>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for a wrap up on day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE coverage at Dell EMC World, our eighth year covering EMC World Now, first year covering Dell EMC World. It's part of the big story of Dell and EMC combining entities, forming Dell Technologies, all those brands. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-hosts this week, Paul Gillin and Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Guys, great week, I thought I'd be wrecked at this point. But, I mean, a lot of energy here but we heard every story. We heard all the commentary, we heard the EMC people trotting in, about their customer references. We hear the executives on message. Bottom line, let's translate it for everybody. (laughing) All the messaging, pretty tight. >> Yes. >> All singing the same songs. My take away real quickly on messaging, they want to portray that this is all good. Everything's fine. No icebergs ahead. We are going to help customers try to move from speeds to feeds, a bigger message. Not getting there yet. Still speeds and feeds. 14 (mumbles), 14G, that's kind of the high level, thoughts? >> This company wants to dominate. I mean, what we heard again and again these last few days is number one, number one. They want to own the top market share in every market in which they play, and they have a broad array of products to do that. They have a huge mix of products, maybe too many products, but with some overlap, but that's okay, but they clearly are trying to blanket or carpet bomb those markets where they think they can win. Interestingly, there are some markets like big data, like software or cloud infrastructure where they are choosing not to be a big player, and that's okay too. It means they are focused. >> John: Keith, your thoughts. >> So, again, I agree with you, tight marketing. They wanted to get out this message. I think if the present analysts get together at the beginning, they emphasized 310 analysts, from analysts and press, from all over the world. They get out the message. They get these guys and gals in here to cover that message that Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, is the leader in this space. You know what? When big mergers like this happen, I can't think of one that happened well. They are usually rocky to begin with. We haven't seen those rocks at the beginning. We haven't see that at the show. It seems like the messaging has been consistent, the customers more or less get it, and that we can't detect the chinks in the armor, so I think they did a great job of getting that out there, and portraying the stress of the brand, and throughout the show. It was a great show for them. >> They have a good story. Their story better together, obviously that's the whole theme. My impression is, in weaving through all the messaging, is generally, authentically the people are pretty happy with it. I think EMC people have been trying to break out of this, we're a storage company, you know, and I won't say they had a little bit of VMware envy, but VM World events were always different than the EMC World, so those culture clashes weren't necessarily too divergent, but different. You had storage guys, and you had VMware developers, right, so I think EMC was always trying to break out and be bigger, and just couldn't get there. Dell wanted to be more enterprise, right, so I think the two together actually is better, in my opinion. Now will it work? I still think your post is still open. They merged for the right reasons, but look it, they're not done. They got a boat-load of work to do. >> I think they're aware, to Keith's point, they are aware that history is against them, that mega mergers don't work, never have worked in this industry, and so that creates a lot of pressure to make this one work, and the good thing about that for both companies is that they're aware of what went wrong in the past. I mean, we had Howard Elias on this show the first day. Howard Elias went through two of the worst tech mega mergers in history with Compaq Digital and HP Compaq, knows where a lot of those landmines are, so they seemed hyper aware of getting everyone on message, getting everyone talking positively about synergy, and as you said John, the language was consistent from the start. >> Alright, I want to ask you guys a pointed question on that point cause it kind of brings out the next question. Management team, do they have the chops, because, to your point, history's against them, okay? We sat down with Michael Dell, founder, lead entrepreneur, still at the helm. He's a billionaire. They're private, so no shot clock on the public markets. Marius Haas, he's a pro. Howard Elias, a pro. Goulden, he does his thing. On and on and on. I think they got a pretty deep bench. I mean, your thoughts guys? >> So, let's think about that. How many bad mergers has EMC gone through? Data domain >> Paul: Home run. >> Incredible. >> Paul: Home run. >> Home run. >> Paul: DSSD. >> DSSD, well, not so much, but that wasn't really that big of a merger. >> They kind of cleaned that up pretty quickly. >> Yeah, they did, what doesn't work they get it out quick, so great management team understands the complexities of mergers. VMware merger, or acquisition, probably one of the best in the history of tech, so the management team has the chops to understand where the value is added, extract that value, and expand it. >> That's a great point. And they know when to leave stuff alone too. >> John: Yeah, engineering lead but they're also, because we heard Jeff Boudreau on talking about the storage challenges. He's like, we know what to do, we took the lumps trying to, late to the game on Flash, we're not going to be late to the game in these other areas, and he is very hyper focused. But the other thing that we didn't talk about is that EMC has just been an impeccably, credible sales organization. They know how to sell, they know how to motivate sales people. They know how to tell the tell the enterprise sales motion, which is the biggest challenge in today's industry. Every company I talked to, startup to growing IPO is we need better enterprise sales. Look at Google. Look what they're doing in the cloud. They are struggling because they have great tech and horrid sales people. They are hiring young people doing phone work. Enterprise sales is a tricky game. >> Arguably the best enterprise sales force on the planet was EMC. I mean, these are the guys who would get on a plane at midnight, would charter a plane at midnight, to get to the customer's site to fix a problem, and no other company does it like that, and Dell has a lot to learn from that. If Dell can really take that knowledge and that culture and absorb it into their own enterprise sales force, they are going to have huge opportunity with their server division. >> I want to take a minute just to thank our sponsors for their awesome CUBE coverage. You guys did great. Dell EMC, Toshiba, Virtustream, Cisco, Dato, Nutanix, Druva, and VMware. Thanks to your support, we had two CUBEs covering VM World, 20 plus videos a day, for 3 straight days. All that's on youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, siliconangle.com for all the journalism and reporting. Wikibon.com for all the great research, and also a shoutout to Keith at @CTOAdvisor. Check him out on Twitter, always part of the conversation, super influential. Guys, great job this week. Just high level marks. My take away? Hyper converge, big time focus on these guys. VMware is the glue, Hybrid Cloud, and they're defensively using Pivotal to hold the line on Amazon, so thoughts on that point? I see you rolling your eyes. >> I just got out with James Watters, the SVP within that business unit. Pivotal is a key part of this. You know Michael has stressed on theCUBE, on Twitter, how important Pivotal is to their long term success. One of Dell's challenges, Dell EMC's, and this is not just Dell EMC, it's infrastructure companies throughout the landscape, is getting out of that conversation with their VP of infrastructure, getting into the offices of the CIOs, COs, CMO, and having these business conversations, and it's going to take a Pivotal type of solution to get that done. I thought Michael made a very great point that that white glove services, that's basically their service organization, is basically the older EMC services organization that's used to getting on a flight, solving the problem. Whatever the original statement at work was, they are willing to tear that up, and get down, get dirty, and get that done. They need to translate that >> The question for you then is this, without Pivotal, they have no play for the app developers? >> Keith: None. >> Amazon would mop that up and they'd have no positions, so I would say it is certainly a placeholder, a good one, I'm not going to deny that. The question is how big is that market for them. Can they get there, can they hold the line on Pivotal and bring in some resources and cavalry to keep that going, thoughts? >> This is where VMware comes into play. VMware has the relationship with the software layer at least, and they have a great story to tell. They need to get in front of the right people and tell that story, that CrossCloud story of being able to develop using CF and then move that to any cloud using NSX. Great story, but John, to your point, they have to get into the right rooms and have the right conversations, >> Yeah. >> Keith: That's a tough thing to do. >> I also got to give them some time. I mean, this merger happened eight months ago. I think it's pretty remarkable what they have pulled off here in such a short time, and to think about the developers are probably not their first priority right now. >> Alright, so we are going to do the metadata segment of our wrap up, which I just made up since it's such a good name, metadata, in the spirit of surveillance. What metadata can you pull out of your interviews, guys, that's a tea leaf that we could read and just nuance points, I'll start. Pat Gelsinger talked about Pivotal sharing, in between the conversations kind of weaved in, yeah, we had to spin out Pivotal, but I could almost see it in his eyes, he didn't say it specifically, but he's like, we shouldn't have sold it, right? And they had to because he said he had to work on the foundational stuff, get NSX done, get that right, but you can almost see that now as, I'd like to bring that back in, although a separate company. To me, I find that a very interesting data point, that that actually makes a lot of sense to your point about VMware. That might be an interesting combination. Why take Pivotal public, roll it into VMware. >> Yeah, I think that is going to be a interesting space to watch over the next few months. VMware and Pivotal have started to once again come back together with solutions. This NSX, CrossCloud talk makes it very compelling. It's hard to predict Dell EMC being relevant long term. They understand the value short term. They have a short rope to take advantage of this cross selling between the Dell and EMC customer. They can grow this business, get revenue short term, but there will be a cliff where they need to make that transition. Cisco is trying to make that transition into a services company, a software company, and it's hard to turn down one knob and turn the other one up. We'll see if Pat, Michael Dell, and the team have the chops to get it done. >> Cisco has to endure the public markets while they are doing that, which is one advantage Dell has. >> Data point that you can extract that you take away from this? >> Synergy, synergy. I mean when two companies this big come together, you're looking at a lot of product line overlap. I came out of this, though, thinking that there really isn't that much product line overlap. You've got a company that's strong in the mid market, with the small companies, a company that's strong in the enterprise, storage, servers, not a lot of overlap there. The big question for me, so I think the synergy question is this merger makes sense from that perspective, and the big question is software, what are they going to do with those software assets, and to your point, the future is going to be, software defined everything, and that's not a story they're telling yet. >> Keith, extracted insight that you observed that was notable that you kind of picked out of the pile of the interviews. Anything notable to you? Something obscure that made you go, wow I didn't know that, oh that's a good piece of the puzzle to put together. >> You know what, just the scale of, you look at the merger, 57 billion dollars, and on paper you are like, okay that's interesting, but a lot of the numbers coming out, you know, we talked to the senior VP of marketing and he says, you know, my guys are making bank, actually that's to paraphrase him. You said that John, that they are making bank, and one of the things that I worried about was the culture, the sales culture between Dell and EMC. Dell sales culture, very web based, very, you know I had a Dell rep and there was not an awful lot of value add, EMC >> Paul: Value add. >> The value add, and those guys earned their money, and bringing those two together and making sure that customers don't miss a beat and still get that EMC value, but Dell is able to maintain that same cost structure, I thought that was a really complicated thing to do. It seems like they are executing really well on that, and I thought from a customer's perspective, you want your supplier to make money and you want it to not be too disruptive, but you know, you want to see some value. >> Great point, that was one of highlights of my take aways, Marius Haas' interview around sales and comp and structure. They are used to a lot of bank, those sales guys, and now it's like, hey we're going to give you a haircut, what? I was about to make a million dollars on commissions this year. >> This merger will not work unless the sales organization is in sync. >> Other notables for me, just that jumped out at me, that kind of made me go, that amplifies a point, that's memorable is Michael Dell's interview hits home the point of entrepreneur founder, lead guy, and there's only three left in the industry, Ellison, Dell, and Bezos, in my mind that are billionaires that are actively, not mailing it in, they are actively driving their business, have a great ethos and culture that is creating durability. I find that the key point for me, that was a moment. I think he does sell Pivotal a little too much, which gives me a little red flag, like hmm, why is he pushing Pivotal so much, what is he hiding, but that's a different story. Michael Dell, founder. Gelsinger shared some personal commentary around his personal life. 2016 was the hardest year of his life. >> Keith: That was a mean story. >> Personal and business. Almost got fired. Remember last year? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelsinger, you're fired. So, he had a tough year, now he's kicking ass, taking names, evaluation's on the rise. That jumped out at me. And finally, the little nuance in this merger is the alliance opportunity. Dell had the Intel, wintel, Microsoft relationships from day one, that history, Intel was on stage. EMC's had it, but not at the deep level that Dell did. So I see the alliance teams really grooving here, so that's going to impact channel marketing, SIs. I think you are going to see a massive power base, to your scale point, around alliances in the industry, the ecosystem. It's either going to blow up big or blow up bad. Either way its high octane power, Intel. >> Keith: It is a big bet. >> It's a big bet. Those are my points. Anything that jumped out at you, final thoughts, interviews? >> Jeff Townsend threw off an interesting statistic, 70% of the traffic on the internet will be video by 2020. I never heard that one before, but that has some pretty interesting implications for how infrastructure has to manage it. >> Yeah, great for our business. We're doing video right now. Keith, anything that jumped out at you, anything else? >> The scale of this show compared to, I've been at Dell World, I've been to EMC World. The energy is different here. I can say that for sure, from the EMC Worlds and the Dell Worlds that I've been at. Customers, I think, are wide eyed. I've been to plenty of VM World's. It doesn't quite have the flavor of a VM World, but I think customers are starting to understand the scale of Dell EMC, the entire portfolio. You walk the show floor, you're like, wow I didn't know >> John: The relevance has increased. >> Just little bits of this larger Dell technologies that customers are picking up on, that they're keying on that there's value there. >> The 800 pound gorilla, the very relevant impact, people are taking notice. >> If you are a one product Dell customer or a one product EMC customer and you are coming to the show for the first time, I think you're a little bit wowed. >> Alright, guys, great job. Keith, great to have you host theCUBE. Great job, as always. Really appreciate you bringing the commentary to theCUBE. Great stuff. >> Always great being here. >> Paul, great editorial, great insight, great questions. Great to work with you guys. Great to the team. Thanks to our sponsors. Go to siliconangle.com, wikibon.com, and go to youtube.com/siliconeangle and check out all the videos and the playlists, more coverage, great. Thanks for watching our special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. See you next time.