. (laughing) He took an entrepreneurial bet, it wasn't hurting at the time but Dell was kind of boring, Dave. I wouldn't call it like an innovative company at the time when they were public using the 90 day shot clock. They had some things going on but they were a hardware company, a supplier to IT footprints-- >> Whoa, whoa, they were 60 billion dollars in revenue and a 20 billion dollar market gap, so something was broken. >> Well I mean it was working numbers wise but he seemed-- >> No that's opposite, a 20 billion dollar value on a 60 billion of revenue, is you're sort of a failure, so anyway, at the time. >> Market conditions aside, right, at the time, he seemed like he wanted to do something entrepreneurial and the takeaway from my interview with him, our interview with him, was he took an entrepreneurial bet put his own cash on the table and it's paying off, that horse is coming in. He's going to make more money on this transaction and takes EMC out of the game, folds it into the operations, it really is going to be, I think, a financial success story if market conditions continue to be the way they are. Michael Dell will go down as a great financial maneuver and he'll be in the top epsilon of deals. >> The story people might forget is that Carl Icahn tried to take the company away from him. Michael Dell beat the great Carl Icahn, which doesn't happen often. Why did Carl Icahn want to take Dell private? Because he knew he could make a boatload of money off of it and Michael Dell said, "No way you're taking my company. "I'm going to do my thing and change the industry." >> He's going to have 90% voting control with Silver Lake Partners when the deal is all said and done and taking a company private and the executing the financial engineering plus execution is really hard to do, look at Elon Musk in the news today. He's trying to take Tesla private, he got his butt handed to him. Now he's saying, "No, we're going to stay public." (laughing) >> Wait, guys, are you saying Michael, after he gets all this money from VMware that it will help them go public, he's not going to sell off VMware or get rid of that, right? >> Well that's a joke that he would sell VMware, I mean-- >> Unless the cash is going to be good? >> No, he won't do it. >> I don't think it'll happen. I mean, maybe some day he sells some of the portion of it but you're not going to give up control of it, why would he? It's throwing off so much cash. He's got Silver Lake as a private equity company, they understand this inside and out. I mean this transaction goes down in history as one of the greatest trades ever. >> Yeah. >> Let me ask you guys a question, because I think is one we brought up in the interview because at that time, the pundits, we were actually right on this deal. We were very bullish on it, and we actually analyzed it. You guys did a good job at Wikibon and we on theCUBE pretty much laid out what happened. He executed it, we put the risks out there, but at the time people were saying, "This is a bad deal, EMC." The current state of IT at that time looked like it was dismal but the market forces that changed were cloud, and so what were those sideways impact points that no one understood, that really helped him lift this up? What's your thoughts, Dave, on that? >> First of all the desktop business did way better than anybody thought it would, which is amazing and actually EMC did pretty poorly for a while and so that was kind of a head fake. And then as we knew, VMware crushed it and crushed it even more than anybody expected so that threw off so much cash they were able to deliver, they did Pivotal, they did a Pivotal IPO, sold some software assets. I mean basically Michael Dell and his team did everything they said they said they were going to do and it's worked out, as he said today, even better than they possibly thought. >> Well and the commentary I'd give here is when the acquisition of EMC by Dell happened, the big turn we had is the impact of cloud and we said, "Well, okay they've got VMware over there "and they've got Pivotal but Dell's "just going to be a boring infrastructure company "with server, network and storage." The message that we heard at Dell World and maturing even more here is that this portfolio of families. Yes, VMware's a big piece of it, NSX and the networking, but Pivotal with PKS, all of those tie in to what's Dell's selling. Every time they're selling VxRail, you know that has a big VMware piece. They do the networking piece that extends across multi clouds, so Dell has a much better multi cloud story than I expected them to have when they bought EMC. >> But now, VMware hides a lot of warts. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Absolutely. >> Let's be honest about that. >> What are they? >> Okay. I still think the client business is exposed. I mean as great as it is, you got to gain share in that business if you want to keep winning, number one. Number two is, the big question I have is can the core of Dell EMC continue to innovate or will it just make incremental improvements, have to do acquisitions to do innovation, inorganic acquisitions, and end up with more stovepipes? That's always been, Stu used to work there, that was always EMC's biggest challenge. Jeff Clark came in and said, "Okay, we're going to rationalize the portfolio." That has backlash as customer's say, "Well wait a minute, does that mean "you're not going to support my products?" No, no, we're going to support your products. So they've got to continue to innovate. As I say, VMware, because of how much cash it throws off, it's 50% of the company's profits, hides a lot of those exposures. >> And if VMware takes a turn, if market conditions change, the debt looming is exposed so again, the game's not over for Dell. He can see the finish line, but. (laughing) >> Buy low, sell high, guess who's selling right now? >> So a lot of financial impact, continued innovation but at the end of the day, guys, this is all about impacting customer's businesses. Not just from we've got to enable them to be successful in this multi cloud era, that's the norm today. They need to facilitate successful digital transformations, business outcomes, but they also have VMware, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, great power to help customer's transform their cultures. I'd love to get perspective from you guys because I love the voice to the customer, what are some of your favorite Dell EMC, VMware, partner, customer stories that you've heard the last couple days that really articulate the value of this financial successful company that they're achieving? >> Well the first thing I'll say before we get to the customer stories is on your point about what VMware's doing, is they're a technology, Robin Matlock, the CMO was on theCUBE talking about they're a technology company, they have the hands on labs, they're a very geeky audience, which we love. But they have to get leadership on the product side, they got to maintain the R and D, they got to have best in class technical products that actually are relevant. You look at companies like Tintri that went bankrupt, great technology, cul-de-sac market. There's no market there, the world's going cloud. So to me VMware has to start pumping out really strong products and technologies that the customer's are going to buy, right? (laughing) >> In conjunction with the customer to help co-develop what the customer's need. >> So I was talking to a customer and he said, "Look, I'm 10 years behind where the cloud guys are "with Amazon so all I want is VMware "to make my life easier, continue to cut my costs. "I like the way I'm operating, "I just get constant pressure to cut cost, "so if they keep doing that, I'm going to stay with them "for a long, long time." Pete Townsend said it best, companies like VMware, Dell EMC, they move at the speed of the CIO and as long as they can move at the speed of the CIO, I've said this a million times, the rich get richer and it's why competent management that led by founders like Larry Ellison, like Michael Dell, continue to do well in this industry. >> And Andy Jassy technically, I would say, a found of AWS because he started it. >> Absolutely. >> A key, the other thing I would also say from a customer, we hear a lot of customer, I won't name names because a lot of our data's in hallway conversations and at night when we go out and get the real stories. On theCUBE it's mostly, oh we've been very successful at VM, we use virtualization, blah, blah, blah and it's an IT story, but the customers in the hallways that are off the record are saying essentially this, I'm paraphrasing, look it, we have an operation to run. I love this cloud stuff and I'd love to just blink my fingers and be in the cloud and just get rid of all this and operate at a level of cloud native, I just can't. I can't get there. They see Amazon's relationship with VMware as a bridge to the future and takes away a lot of cognitive dissonance around the feelings around VMware's lack of cloud, if you will. In this case, now that's satisfied with the AWS deal and they're focused on operations on premises and how to get their app more closed, like modernize so a lot of the blocking and tackling of the customer is I got virtualization and that's great but I don't want to miss out on the next lever of innovation. Okay, I'm looking at it going slow but no one's instantly migrating to the cloud. >> No way, no way. >> They're either born in the cloud or you're on migration schedules now, really evaluating the financial impact, economic impact, headcount impact of cloud. That's the reality of the cloud. >> You got to throw a flag on some of that messaging of how easy it is to migrate. I mean it's just not that easy. I've talked to customers that said, "Well we started it and we just kind of gave up. "There was no point in it. "The new stuff we're going to do in the cloud, "but we're not going to migrate all of our apps to the cloud, "it just makes no sense, there's no business case for it." >> This is where NSX and containers and Kubernetes bet is big, I think, I think if NSX can connect the clouds with some sort of interoperable layer for whatever workloads are going to move on either Amazon or the clouds, that's good. If they want to get the developers off virtualization, into a new drug, if you will, it's going to be services, micro services, Kubernetes because you can throw containers around those old workloads, modernize with the new stuff without killing the old and Stu and I heard this clear at the CNCF and the Lennox Foundation, that this has changed the mindset because you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. You can bring in the new, containerize the old and manage on your speed of the CIO. >> And that's Amazon's bet isn't it? I mean, look, even Sanjay even said, if you go back five, six years, the original reinvent that was sweep the floor, bring it all into the cloud? I think that's in Amazon's DNA. I mean ultimately that's their vision. That's what they want to have happen and the way they get there is how you just described it, John. >> That's where this partnership between Amazon and VMware is so important because, right, Amazon has a lot of the developers but needs to be able to get deeper into the enterprise and VMware, starting to make some progress with the developers, they've got a code initiative, they've got all of these cool projects that they announced with everything from server less and Kubernetes and many others, Edge going to be a key use case there but you know, VMware is not, this is not the developer show. Most of the conversations that I had with customers, we're talking IT things, I mean customers doing some cool things but it's about simplifying in my environment, it's about helping operations. Most of the conversations are not about this cool new micro services building these things out. >> Cisco really is the only legacy, traditional enterprise company that's crushing developers. You give IBM some chops, too, but I wouldn't say they're crushing it. We saw that at Cisco Live, Cisco is doing a phenomenal job with developers. >> Well the thing about the cloud, one thing I've been pointing out, observation that I have is if you look at the future of the cloud and you can look for metaphors and/or real examples, I think Amazon Web Services, obviously we know them well but Google Cloud to me is a picture of the future. Not in the sense of what they have for the customer's today it's the way they've run their business from day one. They have developers and they have SREs, Site Reliability Engineers. This VMworld community is going down two paths. Developers are going to be rapidly iterating on real apps and operators who are going to be running systems. That's network storage, all integrated. That's like an SRE at Google. Google's running massive scale and they perfected it, hence Kubernetes, hence some of the tools coming in to services like Istio and things that we're seeing in the Lennox Foundation. To me that's the future model, it's an operator and set of developers. Whoever can make that easy, completely seamless, is the winner of it all. >> And the linchpin, a linchpin, maybe not the linchpin, but a linchpin is still the database, right? We've seen that with Oracle. Why is Amazon going so hard after the database? I mean it's blatantly obvious what their strategy is. >> Database is the hill that everyone is trying to take down. Capture the hill, you get the high ground with the database. >> Come on Dave, when you used to do the financial models of how much money is spent by the enterprise, that database was a big chunk. We've seen the erosion of lots of licensing out there. When I talked to Microsoft, they're like, pushing a lot of open source, they're going to cloud. Microsoft licensing isn't as much. VMware licensing is something that customers would like to shrink over time but database is even bigger. >> It's a strategic fulcrum, obviously Oracle has it. Microsoft clearly has it with Sequel Server. IBM, a big part of IBM's success to this day, is DB2 running on mainframe. (laughing) So Amazon wants a piece of that action, they understand to be a major player in this business you have to have database infrastructure. >> I mean costs are going down, it's going to come down to economics. End of the day the operating models as I said, some things about DB2 on mainframe, the bottom line's going to come down to when the cost numbers to run at the value and cost expense involved in running the tech that's going to be the ultimate way that things are either going to be cleared out or replaced or expanded so the bottom line is it's going to be a cost equation at that level and then the upside's going to be revenue. >> And just a great thing for VMware, since they don't own the application, when they do things like RDS in their environment they are freeing up dollars that customers are then going to be more likely to want to spend with VMware. >> Great point. I want to make real quick, three things we've been watching this week. Is the Amazon VMware deal a one way trip to the cloud? I think it's clear not in the near term, anyway. And the second is what about the edge? The edge to me is all about data, it's like the wild, wild west. It's very unclear that there's a winner there but there's a new type of cloud emerging. And three is the Dell structure. We asked Pat, we asked VMware Ray O'Farrell, we asked Michael, if that 11 billion dollar special dividend was going to impact VMware's ability to fund it's future? Consistent answer there, no. You know, we'll see, we'll see. >> I mean what are they going to say? Yeah, that really limits my ability to buy companies, on theCUBE? No, that's the messaging so of course, 11 billion dollars gone means they can't do MNA with the cash, that means, yeah it's going to be R and D, what does that mean? Investment, so I think the answer is yes it does limit them a little bit. >> Has to. >> It's cash going out the door. >> But VMware just spent, it is rumored, around 500 million dollars for CloudHealth Technologies, Dave, Boston based company, with about 200 people You know, hey, have a billion-- >> They're going to put back a dividend anyway and do stock buybacks but I'm not sure 11 out of the 13 billion is what they would choose to do that for, so going forward, we'll see how it all plays out, obviously. I think, Floyer wrote about this, more has to go toward VMware, less toward-- >> I think it's the other way around. >> Well I think it's really good that we have one more day tomorrow. >> I think it's a one way trip to the cloud in a lot of instances, I think a lot of VMware customers are going to go off virtualization, not hypervisor and end up being in the cloud most of the business. It's going to be interesting, I think the size of customers that Amazon has now, versus VMware is what? Does VMware have more customers than Amazon right now? >> It's pretty close, right? VMware's 500,000? >> 500,000 for VMware. >> And Amazon's-- >> Over a million. >> Are they over a million, really? >> Yeah. >> A lot of smaller customers, but still. >> Yeah. >> Customer's a customer. >> But VMware might have bigger customers, see that's-- >> No question the ASP is higher, but-- >> It's not conflict, I'm just thinking like cloud is natural, right? Why wouldn't you want to use the cloud, right? I mean. >> So guys-- >> So the debate continues. >> Exactly. Good news is we have more time tomorrow to talk more about all this innovation as well as see more real world examples of how VMware is going to be enabling tech for good. Guys, thanks so much for your commentary and letting me be a part of the wrap. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Looking forward to day three tomorrow. For Dave, Stu and John, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching our coverage of day two VMworld 2018. We look forward to you joining us tomorrow, for day three. (upbeat techno music)