(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC, and now Dell Technologies, has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocketship PC company, to a middling enterprise player, forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech, i.e., VMware. And now is a $100 billion dollar giant with a low-margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. The financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book "Play Nice But Win," in a captivating chapter called "Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue." Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number-one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin-out of VMware from Dell, and a massive wealth-creation milestone, pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell, and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the President of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle, and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott, who's the Senior Vice President of Marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on APEX, which is Dell's as-a-Service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, that we're going to see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jenn Saavedra, who's Dell's Chief Human Resource Officer, about hybrid work, and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company, and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE, and one of our partners, ETR, has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary Net Score methodology on the vertical axis, that's a measure of spending velocity, and on the x-axis is overlap or pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell's CSG products, laptops in particular, are dominant on both the x and the y dimensions. CSG is the Client Solutions Group, and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue, and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business, that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the Infrastructure Solutions Group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is its, as I said, its most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business, as well as the Dell server business, and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server, and its storage sectors. But the nuance is, look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated Net Score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business, in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is, we put a box around VMware, and it's prominently present on both the x and y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high-margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been, had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives for Michael Dell were just too attractive, and it's unlikely that a spin-in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials, to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over $100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue, and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate, for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company, primarily, its margins are low, with operating income 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D, but because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash-flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's APEX, and of course its hardware maintenance business, is recurring revenue, and that is only about 5 billion in revenue, and it's growing at 8% annually. Now, having said that, it's the equivalent of ServiceNow's total revenue. Of course, ServiceNow has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash-flow margin, and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet, and an $85 billion market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment, with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story. And hence it's conservative, and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing, thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al., they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction, to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation, is now down to 16 billion, and it has $7 billion in cash on the balance sheet. So a dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So, pretty good picture. But Dell, a $100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion, or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc., Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple that's over 3x, about 3.3x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes, and no. Dell's performance, relative to its peers in the market, is very strong. It's winning, and has an extremely adept go-to-market machine, but its lack of software content and its margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers, and what might that look like, going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world. And it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely HP, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. and HPE, and IBM, which has had an abysmal decade from a performance standpoint, and has had to shrink to grow again, and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company, which makes a cultural difference, in our view. And it's actually comfortable with a low-margin software-light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that, and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, has a much better chance of doing well at 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. APEX is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now, remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-Service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers, and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing, because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-Service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead. Specifically, Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, likes to say, it's not a zero-sum game. What he means by that is, just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds. What we call supercloud. And that's Dell's strategy, to take advantage of public cloud capex, and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds, and out to the edge. That's ambitious, and technically it's nontrivial. But listen to Dell's Vice Chairman and Co-COO, Jeff Clarke, explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also, technology and business models are tied together, and an enabler. >> That's right. >> If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying, and I summarize it the following way: if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Furrier called it a "business operating system." Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system, or cloud operating environment, to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale capex. Now, is it really game over, as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? Uh, (sucks in breath) I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course, it's got to be funded. And that's going to take time, and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So, as often is the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cybersecurity as an adjacency, and of course, edge and telco/5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher-margin software content, it can thrive with a lower-margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers, and maybe through tuck-in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here, "Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem," because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if APEX is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And its ecosystem today is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The Snowflake deal is an example of up-the-stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship, and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live in a data-heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of APEX. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today, in its early days. The point is, with Dell's go-to-market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, supercloud player that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate, and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable Infrastructure-as-a-Service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly evolve. And of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company, to a middling enterprise player forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i.e VMware. And now is a 100 billion dollar giant with a low margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. Financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC, of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book, "Play Nice But Win." In a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue, Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And, of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell in a massive wealth creation milestone. Pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau who's the president of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott who is the senior vice president of marketing will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as-a-service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cyber Security Awareness month that we're going to see if Sam has anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jennifer Saavedra who's Dell's chief human resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that will introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary net score methodology in the vertical axis. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the x-axis is overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business and it is, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, SISCO would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business is an industry-leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated net score and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a 100 mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over a 100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company primarily, its margins are low with operating income 10% of revenue and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement, before the spin its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive, Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's Apex and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of Service now's total revenue. Of course, Service now has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion dollar market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now, Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story, and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for $67 billion and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. But Dell, a 100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc, Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over 3X, about 3.3X currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine. But it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component, since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application, in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures. Namely HP which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc and HPE, and IBM which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company which makes a cultural difference, in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion is a much better chance of doing well at a 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake. But Dell has a larger portfolio so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say, it's not a zero sum game. What he means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge. That's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and co-COO Jeff Clarke explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> No, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way. If we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Yeah, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition but this vision will take years to play out, and of course it's got to be funded. And now it's going to take time and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and, of course, edge at Telco slash 5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution. But I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of Apex. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is, with Dell's go to market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, super cloud player, that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform. Its programmable infrastructure as-a-service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And, of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (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)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman and we're going to take a look back at ten years of theCUBE at VMworld and look forward to see what's coming next. So, as I say, this is theCUBE's 10th year at VMworld, that's VMworld, of course 2019. And Stu, if you think about the VMware of 2010, when we first started, it's a dramatically different VMware today. Let's look back at 2010. Paul Maritz was running VMware, he set forth the vision of the software mainframe last decade, well, what does that mean, software mainframe? Highly integrated hardware and software that can run any workload, any application. That is the gauntlet that Tucci and Maritz laid down. A lot of people were skeptical. Fast forward 10 years, they've actually achieved that, I mean, essentially, it is the standard operating system, if you will, in the data center, but there's a lot more to the story. But you remember, at the time, Stu, it was a very complex environment. When something went wrong, you needed guys with lab coats to come in a figure out, you know, what was going on, the I/O blender problem, storage was a real bottleneck. So let's talk about that. >> Yeah, Dave, so much. First of all, hard to believe, 10 years, you know, think back to 2010, it was my first time being at VMworld, even though I started working with VMware back in 2002 when it was like, you know, 100, 150 person company. Remember when vMotion first launched. But that first show that we went to, Dave, was in San Francisco, and most people didn't know theCUBE, heck, we were still figuring out exactly what theCUBE will be, and we brought in a bunch of our friends that were doing the CloudCamps in Silicon Valley, and we were talking about cloud. And there was this gap that we saw between, as you said, the challenges we were solving with VMware, which was fixing infrastructure, storage and networking had been broken, and how were we going to make sure that that worked in a virtual environment even better? But there were the early thought leaders that were talking about that future of cloud computing, which, today in 2019, looks like we had a good prediction. And, of course, where VMware is today, we're talking all about cloud. So, so many different eras and pieces and research that we did, you know, hundreds and hundreds of interviews that we've done at that show, it's definitely been one of our flagship shows and one of our favorite for guests and ecosystems and so much that we got to dig into at that event. >> So Tod Nielsen, who was the President and probably COO at the time, talked about the ecosystem. For every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 was spent on the ecosystem. VMware was a very, even though they were owned by EMC, they were very, sort of, neutral to the ecosystem. You had what we called the storage cartel. It was certainly EMC, you know, but NetApp was right there, IBM, HP, you know, Dell had purchased EqualLogic, HDS was kind of there as well. These companies were the first to get the APIs, you remember, the VASA VAAI. So, we pushed VMware at the time, saying, "Look, you guys got a storage problem." And they said, "Well, we don't have a lot of resources, "we're going to let the ecosystem solve the problem, "here's an API, you guys figure it out." Which they largely did, but it took a long time. The other big thing you had in that 2010 timeframe was storage consolidation. You had the bidding war between Dell and HP, which, ultimately, HP, under Donatelli's leadership, won that bidding war and acquired 3PAR >> Bought 3PAR >> for 2.4, 2.5 billion, it forced Dell to buy Compellent. Subsequently, Isilon was acquired, Data Domain was acquired by EMC. So you had this consolidation of the early 2000s storage startups and then, still, storage was a major problem back then. But the big sea change was, two things happened in 2012. Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO, and VMware acquired Nicira, beat Cisco to the punch. Why did that change everything? >> Yeah, Dave, we talked a lot about storage, and how, you know, the ecosystem was changing this. Nicira, we knew it was a big deal. When I, you know, I talked to my friends that were deep in networking and I talked with Nicira and was majorly impressed with what they were doing. But this heterogeneous, and what now is the multi-cloud environment, networking needs to play a critical role. You see, you know, Cisco has clearly targeted that environment and Nicira had some really smart people and some really fundamental technology underneath that would allow networking to go just beyond the virtual machine where it was before, the vSwitch. So, you know, that expansion, and actually, it took a little while for, you know, the Nicira acquisition to run into NSX and that product to gain maturity, and to gain adoption, but as Pat Gelsinger has said more recently, it is one of the key drivers for VMware, getting them beyond just the hypervisor itself. So, so much is happening, I mean, Dave, I look at the swings as, you know, you said, VMware didn't have enough resources, they were going to let the ecosystem do it. In the early days, it was, I chose a server provider, and, oh yeah, VMware kind of plays in it. So VMware really grew how much control and how much power they had in buying decisions, and we're going through more of that change now, as to, as they're partnering we're going to talk about AWS and Microsoft and Google as those pieces. And Pat driving that ship. The analogy we gave is, could Pat do for VMware what Intel had done for a long time, which is, you have a big ecosystem, and you slowly start eating away at some of that other functionality without alienating that ecosystem. And to Pat's credit, it's actually something that he's done quite well. There's been some ebbs and flows, there's pushback in the community. Those that remember things like the "vTax," when they rolled that out. You know, there's certain features that the rolled into the hypervisor that have had parts of the ecosystem gripe a little bit, but for the most part, VMware is still playing well with the ecosystem, even though, after the Dell acquisition of EMC, you know, we'll talk about this some more, that relationship between Dell and VMware is tighter than it ever was in the EMC days. >> So that led to the Software-Defined Data Center, which was the big, sort of, vision. VMware wanted to do to storage and networking what it had done to compute. And this started to set up the tension between with VMware and Cisco, which, you know, lives on today. The other big mega trend, of course, was flash storage, which was coming into play. In many ways, that whole API gymnastics was a Band-Aid. But the other big piece if it is Pat Gelsinger was much more willing to integrate, you know, some of the EMC technologies, and now Dell technologies, into the VMware sort of stack. >> Right, so Dave, you talked about all of those APIs, Vvols was a huge multi-year initiative that VMware worked on and all of the big storage players were talking about how that would allow them to deeply integrate and make it virtualization-aware storage your so tense we come out on their own and try to do that. But if you look at it, VVols was also what enabled VMware to do vSAN, and that is a little bit of how they can try to erode in some of the storage piece, because vSAN today has the most customers in the hyperconverged infrastructure space, and is keeping to grow, but they still have those storage partnerships. It didn't eliminate it, but it definitely adds some tension. >> Well it is important, because under EMC's ownership it was sort of a let 1,000 flowers bloom sort of strategy, and today you see Jeff Clarke coming in and consolidating the portfolios, saying, "Look, let's let VMware go hard with vSAN." So you're seeing a different type of governance structure, we'll talk about that. 2013 was a big year. That's the year they brought in Sanjay Poonen, they did the AirWatch acquisition, they took on what the industry called VDI, what VMware called EUC, End-User Computing. Citrix was the dominant player in that space, VMware was fumbling, frankly. Sanjay Poonen came in, the AirWatch acquisition, now, VMware is a leader in that space, so that was big. The other big thing in 2013 was, you know, the famous comment by Carl Eschenbach about, you know, if we lose to the book seller, we'll all lose. VMware came out with it's cloud strategy, vCloud Air. I was there with the Wall Street analyst that day listening to Pat explain that and we were talking afterwards to a number of the Wall Street analysts saying, "This really doesn't make a lot of sense." And then they sort of retreated on that, saying that it was going to be an accelerant, and it just was basically a failed cloud strategy. >> And Dave, that 2013 is also when they spun out Cloud Foundry and founded Pivital. So, you know, this is where they took some of the pieces from EMC, the Greenplum, and they took some of the pieces from VMware, Spring and the Cloud Foundation, and put those together. As we speak right now, there was just an SEC Filing that VMware might suck them back in. Where I look at that, back in 2013, there was a huge gap between what VMware was doing on the infrastructure side and what Cloud Foundry was doing on the application modernization standpoint, they had bought the Pivotal Labs piece to help people understand new programming models and everything along those lines. Today, in 2019, if you look at where VMware is going, the changes happening in containerization, the changes happening from the application down, they need to come together. The Achilles heel that I have seen from VMware for a long time is that VMware doesn't have enough a tie to or help build the applications. Microsoft owns the applications, Oracle owns the applications. You know, there are all the ISVs that own the applications, and Pivotal, if they bring that back into VMware it can help, but it made sense at the time to kind of spin that out because it wasn't synergies between them. >> It was what I called at the time a bunch of misfit toys. And so it was largely David Goulden's engineering of what they called The Federation. And now you're seeing some more engineering, financial engineering, of having VMware essentially buy another, you know, Dell Silver Lake asset, which, you know, drove the stock price up 77% in a day that the Dow dropped 800 points. So I guess that works, kind of funny money. The other big trend sort of in that mid-part of this decade, hyperconverged, you know, really hit. Nutanix, who was at one point a strong partner of both VMware and Dell, was sort of hitting its groove swing. Fast forward to 2019, different situation, Nutanix really doesn't have a presence there. You know, people are looking at going beyond hyperconverged. So there's sort of the VMware ecosystem, sort of friendly posture has changed, they point fingers at each other. VMware says, "Well, it's Nutanix's fault." Nutanix will say it's VMware's fault. >> Right, so Dave, I pointed out, the Achilles heel for VMware might be that they don't have the closest tie to the application, but their greatest strength is, really, they are really the data center operating system, if you will. When we wrote out our research on Server SAN was before vSAN had gotten launched. It was where Nutanix, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, you know, Pivot3, and a few others were early in that space, but we stated in our research, if Microsoft and VMware get serious about that space, they can dominate. And we've seen, VMware came in strong, they do work with their partnerships. Of course, Dell, with the VxRail is their largest solution, but all of the other server providers, you know, have offerings and can put those together. And Microsoft, just last year, they kind of rebranded some of the Azure Stack as HCI and they're going strong in that space. So, absolutely, you know, strong presence in the data center platform, and that's what they're extending into their hybrid and multi-cloud offering, the VMware Cloud Solutions. >> So I want to get to some of the trends today, but just real quick, let's go through some of this. So 2015 was the big announcement in the fall where Dell was acquiring EMC, so we entered, really, the Dell era of VMware ownership in 2016. And the other piece that happened, really 2016 in the fall, but it went GA 2017, was the announcement AWS and VMware as the preferred partnership. Yes, AWS had a partnership with IBM, they've subsequently >> VMware had a partnership >> Yeah, sorry, VMware has a partnership with IBM for their cloud, subsequently VMware has done deals with Google and Microsoft, so there's, we now have entered the multi-cloud hybrid world. VMware capitulated on cloud, smart move, cleaned up its cloud strategy, cleaned that AirWatch mess. AWS also capitulated on hybrid. It's a term that they would never use, they don't use it necessarily a lot today, but they recognize that On Prem is a viable portion of the marketplace. And so now we've entered this new era of cloud, hybrid cloud, containers is the other big trend. People said, "Containers are going to really hurt VMware." You know, the jury's still out on that, VMware sort of pushes back on that. >> And Dave, just to put a point on that, you know, everybody, including us, spent a lot of time looking at this VMware Cloud on AWS partnership, and what does it mean, especially, to the parent, you know, Dell? How do they make that environment? And you've pointed out, Dave, that while VMware gets in those environments and gives themselves a very strong cloud strategy, AWS is the key partner, but of course, as you said, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and all the server providers, we have a number of them including CenturyLink and Rackspace that they're partnering with, but we have to wait a little while before Amazon, when they announced their outpost solutions, VMware is a critical software piece, and you've got two flavors of the hardware. You can run the full AWS Stack, just like what they're running in their data center, but the alternative, of course, is VMware software running on Dell hardware. And we think that if VMware hadn't come in with a strong position with Amazon and their 600,000 customers, we're not sure that Amazon would have said, "Oh yeah, hey, you can run that same software stack "that you're running, but run some different hardware." So that's a good place for Dell to get in the environment, it helps kind of close out that story of VMware, Dell, and AWS and how the pieces fit together. >> Yeah, well so, by the way, earlier this week I privately mentioned to a Dell executive that one of the things I thought they should do was fold Pivotal into VMware. By the way, I think they should go further. I think they should look at RSA and Dell Boomi and SecureWorks, make VMware the mothership of software, and then really tie in Dell's hardware to VMware. That seems to me, Stu, the direction that they're going to try to gain an advantage on the balance of the ecosystem. I think VMware now is in a position of strength with, what, 5 or 600,000 customers. It feels like it's less ecosystem friendly than it used to be. >> Yeah, Dave, there's no doubt about it. HPE and IBM, who were two of the main companies that helped with VMware's ascendancy, do a lot of other things beyond VMware. Of course, IBM bought Red Hat, it is a key counterbalance to what VMware is doing in the multi-cloud. And Dave, to your point, absolutely, if you look at Dell's cloud strategy, they're number one offering is VMware, VMware cloud on Dell. Dell as the project dimension piece. All of these pieces do line up. I'll say, some of those pieces, absolutely, I would say, make sense to kind of pull in and shell together. I know one of the reasons they keep the security pieces at arm's length is just, you know, when something goes wrong in the security space, and it's not of the question of if, it's a question of when, they do have that arm's length to be able to keep that out and be able to remediate a little bit when something happens. >> So let's look at some of the things that we're following today. I think one of the big ones is, how will containers effect customer spending on VMware? We know people are concerned about the vTax. We also know that they're concerned about lock-in. And so, containers are this major force. Can VMware make containers a tailwind, or is it a headwind for them? >> So you look at all the acquisitions that they've made lately, Dave, CloudHealth is, from a management standpoint, in the public cloud. Heptio and Bitnami, targeting that cloud native space. Pair that with Cloud Foundry and you see, VMware and Pivotal together trying to go all-in on Kubernetes. So those 600,000 customers, VMware wants to be the group that educates you on containerization, Kubernetes, you know, how to build these new environments. For, you know, a lot of customers, it's attractive for them to just stay. "I have a relationship, "I have an enterprise licensing agreement, "I'm going to stay along with that." The question I would have is, if I want to do something in a modern way, is VMware really the best partner to choose from? Do they have the cost structure? A lot of these environments set up, you know, it's open source base, or I can work with my public cloud providers there, so why would I partner with VMware? Sure, they have a lot of smart people and they have expertise and we have a relationship, but what differentiates VMware, and is it worth paying for that licensing that they have, or will I look at alternatives? But as VMware grows their hybrid and multi-cloud deployments they absolutely are on the short list of, you know, strategic partners for most customers. >> The other big thing that we're watching is multi-cloud. I have said over and over that multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of multi-vendor. It's not necessarily, to date anyway, been a strategy of customers. Having said that, issues around security, governance, compliance have forced organizations and boards to say, "You know what, we need IT more involved, "let's make multi-cloud part of our strategy, "not only for governance and compliance "and making sure it adheres to the corporate edicts, "but also to put the right workload on the right cloud." So having some kind of strategy there is important. Who are the players there? Obviously VMware, I would say, right now, is the favorite because it's coming from a position of strength in the data center. Microsoft with it's software state, Cisco coming at it from a standpoint of network strength. Google, with Anthos, that announcement earlier this year, and, of course, Red Hat with IBM. Who's the company that I didn't mention in that list? >> Well, of course, you can't talk about cloud, Dave, without talking about AWS. So, as you stated before, they don't really want to talk about hybrid, hey, come on, multi-cloud, why would you do this? But any customer that has a multi-cloud environment, they've got AWS. And the VMware-AWS partnership is really interesting to watch. It will be, you know, where will Amazon grow in this environment as they find their customers are using multiple solutions? Amazon has lots of offerings to allow you leverage Kubernetes, but, for the most part, the messaging is still, "We are the best place for you, "if you do everything on us, "you're going to get better pricing "and all of these environments." But as you've said, Dave, we never get down to that homogeneous, you know, one vendor solution. It tends to be, you know, IT has always been this heterogeneous mess and you have different groups that purchase different things for different reasons, and we have not seen, yet, public cloud solving that for a lot of customers. If anything we often have many more silos in the clouds than we had in the data center before. >> Okay. Another big story that we're following, big trend, is the battle for networking. NSX, the software networking component, and then Cisco, who's got a combination of, obviously, hardware and software with ACI. You know, Stu, I got to say, Cisco a very impressive company. You know, 60+% market share, being able to hold that share for a long time. I've seen a lot of companies try to go up against Cisco. You know, the industry's littered with failures. It feels, however, like NSX is a disruptive force that's very hard for Cisco to deal with in a number of dimensions. We talked about multi-cloud, but networking in general. Cisco's still a major player, still, you know, owns the hardware infrastructure, obviously layering in its own software-defined strategy. But that seems to be a source of tension between the two companies. What's the customer perspective? >> Yeah, so first of all, Dave, Cisco, from a hardware perspective, is still going strong. There are some big competitors. Arista has been doing quite well into getting in, especially, a high performance, high speed environments, you know, Jayshree Ullal and that team, you know, very impressive public company that's doing quite well. >> Service providers that do really well there. >> Absolutely, but, absolutely, software is eating the world and it is impacting networking. Even when you look at Cisco's overall strategy, it is in the future. Cisco is not a networking company, they are a software company. The whole DevNet, you know, group that they have there is helping customers modernize, what we were talking about with Pivotal. Cisco is going there and helping customers create those new environments. But from a customer standpoint, they want simplicity. If my VMware is a big piece of my environment, I've probably started using NSX, NSX-T, some of these environments. As I go to my service providers, as I go to multi-cloud, that NSX piece inside my VMware cloud foundation starts to grow. I remember, Dave, a few years back, you know, Pat Gelsinger got up on a stage and was like, "This is the biggest collection of network administrators that we've ever seen!" And everybody's looking around and they're like, "Where? "We're virtualization people. "Oh, wait, just because we've got vNICs and vSwitches "and things like that." It still is a gap between kind of a hardcore networking people and the software state. But just like we see on storage, Dave, it's not like vSAN, despite it's thousands and thousands of customers, it is not the dominant player in storage. It's a big player, it's a great revenue stream, and it is expanding VMware beyond their core vSphere solutions. >> Back to Cisco real quickly. One of the things I'm very impressed with Cisco is the way in which they've developed infrastructures. Code with the DevNet group, how CCIEs are learning Python, and that's a very powerful sort of trend to watch. The other thing we're watching is VMware-AWS. How will it affect spending, you know, near-term, mid-term, long-term? Clearly it's been a momentum, you know, tailwind, for VMware today, but the questions remains, long-term, where will customers place their bets? Where will the spending be? We know that cloud is growing dramatically faster than On Prem, but it appears, at least in the near- to mid-term, for one, two, maybe three more cycles, maybe indefinitely, that the VMware-AWS relationship has been a real positive for VMware. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you stated it really well. When I talked to customers, they were a bit frozen a couple of years ago. "Ah, I know I need to do more in cloud, "but I have this environment, what do I do? "Do I stay with VMware, do I have to make a big change." And what VMware did, is they really opened things up and said, "Look, no, you can embrace cloud, and we're there for you. "We will be there to help be that bridge to the future, "if you will, so take your VMware environment, "do VMware cloud in lots of places, "and we will enable that." What we know today, the stat that we hear all the time, the old 80/20 we used to talk about was 80% keeping the lights on, now the 80% we hear about is, there's only 20% of workloads that are in public cloud today. It doesn't mean that that other 80% is going to flip overnight, but if you look over the next five to ten years, it could be a flip from 80/20 to 20/80. And as that shift happens, how much of that estate will stay under VMware licenses? Because the day after AWS made the announcement of VMware cloud on AWS, they offered some migration services. So if you just want to go on natively on the public cloud, you can do that. And Microsoft, Google, everybody has migration services, so use VMware for what I need to, but I might go more native cloud for some of those other environments. So we know it is going to continue to be a mix. Multi-cloud is what customers are doing today, and multi- and hybrid-cloud is what customers will be doing five years from now. >> The other big question we're watching is Outposts. Will VMware and Outposts get a larger share of wallet as a result of that partnership at the expense of other vendors? And so, remains to be seen, Outposts grabbed a lot of attention, that whole notion of same control plane, same hardware, same software, same data plane On Prem as in the Data Center, kind of like Oracle's same-same approach, but it's seemingly a logical one. Others are responding. Your thoughts on whether or not these two companies will dominate or the industry will respond or an equilibrium. >> Right, so first of all, right, that full same-same full stack has been something we've been talking about now, feels like for 10 years, Dave, with Oracle, IBM had a strategy on that, and you see that, but one of the things with VMware has strong strength. What they have over two decades of experiences on is making sure that I can have a software stack that can actually live in heterogeneous environments. So in the future, if we talk about if Kubernetes allows me to live in a multi-cloud environment, VMware might be able to give me some flexibility so that I can move from one hardware stack to another as I move from data centers to service providers to public clouds. So, absolutely, you know, one to watch. And VMware is smart. Amazon might be their number one partner, but they're lining up everywhere. When you see Sanjay Poonen up on stage with Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud talking about how Anthos in your data center very much requires VMware. You see Sachi Nodella up on stage talking about these kind of VMware partnerships. VMware is going to make sure that they live in all of these environments, just like they lived on all of the servers in the data center in the past. >> The other last two pieces that I want to touch on, and they're related is, as a result of Dell's ownership of VMware, are customers going to spend more with Dell? And it's clear that Dell is architecting a very tight relationship. You can see, first of all, Michael Dell putting Jeff Clarke in charge of everything Dell was brilliant, because, in a way, you know, Pat was kind of elevated as this superstar. And Michael Dell is the founder, and he's the leader of the company. So basically what he's created is this team of rivals. Now, you know, Jeff and Pat, they've worked together for decades, but very interesting. We saw them up on stage together, you know, last year, well I guess at Dell Technologies World, it was kind of awkward, but so, I love it. I love that tension of, It's very clear to me that Dell wants to integrate more tightly with VMware. It's the clear strategy, and they don't really care at this point if it's at the expense of the ecosystem. Let the ecosystem figure it out themselves. So that's one thing we're watching. Related to that is long-term, are customers going to spend more of their VMware dollars in the public cloud? Come back to Dell for a second. To me, AWS is by far the number one competitor of Dell, you know, that shift to the cloud. Clearly they've got other competitors, you know, NetApp, Huawei, you know, on and on and on, but AWS is the big one. How will cloud spending effect both Dell and AWS long-term? The numbers right now suggest that cloud's going to keep growing, $35, $40 billion run-rate company growing at 40% a year, whereas On Prem stuff's growing, you know, at best, single digits. So that trend really does favor the cloud guys. I talked to a Gartner analyst who tracks all this stuff. I said, "Can AWS continue to grow? It's so big." He said, "There's no reason, they can't stop. "The market's enormous." I tend to agree, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, first of all, on the AWS, absolutely, I agree, Dave. They are still, if you look at the overall IT spend, AWS is still a small piece. They have, that lever that they have and the influence they have on the marketplace greatly outweighs the, you know, $30, $31 billion that they're at today, and absolutely they can keep growing. The one point, I think, what we've seen, the best success that Dell is having, it is the Dell and VMware really coming together, product development, go to market, the field is tightly, tightly, tightly alligned. The VxRail was the first real big push, and if they can do the same thing with the vCloud foundation, you know, VMware cloud on Dell hardware, that could be a real tailwind for Dell to try to grow faster as an infrastructure company, to grow more like the software companies or even the cloud companies will. Because we know, when we've run the numbers, Dave, private cloud is going to get a lot of dollars, even as public cloud continues its growth. >> I think the answer comes down to a couple things. Because right now we know that 80% of the spend and stall base is On Prem, 20% in the cloud. We're entering now the cloud 2.0, which introduces hybrid-cloud, On Prem, you know, connecting to clouds, multi-cloud, Kubernetes. So what it comes down to, to me Stu, is to what degree can Dell, VMware, and the ecosystem create that cloud experience in a hybrid world, number one? And number two, how will they be able to compete from a cost-structure standpoint? Dell's cost-structure is better than anybody else's in the On Prem world. I would argue that AWS's cost-structure is better, you know, relative to Dell, but remains to be seen. But really those two things, the cloud experience and the cost-structure, can they hold on, and how long can they hold on to that 80%? >> All right, so Dave here's the question I have for you. What are we talking about when we're talking about Dell plus VMware and even add in Pivotal? It's primarily hardware plus software. Who's the biggest in that multi-cloud space? It's IBM plus Red Hat, which you've stated emphatically, "This is a services play, and IBM has, you know, "just got, you know, services in their DNA, "and that could help supercharge where Red Hat's going "and the modernization." So is that a danger for Dell? If they bring in Pivotal, do they need to really ramp up that services? How do they do that? >> Yeah, I don't think it's a zero sum game, but I also don't think there's, it's five winners. I think that the leader, VMware right now would be my favorite, I think it's going to do very well. I think Red Hat has got, you know, a lot of good market momentum, I think they've got a captive install base, you know, with IBM and its large outsourcing business, and I think they can do pretty well, and I think number three could do okay. I think the other guys struggle. But it's so early, right now, in the hybrid-cloud world and the multi-cloud world, that if I were any one of those five I'd be going hard after it. We know Google's got the dollars, we know Microsoft has the software state, so I can see Microsoft actually doing quite well in that business, and could emerge as the, maybe they're not a long-shot right now, but they could be a, you know, three to one, four to one leader that comes out as the favorite. So, all right, we got to go. Stu, thanks very much for your insights. And thank you for watching and listening. We will be at VMworld 2019. Three days of coverage on theCUBE. Thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. (robotic music) >> We're back in the heart of Central Park. We're here at Tavern on the Green. Beautiful location for the Veritas Vision Day. You're watching theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we got the CEO of Veritas here, Greg Hughes, newly minted, nine months in. Greg, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here Dave, thank you. >> So let's talk about your nine. What was your agenda your first nine months? You know they talk about the 100 day plan. What was your nine month plan? >> Yeah, well look, I've been here for nine months, but I'm a boomerang. So I was here from 2003 to 2010. I ran all of global services, during that time and became the chief strategy officer after that. Was here during the merger by Semantic. And then ran the Enterprise Product Group. So I had all the products and all the engineering teams for all the Enterprise products. And really my starting point is the customer. I really like to hear directly from the customer. So I've spent probably 50% of my time out and about, meeting with customers. And at this point, I've met with a 100 different accounts all around the world. And what I'm hearing, makes me even more excited to be here. Digital transformation is real. These customers are investing a lot in digitizing their companies. And that's driving an explosion of data. That data all needs to be available and recoverable and that's where we step in. We're the best at that. >> Okay, so that was sort of alluring to you. You're right, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. It changes the whole data protection equation. It kind of reminds me, in a much bigger scale, of virtualization. You remember, everybody had to rethink their backup strategies because you now have less physical resources. This is a whole different set of pressures, isn't it? It's like you can't go down, you have to always have access to data. Data is-- >> 24 by seven. >> Increasingly valuable. >> Yup. >> So talk a little bit more about the importance of data, the role of data, and where Veritas fits in. >> Well, our customers are using new, they're driving new applications throughout the enterprise. So machine learning, AI, big data, internet of things. And that's all driving the use of new data management technologies. Cassandra, Hadoop, Open Sequel, MongoDB. You've heard all of these, right? And then that's driving the use of new platforms. Hyper-converged, virtual machines, the cloud. So all this data is popping up in all these different areas. And without Veritas, it can exist, it'll just be in silos. And that becomes very hard to manage and protect it. All that data needs to be protected. We're there to protect everything. And that's really how we think about it. >> The big message we heard today was you got a lot of different clouds, you don't want to have a different data protection strategy for each cloud. So you've got to simplify that for people. Sounds easy, but from an R&D perspective, you've got a large install base, you've been around for a long, long time. So you've got to put investments to actually see that through. Talk about your R&D and investment strategy. >> Well, our investment strategy's very simple. We are the market share leader in data protection and software-defined storage. And that scale, gives us a tremendous advantage. We can use that scale to invest more aggressively than anybody else, in those areas. So we can cover all the workloads, we can cover wherever our customers are putting their data, and we can help them standardize on one provider of data protection, and that's us. So they don't have to have the complexity of point products in their infrastructure. >> So I wonder if we could talk, just a little veer here, and talk about the private equity play. You guys are the private equity exit. And you're seeing a lot of high profile PE companies. It used to be where companies would go to die, and now it's becoming a way for the PE guys to actually get step-ups, and make a lot of money by investing in companies, and building communities, investing in R&D. Some of the stuff we've covered. We've followed Syncsort, BMC, Infor, a really interesting company, what's kind of an exit from PE, right? Dell, the biggest one of all. Riverbed, and of course Veritas. So, there's like a new private equity playbook. It's something you know well from your Silver Lake days. Describe what that dynamic is like, and how it's changed. >> Oh look, private equity's been involved in software for 10 or 15 years. It's been a very important area of investment in private equity. I've worked for private equity firms, worked for software companies, so I know it very well. And the basic idea is, continue the investment. Continue in the investment in the core products and the core customers, to make sure that there is continued enhancement and innovation, of the core products. With that, there'll be continuity in customer relationships, and those customer relationships are very valuable. That's really the secret, if you will, of the private equity playbook. >> Well and public markets are very fickle. I mean, they want growth now. They don't care about profits. I see you've got a very nice cash flow, you and some of the brethren that I mentioned. So that could be very attractive, particularly when, you know, public markets they ebb and flow. The key is value for customers, and that's going to drive value for shareholders. >> That's absolutely right. >> So talk about the TAM. Part of a CEOs job, is to continually find new ways, you're a strategy guy, so TAM expansion is part of the role. How do you look at the market? Where are the growth opportunities? >> We see our TAM, or our total addressable market, at being around $17 billion, cutting across all of our areas. Probably growing into high single digits, 8%. That's kind of a big picture view of it. When I like to think about it, I like to think about it from the themes I'm hearing from customers. What are our customers doing? They're trying to leverage the cloud. Most of our customers, which are large enterprises. We work with the blue-chip enterprises on the planet. They're going to move to a hybrid approach. They're going to on-premise infrastructure and multiple cloud providers. So that's really what they're doing. The second thing our customers are worried about is ransomware, and ransomware attacks. Spearfishing works, the bad guys are going to get in. They're going to put some bad malware in your environment. The key is to be resilient and to be able to restore at scale. That's another area of significant investment. The third, they're trying to automate. They're trying to make investments in automation, to take out manual labor, to reduce error rate. In this whole world, tape should go away. So one of the things our customers are doing, is trying to get rid of tape backup in their environment. Tape is a long-term retention strategy. And then finally, if you get rid of tape, and you have all your secondary data on disc or in the cloud, what becomes really cool, is you can analyze all that data. Out of bound, from the primary storage. That's one of the bigger changes I've seen since I've returned back to Veritas. >> So $17 billion, obviously, that transcends backup. Frankly, we go back to the early days of Veritas, I always thought of it as a data management company and sort of returned to those roots. >> Backup, software defined storage, compliance, all those areas are key to what we do. >> You mentioned automation. When you think about cloud and digital transformation, automation is fundamental, we had NBCUniversal on earlier, and the customer was talking about scripts and how scripts are fragile and they need to be maintained and it doesn't scale. So he wants to drive automation into his processes as much as possible, using a platform, a sort of API based, modern, microservices, containers. Kind of using all those terms. What does that mean for you guys in terms of your R&D roadmap, in terms of the investments that you're making in those types of software innovations? >> Well actually one of the things we're talking about today is our latest release of NetBackup 812, which had a significant investment in APIs and that allow our customers to use the product and automate processes, tie it together with their infrastructure, like ServiceNow, or whatever they have. And we're going to continue full throttle on APIs. Just having lunch with some customers just today, they want us to go even further in our APIs. So that's really core to what we're doing. >> So you guys are a little bit like the New England Patriots. You're the leader, and everybody wants to take you down. So you always start-- >> Nobody's confused me for Tom Brady. Although my wife looks... I'll stack her up against Giselle anytime, but I'm no Tom Brady. >> So okay, how do you maintain your leadership and your relevance for customers? A lot of VC money coming into the marketplace. Like I said, everybody wants to take the leader down. How do you maintain your leadership? >> We've been around for 25 years. We're very honored to have 95% of the Fortune 100, are our customers. If you go to any large country in the world it's very much like that. We work with the bluest of blue-chips, the biggest companies, the most complex, the most demanding (chuckling), the most highly regulated. Those are our customers. We steer the ship based on their input, and that's why we're relevant. We're listening to them. Our customer's extremely relevant. We're going to help them protect, classify, archive their data, wherever it is. >> So the first nine months was all about hearing from customers. So what's the next 12 to 18 months about for you? >> We're continuing to invest, delighted to talk about partnerships, and where those are going, as well. I think that's going to be a major emphasis of us to continue to drive our partnerships. We can't do this alone. Our customers use products from a variety of other players. Today we had Henry Axelrod, from Amazon Web Services, here talking about how we're working closely with Amazon. We announced a really cool partnership with Pure Storage. Our customers that use Pure Storage's all-flash arrays, they know their data's backed up and protected with Veritas and with NetBackup. It's continually make sure that across this ecosystem of partners, we are the one player that can help our large customers. >> Great, thank you for mentioning that ecosystem is a key part of it. The channel, that's how you continue to grow. You get a lot of leverage out of that. Well Greg, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on your-- >> Dave, thank you. >> On the new role. We are super excited for you guys, and we'll be watching. >> I enjoyed it, thank you. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, we're here in Central Park. Be right back, Veritas Vision, be right back. (robotic 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)

>> Welcome to another edition of Wikibon's Weekly Research Meeting on theCUBE. (techno music) I'm Peter Burris, and once again I'm joined by, in studio, George Gilbert, David Floyer. On the phone we have Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Ralph Finos, and Neil Raden. And this week we're going to be visiting Dell EMC's Analyst Summit. And we thought we'd take some time today to go deeper into the transition that Dell and EMC have been on in the past few years, touching upon some of the value that they've been creating for customers and addressing some of the things that we think they're going to have to do to continue on the path that they're on and continue to deliver value to the marketplace. Now, to look back over the course of the past year, it was about a year ago that the transaction actually closed. And in the ensuing year, there's been a fair amount of change. We've seen some interesting moves by Dell to bring the companies together, a fair amount of conversation about how bigger is better. And at the most recent VMworld, we saw a lot of great news of VMworld, VMware in particular working more closely with Amazon and others, or AWS and others. So we've seen some very positive things happen in the course of the past year. But there are still some crucial questions that are addressed. And to kick us off, Dave Vellante, where are we one year in and what are we expecting to hear this week? >> Dave: And foremost, Michael Dell was trying to transform his company. It wasn't happening fast enough. He had to go private. He wanted to be an enterprise player, and amazingly, he and Silver Lake came up with four billion dollars in cash. And they may very well pull off one of the greatest wealth creation trades in the history of the computer industry because for four billion dollars, they're getting an asset that's worth somewhere north of 50 billion, and they're paying down the debt that they used to lever that acquisition through cash flow. So like I say, for a pittance (laughs) of four billion dollars, they're going to turn that into a lot of dough, tens and tens of billions. If you look at EMC pre the M and A, I'm sorry, if you look at Dell pre M and A, pre-merger, their transformation was largely failing. The company was making a lot of acquisitions but it wasn't able to reshape itself fast enough. If you look at EMC pre-merger, it was a powerhouse, but it was suffering from this decade-long collapse of infrastructure hardware and software pricing, which was very much a drag on growth and cash flow. So the company was forced to find a white knight, which came in the form of Michael Dell. So you had this low gross margin company, Dell's public gross margin before it went private were in the teens. EMC was in the roughly 60%. Merge those together and you get a roughly 30% plus gross margin entity. I don't think they're there yet. I think they got a lot of work to do. So a lot of talk about integration. And there's some familiarity with these two companies because they had a fairly large OEM deal for the better part of a decade in the 90s. But culturally, it's quite different. Dell's a very metrics-driven culture with a lot of financial discipline. EMC's kind of a take the hill, do whatever it takes culture. And they're in the process of bringing those together, and a lot of cuts are taking place. So we want to understand what impacts those will have to customers. The other point I want to make is that without VMware, in my view anyway, the combination of these companies would not be nearly as interesting. In fact, it would be quite boring. So the core of these companies, you know, have faced a lot of challenges. But they do have VMware to leverage. And I think the challenge that customers really need to think about is how does this company continue to innovate now that they can't really do M and A? If you look at EMC, for years, they would spend money on R and D and make incremental improvements to its product lines and then fill the gaps with M and A. And there're many, many examples of that, Isilon, Data Domain, XtremIO, and dozens of others. That kept EMC competitive. So how does Dell continue that strength? It spends about four and a half billion a year on R and D, and according to Wikibon's figures, that's about 6% of revenue. If you compare that with other companies, Oracle, Amazon, they're into the 12%. Google's mid-teens. Microsoft, obviously to 12, 13%. Cisco's up there. EMC itself was spending 12% on R and D. So IBM's only about 6%, but remember IBM, about two thirds of the company is services. It's not R and D heavy. So Dell has got to cut costs. It's a must. And what implications does that have on the service levels that customers have grown to expect, and what's the implications on Dell's roadmap? I think we would posit that a lot of the cash cows are going to get funded in a way that allows them to have a managed decline in that business. And it's likely that customers are going to see reduced roadmap functions going forward. So a key challenge that I see for Dell EMC is growth. The strength is really VMware, and the leverage of the VMware and their own install base I think gives Dell EMC the ability to keep pace with its competitors because it's got kind of the inside baseball there. It's got a little bit of supply chain leverage, and of course its sales force and its channels are a definite advantage for this company. But it's got a lot of weaknesses and challenges. Complexity of the portfolio, it's got a big debt load that hamstrings its ability to do M and A. I think services is actually a big opportunity for this company. Servicing its large install base. And I think the key threat is cloud and China. I think China, with its low-cost structure, made a deal like this inevitable. So I come back to the point of Michael Dell's got to cut in order to stay competitive. >> Peter: Alright, so one of the, sorry- >> Dave: Next week, hear a lot about sort of innovation strategies, which are going to relate to the edge. Dell EMC has not announced an edge strategy. It needs to. It's behind HPE in that regard, one its major competitors. And it's got to get into the game. And it's going to be really interesting to see how they are leveraging data to participate in that IOT business. >> Great summary, Dave. So you mentioned that one of the key challenges that virtually every company faces is how do they reposition themselves in a world in which the infrastructure platform, foundation, is going to be more cloud-oriented. Stu Miniman, why don't you take us through, very quickly, where Dell EMC is relative to the cloud? >> Stu: Yeah, great question, Peter. And just to set that up, it's important to talk about one of the key initiatives from Dell and EMC coming together, one of the synergies that Michael Dell has highlighted is really around the move from converged infrastructure to hyper converged infrastructure. And this is also the foundational layer that Dell EMC uses today for a lot of their cloud solutions. So EMC has done a great job with the first wave of converged infrastructure through partnering with Cisco. They created the Vblock, which is now VxBlock, which is now a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. And Dell did a really good job of jumping on early with the hyper converged infrastructure trend. So I'd written research years ago that not only was it through partnerships but through OEM deals, if you look at most of the solutions that were being sold on the market, the underlying server for them was Dell. And that was even before the EMC acquisition. Once they acquired EMC, they really get kind of control, if you will, of the VMware VSAN business, which is a very significant player. They have an OEM relationship with Nutanix, who's doing quite well in the space, and they put together their own full-stack solution, which takes Dell's hardware, the VMware VSAN, and the go-to-market processes of what used to be VCE, and they put together VxRail, which is doing quite well from a revenue and a growth standpoint. And the reason I set this all up to talk about cloud is that if you look at Dell's positioning, a lot of their cloud starts at that foundational infrastructure level. They have all of these enterprise hybrid clouds and different solutions that they've been offering for a few years. And underneath those, really it is a simplified infrastructure hardware offering. So whether that is the traditional VCE converged infrastructure solutions or the newer hyper converged infrastructure solutions, that's the base level. And then there's software that wraps on top of it. So they've done a decent amount of revenue. The concern I have is, you know, Peter, you laid out, it's very much a software world. We've been talking a lot at Wikibon about the multi-cloud nature of what's going on. And while Dell and the Dell family have a very strong position in the on-premises market, that's really they're center strength, is around hardware and customer and the enterprises data center. And the threat is public cloud and multi-cloud. And if it centers around hardware and especially when you dig down and say, "okay, I want to sell more servers," which is one of the primary drivers that Michael wants to have with his whole family of solutions, how much can you really live across these in various environments? Of course, they have partnerships with Microsoft. There's the VMware partnerships with Amazon, which is interesting, how they even partner with the likes of Google and others, it can be looked at. But from that kind of center strength is on premises and therefore they're not really living heavily in the public and multi-cloud world, unless you look at Pivotal. So Pivotal's a software, and that's where they're going to say that the big push is, but it's these massive shifts of large install base of EMC, Dell, and VMware, compared to the public cloud that are doing the land grabs. So this is where it's really interesting to look at. And the announcement that we're interested to look at is how IOT and edge fits into all of this. So David Foyer and you, Peter, research about how- >> Peter: Yeah, well, we'll get to that. >> Stu: There's a lot of nuance there. >> We'll get to that in a second, Stu. But one of the things I wanted to mention to David Floyer is that certainly in the case of Dell, they have been a major player in the Intel ecosystem. And as we think about what's going to happen over the course of the next couple of years, what's going to happen with Intel? It's going to continue to dominate. And what's that going to mean for Dell? >> Sure, Dell's success, I mean, what Stu has been talking about is the importance of volume for Dell, being a volume player. And obviously when they're looking at Intel, the PC is a declining market, and ARM is doing incredibly well in the mobile and other marketplaces. And Dell's success is essentially tied to Intel. So the question to ask is if Intel starts to lose market share to ARM and maybe even IBM, what is the impact on that on Dell? And in particular, what is the impact on the edge? And so if you look at the edge, there are two primary parts. We put forward there are two parts of the edge. There's the primary data, which is coming from the sensors themselves, from the cameras and other things like that. So there's the primary edge, and there's the secondary edge, which is after that data has been processed. And if you think about the primary edge, AI and DL go to the primary edge because that's where the data is coming in, and you want the highest fidelity of data. So you want to do the processing as close as possible to that. So you're looking at these examples in autonomous cars. You're seeing it in security cameras, that all of that processing is going to much cheaper chips, very, very close to the data itself. What that means is that most of that IOT, or could mean, is that most of that IOT could go to other vendors, other than Intel, to go to the ARM vendors. And if you look at that market, it's going to be very specialized in the particular industry and the particular problem it's trying to solve. So it's likely that non-IT vendors are going to be in that business. And you're likely to be selling to OT and not the IT. So all of those are challenges to Dell in attacking the edge. They can win the secondary edge, which is the compressed data, initially compressing it 1,000 to one, probably going to a million to one compression of the data coming from the sensors to a much higher value data but much, much smaller amounts, both on the compute side and on the storage side. So if that bifurcation happens at the edge, the size of marketplace is going to be very considerably reduced for Intel. And Dell has in my view a strategic decision to make of whether they get into being part of that ARM ecosystem for the edge. There's a strong argument that's saying that they would need to do that. >> And they will be announcing something on Monday, I believe, or next week. We're going to hear a lot about that. But when we think, ultimately, about the software that Dell and EMC are going to have to think about, they're very strong in VMware, which is important, and there's no question that virtual machines will remain important, if not only from an install base standpoint but from, in the future, how the cloud is organized and arranged and managed. Pivotal also is an interesting play, especially as it does a better job of incorporating more of the open source elements that are becoming very attractive to developers. But George, let me ask you a question, ultimately, about where is Dell in some of these more advanced software worlds? When we think about machine learning, when we think about AI, these are not strong markets right now, are not huge markets right now, but they're leading indicators. They're going to provide cues about where the industry's going to go and who's going to get a chance to provide the tooling for them. So what's our take right now, where Dell is, Dell EMC is relative to some of these technologies? >> Okay, so that was a good lead in for my take on all the great research David Floyer's done, which is when we go through big advances in hardware, typically relative price performance changes between CPU, memory, storage, networking. When we see big relative changes between those, then there's an opportunity for the software to be re-architected significantly. So in this case, what we call unigrid, what David's called unigrid previously is the ability to build scale-out, extremely high-performance clusters to the point where we don't have to bottleneck on shared storage like a SAN anymore. In other words, we can treat the private memory for each node as if it were storage, direct-attached storage, but it is now so fast in getting between nodes and to the memory in a node that for all intents and purposes, it can perform as if you had a shared storage small cluster before. Only now this can scale out to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nodes. The significance of that is we are in an era of big data and big analytics. And so the issue here is can Dell sort of work with the most advanced software vendors who are trying to push the envelope to build much larger-scale data management software than they've been able to. Now, Dell has an upward, sort of an uphill climb to master the cloud vendors. They build their own infrastructure hardware. But they've done pools of GPUs, for instance, to accelerate machine learning training. Dell could work with these data management vendors to get pools of this scale-out hardware in the clouds to take advantage of the NoSQL databases, the NewSQL databases. There's an opportunity to leapfrog. What we found out at Oracle, at their user conference this week was even though they're building similar hardware, their database is not yet ready to take advantage of it. So there is an opportunity for Dell to start making inroads in the cloud where their generic infrastructure wouldn't. Now, one more comment on the edge, I know David was saying on the sort of edge device, that's looking more and more like it doesn't have to be Intel-compatible. But if you go to the edge gateway, the thing that bridges OT and IT, that's probably going to be their best opportunity on the edge. The challenge, though, is it's not clear how easy it will be in a low-touch sort of go-to-market model that Dell is accustomed to because like they discovered in the late 90s, it cost $6,000 per year per PC to support. And no one believed that number until Intel did a study on itself and verified it. The protocols from all the sensors on the OT side are so horribly complex and legacy-oriented that even the big auto manufacturers keep track of the different ones on a spreadsheet. So mapping the IT gateway server to all the OT edge devices may turn out to be horribly complex for a few years. >> Oh, it's not a question of may. It is going to be horribly complex for the next few years. (laughing) I don't think there's any question about that. But look, here's what I want to do. I want to ask one more question. And I'm going to go do a round table and ask everybody to give me what the opportunity is and what the threat is. But before I do that, the one thing we haven't discussed, and Dave Vellante, I'm going to throw it over to you, is we've looked at the past of Dell talks a lot about the advantages of its size and the economies of scale that it gets. And Dell's not in the semiconductor business or at least not in a big way. And that's one place where you absolutely do get economies of scale. They got VMware in the system software business, which is an important point. So there may be some economies there. But in manufacturing and assembly, as you said earlier, Dave, that is all under consideration when we think about where the real cost efficiencies are going to be. One of the key places may be in the overall engagement model. The ability to bring a broad portfolio, package it up, and make it available to a customer with the appropriate set of services, and I think this is why you said services is still an opportunity. But what does it mean to get to the Dell EMC overall engagement model as Dell finds or looks to find ways to cut costs, to continue to pay down its debt and show a better income statement? >> Dave: So let me take the customer view. I mean, I think you're right. This whole end to end narrative that you hear from Dell, for years you heard it from HP, I don't think it really makes that much of a difference. There is some supply chain leverage, no question. So you can get somewhat cheaper components, you could probably get supplies, which are very tight right now. So there are definitely some tactical advantages for customers, but I think your point is right on. The real leverage is the engagement model. And the interesting thing from I think our standpoint is that you've got a very high-touch EMC direct sales force, and that's got to expand into the channel. Now, EMC's done a pretty good job with the channel over the last, you know, half a decade. Dell doesn't have as good a reputation there. Its channel partners are many more but perhaps not as sophisticated. So I think one of the things to watch is the channel transformation and then how Dell EMC brings its services and its packages to the market. I think that's very, very important for customers in terms of reducing a lot of the complexity in the Dell EMC portfolio, which just doubled in complexity. So I think that is something that is going to be a critical indicator. It's an opportunity, and at the same time, if they blow it, it's a big threat to this organization. I think it's one of the most important things, especially, as you pointed out, in the context of cost cutting. If they lose sight of the importance of the customer, they could hit some bumps in the road and open it up for competition to come in and swoop some of their business. I don't think they will. I think Michael Dell is very focused on the customer, and EMC's culture has always been that way. So I would bet on them succeeding there, but it's not a trivial task. >> Yeah, I would agree with you. In fact, one of the statements that we heard from Michael Dell and other executives at Dell EMC at VMworld, over and over and over again, on theCUBE and elsewhere, was this notion of open with an opinion. And in many respects, the opinion is not just something that they say. It's something that they do through their packaging and how they put their technologies into the marketplace. Okay, guys, rapid fire, really, really, really short answers. Let's start with the threats. And then we'll close with the positive note on the strengths. David Floyer, really quick, biggest threat that we're looking at next week? >> The biggest threat is the evolution of ARM processes, and if they keep to an Intel-only strategy, that to me is their biggest threat. Those could offer a competition in both mobile, increasing percentages of mobile, and also also in the IOT and other processor areas. >> Alright, George Gilbert, biggest threat? >> Okay, two, summarizing the comments I made before, one, they may not be able to get the cloud vendors to adopt pools of their scale-out infrastructure because the software companies may not be ready to take advantage of it yet. So that's cloud side. >> No, you just get one. Dave Vellante. >> Dave: Interest rates. (laughing) >> Peter: Excellent. Stu Miniman. >> Stu: Software. >> Peter: Okay, come on Stu. Give me an area. >> Stu: Dell's a hardware company! Everything George said, there's no way the cloud guys are going to adopt Dell EMC's infrastructure gear. This is a software play. Dell's been cutting their software assets, and I'm really worried that I'm going to see an edge box, you know, that doesn't have the intelligence that they need to put the intelligence that they say that they're going to put in. >> So, specifically, it's software that's capable of running the edge centers, so to speak. Ralph Finos. >> Ralph: Yeah, I think the hardware race to the bottom. That's a big part of their business, and I think that's a challenge when you're looking at going head on head, with HPE especially. >> Peter: Neil Raden, Neil Raden. >> Neil: Private managed cloud. >> Or what we call true private cloud, which goes back to what Stu said, related to the software and whether or not it ends up being manageable. Okay, threats. David Floyer. >> You mean? >> Or I mean opportunities, strengths. >> Opportunities, yes. The opportunity is being by far the biggest IT place out there, and the opportunity to suck up other customers inside that. So that's a big opportunity to me. They can continue to grow by acquisition. Even companies the size of IBM might be future opportunities. >> George Gilbert. >> On the opposite side of what I said earlier, they really could work with the data management vendors because we really do need scale-out infrastructure. And the cloud vendors so far have not spec'd any or built any. And at the same time, they could- >> Just one, George. (laughing) Stu Miniman. >> Dave: Muted. >> Peter: Dave Vellante. >> Dave: I would say one of the biggest opportunities is 500,000 VMware customers. They've got the server piece, the networking piece kind of, and storage. And combine that with their services prowess, I think it's a huge opportunity for them. >> Peter: Stu, you there? Ralph Finos. >> Stu: Sorry. >> Peter: Okay, there you go. >> Stu: Dave stole mine, but it's not the VMware install base, it's really the Dell EMC install base, and those customers that they can continue moving along that journey. >> Peter: Ralph Finos. >> Ralph: Yeah, highly successful software platform that's going to be great. >> Peter: Neil Raden. >> Neil: Too big to fail. >> Alright, I'm going to give you my bottom lines here, then. So this week we discussed Dell EMC and our expectations for the Analyst Summit and our observations on what Dell has to say. But very quickly, we observed that Dell EMC is a financial play that's likely to make a number of people a lot of money, which by the way has cultural implications because that has to be spread around Dell EMC to the employee base. Otherwise some of the challenges associated with cost cutting on the horizon may be something of an issue. So the whole cultural challenges faced by this merger are not insignificant, even as the financial engineering that's going on seems to be going quite well. Our observation is that the cloud world ultimately is being driven by software and the ability to do software, with the other observation that the traditional hardware plays tied back to Intel will by themselves not be enough to guarantee success in the multitude of different cloud options that will become available, or opportunities that will become available to a wide array of companies. We do believe the true private cloud will remain crucially important, and we expect that Dell EMC will be a major player there. But we are concerned about how Dell is going to evolve as a, or Dell EMC is going to evolve as a player at the edge and the degree to which they will be able to enhance their strategy by extending relationships to other sources of hardware and components and technology, including, crucially, the technologies associated with analytics. We went through a range of different threats. If we identify two that are especially interesting, one, interest rates. If the interest rates go up, making Dell's debt more expensive, that's going to lead to some strategic changes. The second one, software. This is a software play. Dell has to demonstrate that it can, through its 6% of R and D, generate a platform that's capable of fully automating or increasing the degree to which Dell EMC technologies can be automated. In many conversations we've had with CIOs, they've been very clear. One of the key criteria for the future choices of suppliers will be the degree to which that supplier fits into their automation strategy. Dell's got a lot of work to do there. On the big opportunities side, the number one from most of us has been VMware and the VMware install base. Huge opportunity that presents a pathway for a lot of customers to get to the cloud that cannot be discounted. The second opportunity that we think is very important that I'll put out there is that Dell EMC still has a lot of customers with a lot of questions about how digital transformation's going to work. And if Dell EMC can establish itself as a thought leader in the relationship between business, digital business, and technology and bring the right technology set, including software but also packaging of other technologies, to those customers in a true private cloud format, then Dell has the potential to bias the marketplace to their platform even as the marketplace chooses in an increasingly rich set of mainly SaaS but public cloud options. Thanks very much, and we look forward to speaking with you next week on the Wikibon Weekly Research Meeting here on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017! Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back everyone, we are live, here, in Las Vegas for VMworld 2017, I'm John Furrier, my cohost Dave Vellante, eighth year with theCUBE, proud to have two great guests, Josh Epstein, CMO of Kaminario and Eyal David, CTO of Kaminario, great to see you guys again! >> Likewise, great to be here! >> You guys had a great event in Boston recently, what's going on with you guys? Give me an update on the company. >> Sure, I'll go first. Kaminario's been around for awhile, but we've been, first of all, moved the headquarters over to east coast US, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, opened up a great new office space there. Got a lot going on from a product perspective, a lot going on from a go-to-market perspective, you see a lot happening in the all-flash space and the storage space in general, and just, really excited to take it to the next step. We see a lot of things happening here. >> It's a pretty big week this week. We saw Scott Dietzen from Pure Storage become the Chairman and Jean Carlo, ex-CISCO MNA guy from Silver Lake come in to be CEO, so Dave and I were speculating, All flash, a lot of, what's going on! A lot of people saying, woah, is it growing? Still a need for flash. What's the big hubbub about? >> So, we definitely see a change in the market, and the emergence of two different models. The way people used to buy storage, and the way next-generation application, cloud-scale application, software-to-servers, e-commerce, online businesses, need to buy storage. And their need for simplicity, performance and cost-efficiency at scale is still driving the need for flash storage, and we'll talk about this yet to come some more. >> And you guys see those as really distinct opportunities, is that right? Can you add some color to that, Josh? >> Yeah, I think that we see the flash space made up of two different markets, one is just the massive stocking function of traditional enterprise data centers, making the move en masse to flash. And there you have, obviously, the incumbent vendors with their flash solutions, you know. That's a dogfight, there's a lot of competition in there. There's this other market which we see growing more healthily, more organically, which is the growth of these cloud-scale applications. As Eyal said, flash provider, or, software-to-server providers, e-commerce providers, fintech, healthtech, these large, highly-scalable, database-driven cloud-scale applications. That means a different type of of scale, so that's where we see less competition from the incumbents and more opportunity -- >> What's different about that market, what's the requirement, what are they looking for that makes this a good engine for them? >> So one of the key requirements is agility and flexibility. One of the current characteristics is they don't really know what is going to be the next workload, how their workload is going to change in scale over time. So they need an infrastructure that can change and adapt to their needs, still deliver the same level of performance, still deliver the same level of simplicity. But have that flexibility to address their changing needs in capacity and performance, to address growth in customers, changing in workload application, without too much pre-planning. >> So I'd ask the question to you guys, I get this all the time. So since you guys are the gurus in the area. I get this question a lot, what is a modern data center? With all the action on private cloud happenings, true private cloud, they truly point out, people are re-tooling their data centers to operate like cloud, it's still on-premise. That's kind of the gateway to hypercloud, very clear. Public cloud, workloads, all bursting, that stuff's great. What's a modern architecture, what's a modern data center? When I hear that term, what do you guys mean? >> That's a great question. So the modern data center, or even the next generation data center is exactly that, one that allows enterprises to achieve the same levels of scalability, efficiency, as the hypercloud, but on-premise, or in a hybrid fashion. But it allows them to have that level of control against operation simplicity that's hard to come by, but on their own terms, adapting to their own needs. >> So without the need to build out a massive engineering team to build this from the ground up. >> So are the buyers different, are those two worlds coming together? I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah, I think the buyers are, in fact, different. I think, now, you see a convergence over time as the classic enterprise data centers start to look more like a private cloud. But we see this growth in large-managed private cloud providers really exciting, and they come in different forms. You have the Telcos getting into the business, you have the outsourcers getting into the business, you have the traditional channel getting into the business. We have a great partnership with Vion, a big federal reseller, and using Kaminario as a flash service offering. And they start looking like a cloud provider, and they're thinking like a cloud provider. >> And what's the benefits then? Cause I was just looking at the gov cloud impact, I was just at the Amazon Public Sector Summit. Huge traction right now because it's so fast, you can get into the government cloud quickly. Why is that unique, why, as a service, and why are you guys really driving that? >> One, it fits with our architecture perfectly. But I think from a customer standpoint, the ability to procure, like, procuring from the cloud, but also to get the kind of services, you know, as people start re-engineering applications thinking about dev-ops, cloud-data-type applications, leveraging the same kind of utilities that they might get from an Amazon or an Ajer, from a managed private cloud provider, it becomes really important. >> And Al-fed ramp is there, you get all the federal information stuff going on around it. >> So I wonder how you deal with this problem, it's a relatively small company, you're up against the big guys, you say, it's like a rock fight. But you have an affinity to, let's say, SAS players. They like your product and it fits better with their vision. But then you have this big whale, saying, okay, I'm going to buy my HR software from, you know, some SAS provider, I'm going to do some, whatever, 70,000-person deployment, but, as a quid pro quo, you've got to buy my all-flash array. So you must see that all the time. When you peel back the covers, underneath that SAS provider, what do you really see? Like, they fence off, sort of, legacy-vendors' stuff, and they really drive in their core business with your modern platform? Or is it sort of just a mishmash? >> No, I think we're seeing a shift. I think what we're seeing is, some of the legacy architectures are running up against boundaries. Boundaries in terms of complexity, boundaries in terms of agility. Kaminario was built to scale from the get-go. It was built for performance and it was built for scale. And I think what we're seeing is, the main value of these SAS providers, as they're reaching scale, is the ability to deliver consistent performance, consistent cost-efficiency, and really, our predictability. The ability to sort of forecast in the future what cost structure's going to look like in order to continue to deliver high-performance to their own users. >> So the hypothetical example I gave, I'm sure you see it, but are you, you know, winning head-to-head in those environments, and your piece is growing, and that's sort of just a static one-time deal? >> That's exactly what we're seeing, so our main growth, our main focus is on these software-to-service companies or software-to-service departments within existing companies building these types of offerings to deliver this as a service consumption model. And you were asking about the back-end, in the back-end, these are often large-scale databases operating mixed types of workloads, for example, transaction processing, analytics, all at the same time. And the need to support these types of workloads requires an infrastructure that can deliver at-scale, consistent performance. And when we face off the legacy vendors in those environments, we win out. >> You have to be substantially better as a small company. You are, otherwise, you're out of business. >> Absolutely. >> And so, interesting thing about the flash market it, a lot of the big guys realized right away, wow, I'm way behind, so they went out and they bought a lot of startups. What happened, did they sort of pollute them, through the integration, or ... (laughing) >> I think the marketshare statistics are a little bit confusing, but what we see is, you know, the bulk of the legacy vendors, you know, push in what we call retro-fit flash, basically taking their old legacy architectures, their scale-up or scale-out architectures, and cramming flash into it, and basically, then, they don't bring the same kind of simplicity, same kind of agility, same kind of scalability as a built-for-flash-offering like Kaminario. >> Right, what about, you guys have some announcements this week? >> Yup, take that? >> Yeah, two weeks ago we announced our next-generation platform, K2.n, which is based on a fully-converged, NVIO mean over fabric back end. This is basically taking our core operating system, Vision OS, which is a mature and robust storage software stack with all the data services and enterprise features that enterprises need. And deliver it on an NVIO fabric backend which leverages the existing capability to aggregate capacity and compute, and take it to the next level, delivering a very scalable and agile storage cluster that allows you to mix and match different types of resources, to add and remove resources very dynamically, and make your data center responsive in minutes and not hours or days or even months. >> You guys are familiar with our service and research, and we're very excited about NVIO over fabric, because we've been talking about it since probably, maybe 2008, 2009, some type of ability to scale and to communicate, and that's here today, finally. How close are we to actually having a product in the field that I can actually deploy? >> We will actually be shipping this in Q1, the K2.N They added another layer on top of that, We also announced a new software platform called Kaminario Flex, which is a orchestration platform which rides on top of K2.N, and allows you to dynamically compose virtual arrays out of these NVME-connected resources. So I really take that, looking ahead, that the classic notion of a monolithic shared-storage array, is going to die over time. >> Well, here's the numbers. I mean, it's automatic, go ahead. >> Well no, this is the whole debate that we've been clearing up with the true, private cloud report. I mean, guys, no-brainer, check, as a service, as the future, so you're good there. (laughs) The true pilot board, too bad it shows the on-prem stuff is declining in general, that's settlement for buying boxes, and the old way of doing things. Labor's being automated away and shifted, that's pretty obvious. Enter your business model, right? I mean, this is perfect for any cloud deal. >> Right. >> The question is, track record, bulletproof, reliability, security, the table stays all shift, data protection, all these details, that's what they care. You guys check that box ... (laughing) >> So the disability takes vision away, so I'm going to take it to the next generation. Technology is what actually allows us to do that. Whether it's in a hypercloud or we're going into a managed cloud provider, that is becoming a very desired consumption model for a lot of the ads of service members, allows them to build such a flexible architecture, based on a mature software step. >> So you guys, really, from what I see is your strategy is, get this out there quickly from a tech standpoint, software, flex, and integration with cloud is critical. Because you can offload a lot of that heavy lifting on those unique requirements to the cloud guys, where the pre-existing tech exists. Did I get that right? >> Yeah and I think what we see is these managed cloud providers are going to want to have a say in it, they want to actually be part of the evolution of the platform, right? >> Yeah, go ahead, fine, it's your stop! You can always buy the servers more flash! (laughing) >> So talk about your channel, and you go to market, help us understand that a little bit better. >> Yeah, I think it's all about focus for Kaminario. I mean, let's face it, the flash space is competitive, right, if we're going to go head-to-head with everyone, kind of, pull one of these growth-at-all-cost models. And you see what the market values those types of companies. So we've been really focused in two ways. One, SAS providers, next-generation business. I mean, if we opportunistically find a VDI deal, okay, that's great, we have a great solution for VDI, but it's not something that we're going to go out and hunting day to day. The second is really to focus on channel partners. We've got a channel first model, really, effectively 100% of our new business in 2017 will come through a channel partner. Most of those channel partners are looking at developing some type of managed services offering as well, so you know, it's not just about the margin on the deal, it's about the longterm -- >> Cause they're trying to respond to the market transit and value. >> Exactly, so it's about focus on a relatively small number of channel partners that get it, that like our model, and again, it's just -- >> Hey, you'll make money from it, cause that's all, at the end of the day, you've got to get that leverage, because that's your David and Goliath story. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And, global footprint? Is it primarily US and Europe or -- >> Yeah, so it's been, we started in Israel, US has been a good focus, last year we opened up the UK and France, end of the great we opened up Korea, we're now in Singapore, we're moving into China through partners, and so yeah, this is a global story. Clearly, US is the, in terms of adoption of these server infrastructures, US is really the furthest ahead, but it's a global phenomenon. >> What do you make of the VMwear momentum? Because two years ago, VMwear was, the stock was sort of in the tank and there was no growth, and now it's on fire, the data center's on fire, you can't get data center space! (laughing) >> From my perspective, the fast adoption that VMwear had for new technologies, for adopting containers, for adopting cloud paradigms, for adopting this new delivery model, and enabling a fuller stack aligns very well with the kind of demands of the next-generation data system we talked about, where the management plane, the orchestration plane, is becoming more and more important in optimizing the way in this infrastructure gets delivered. So that's, I believe, what is driving that forward. >> Josh and Elay, thanks so much for coming out, coming our way, you guys, company watch, love the business model. The tech comes home, you get it with that integration, man there's not a leverage there, congratulations on your success! (laughing) Great business. TheCUBE bringing you the CUBE as a service, all flash content here! Back with more VMworld coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)

>> live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering E M C. World 2015. Brought to you by E. M. C Brocade and D. C. >> You're watching E m C World Live here on the Q. Looking Angles Flagship program. We go out to the event they start the season noise. I'm John Kerry of my coast Dude. Minutemen. Our next guest is a cube. Alumni have been on a cute many times before and back again. 2011 John Thompson is the CEO of Virtual Instruments and also the chairman of a company called Microsoft. Um, welcome back to the cubes. Nice to be about Great to see you in the A M World week didn't interview on Virtual Instruments with CEO, and we were really riffing on this whole idea of data instrumentation. And we it was really free Internet of things. So give us the update. What's going on with virtue Instruments here? I see Microsoft has a conference going on ignite. Even though you're chairman. The board. You're also the CEO of Virgin Instruments and you're gonna do some business here. What's going on? What business are you doing? Well, this is an important conference for virtual instruments. DMC is one of our strongest go to market partners, and candidly, many of their customers are virtual instruments customers. And so it's an opportunity for me to be here to spend time with our partners and our customers in one venue. Our business is doing quite well. We just had a very, very strong March quarter, which is always a little bit of a down quarter for most tech companies. But we were up 27 28% year over year for the calendar. Q. One so we feel pretty good about that. This is the most important quarter of the year, though, which is always the case in Texas. So we're hoping that we can knock the ball out of the park again this quarter. We launched our virtual wisdom for platform in the spring of last year, and it is gaining tremendous traction, certainly in the U. S. And around the globe. It is all about health utilization in performance of the infrastructure, and we've defined a model where you can look at an application inside that infrastructure, monitor its performance and its availability, and that idea is so critical in a world where everything will someday live in the cloud and will you will want to assure a level of performance and, quite frankly, a level of responsiveness to customers as they come on says it's a reset to share the folks out. This is not a new concept for you guys. We talked about this years ago. It's not like you woke up one boys. Hey, things is trendy. This data center in fermentation takes us quickly back. Where did it come from? Was an itch to scratch. What original product as you have and how does that morph into today's crazy, data driven world, where dash boring riel time is actually competitive advantage and now table stakes? Well, if you were to go back to the genesis of virtual instruments, we started as a small technology investment inside a larger company called Venice are that was trying to solve the inevitable performance problem in the fibre channel world. And as the market crashed in 7 4008 the team at Venice or had to decide, how are we gonna clean up our portfolio? And the result waas. They sold off the assets? Were we, in fact, created virtual instruments. So a small group of investors, led by Jim Davidson from Silver Lake and Michael Marks from Riverwood, helped to fund the original investment and virtual instruments. We've been at it now for about seven years. We have clearly evolved the product quite a bit since then, and we've captured a number of very, very strong venture capital investment so long away as we made the choice. That said, we need the shift from being a fiber channel company to be in an infrastructure performance management company because the inevitable movement to the cloud will drive an opportunity for us. Yeah, and you're a senior executive private equity. I mean, this is pretty much a big bet. There's a lot of money involved with private equity. So it wasn't like you're, like, throw in the Silicon Valley startup together. It was really like, Okay, there's big money behind it. Well, you guys, did you see it turning out this way? What? What was learning that have been magnified from that trajectory? Well, I think in the early days we thought the path was a little different than what we've actually followed. We thought the path waas that the fibre channel World was so big and it needed better visibility. This would in fact give the world better visibility in the fibre channel space. What we have observed, however, is that the entire infrastructure has become Maur and more opaque, and therefore you need to not just drive visibility in the storage layer, but across the entire converge staff. And so the platform that we have evolved is all about supporting this converged platform not just fibre Channel, but filed a storage not just VM where, but all virtualized server environments. And we believe that's, ah, multibillion dollar market. And that's why we were able to attract both private equity initially and venture capital later as we built out of product. It's interesting. You see some of these ideas come a come around full circle. I'm curious. Just in industry trend. Your your opinion on Veritas, you know, being spun out. It's it's It's both sad for me personally, but I think it speaks to how difficult the cultural integration might have been between the two companies. While I really had a vision back in the old four or five days of security and backup coming together, I think It was a really, really difficult thing to make happen in the context of what has evolved at Samantha, so the fact that they've chosen to spend it out, it's perhaps a little disappointing for me personally, but not a surprise. So what is your vision of security today? My understanding, You advise, even sit on the board of ah Lumia company. We've way we've talked to the company really, what's happening in security. So if you think about how security has evolved once upon a time, it was about protecting the device candidly and a cloud based world. It's going to be more about protecting the workloads as they move around. And that's one of the elements of what a lumia does, in fact, provide. Furthermore, I have believed for a very, very long time that as time goes on, security will have to get closer and closer to that which is deemed to be most critical. In other words, you can't protect all of the data. You can't protect all of the instances that air on the Web, but you can identify those that are most critical and therefore need a level of protection beyond what the standard would be. And so my belief is that companies like a Loom EO and others that will evolve will get closer to the workload, and we'll get closer to the data that's most critical. And so data classification and things of that nature will become much, much more important than they have. You're an investor in aluminum. You on the board are okay, so you're on the board of director and investor. We covered their launch. Great company. The cracking is low slides, as as Alan Cohen would say, they phenomenal funding round gone from stealth two years and now the big $100,000,000 really funding round massive guerrilla marketing. Still going on at the air say, was kind of clever. The perimeter lists cloud is a factor. And what tech enabled? Do you see the key thing? Alan Cohen described it as 1000 foot shoulds soldiers protecting assets because there's no more perimeter that no front door any more. What is the technology driver for that? Well, the whole idea behind the loom Eo, is to have a what I would call a portable policy enforcement engine that can move as the workload moves around the cloud. So policy management, security policy management has been a very, very difficult task for most large enterprises. So if I can define security policies for every server of where workloads can go to and from on that server and make sure that nothing violates that policy, hence I enforce it routinely. Oh, I can change. The dynamic of House security gets delivered in a cloud based world because no workload is gonna run in any single place on a cloud world. That workload is gonna move to where there is capacity to handle. I gotta ask you because we have a lot of people out there that follow tech business test tech athletes that you are. But also, you're a senior executive who has a lot of experience, and we could be presenting to Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School. I want to get your kind of business mind out to the audience. And that is, is that as an executive who's seen the big, big companies, the big battleships, the big aircraft carriers, from the IBM days to the M in a world of the nineties and the transformation of the Internet now in a complete shift, an inflection point with things like a Loom, Eo and Cloud and and Virtual instruments and the new Microsoft and the Silicon Angles and the crowd shots out there, What do you advise managers out there to operate from a management perspective. I mean, there's a classic business school numbers quarter on the challenges of going public, managing enormous dynamic technology change. So every theater is kind of exploding the technology theater, the business theater, the social theater as an executive. How would you advise someone as a CEO are rising growing startup how they should stitch themselves together? If you can draw in from previous experiences? Or is there a pattern recognition you can share? Well, it's It's never simply about the numbers, while the numbers air always important and the numbers will always be the underpinning of evaluation or whatever. In reality, it's about having a team that is able to rally around a leader with vision that says, Here's how we're gonna change the world. Here's how we're going to make an impact as this industry goes through, the natural inflection points that it always does. And if you look at what has occurred in this industry about every 8 to 10 years, something significant changes. And so a company that may have missed an opportunity six or eight years ago has another shot at it six or eight years later because of the inflection points that we go through. So it's important for the leader of a company toe. Believe that I can change the world based upon the industry that I'm a part of and have a compelling point of view about what changing the world means for that company and that team. And if you could get the team together around that idea, what about cloud and big data and mobile thes dynamics that you would? If someone just wants a roadmap for navigation or what decked me to go after, What would you say? What do you say? You know, get it all in the cloud or go poke at a duel are indeed new, agile management. Things were happening like, Well, I think it starts with what are the court confidence is that you have as a team or company, so you can't say g I'm gonna go and do cloud and oh, by the way, I have no confidence in the management infrastructure for large enterprises or I'm gonna go do mobile and I really have no experience in the mobile space whatsoever. So core competencies matter and leveraging the core strengths of the company matters now. Oftentimes, what companies will do its supplement their core strengths through M, and we'll go out and acquire something and bolted on the hard part of M and A, which is what we were referencing early around. Veritas is Can you integrate it? Can you really make it work after you bought it? Buying it is the easy part. Generating it and making it work is the really, really tough part. And arguably we didn't do is good a job as I would have liked with Samantha. And so basically you're saying is if you as an executive, you want to look at the winds of change for hand, get the sails up, if you will, to confuse the metaphor and get into that slipstream so you can actually drive and you can't. Being an amateur, you gotta actually have some competency. You have a leverage point. Look, one of the great things about this industry is it doesn't take some brilliant business leader to create a new idea. I mean, no one ever would have viewed Zucker Bird as a business leader or some of the young, really, really powerful CEO built phenomenal, phenomenal companies in this industry. But they had an idea, and they were able to create a team around that idea and go change the world. And that's what's so powerful about this industry that I've had the pleasure to be a part of for 40 some years. Yes. Speaking about CEOs that changed the industry, John Chambers announced that he's stepping aside from the CEO role this morning. So you know when you look back, you know John was one of the four horsemen of the Internet era and 20 years there. Chuck Robbins is coming in. He's been there since C. I think 97. What do you think of that move? And you know what's happening with Cisco in leadership for the big companies? Well, John's a really, really good friend, and I admire him for all of what he's done and Cisco and I wish him well as he makes this transition. Interestingly enough, the transition is to executive chairman, with the new CEO stepping in so What that says is that John plans that have a little more involvement, perhaps in what goes on in the company. Then I do it. Microsoft. My title is not executive chairman of Microsoft. Thank goodness I wouldn't want it to. But it also speaks to the fact that John spend the CEO. It just goes since 1995 like that. So he has an enormous amount of knowledge and insight about the company industry, its customers, partners, culture, all of those culture. And so all of those things will be valuable and important to the new CEO. And I think him stepping into that role is trying to leverage that. Cenedella came in and made his voice heard really instantly. And Microsoft has been a great company to watch, you know, since Auntie's came on board, you know, just Cisco need to make some bold moves or are they pretty stable where they are is kind of the dominant? That's a better question for John and CEO. I think what is clear is that all all companies, at some point after find a way to redefine and Sasha's role at Microsoft. He has redefined Microsoft as a cloud first mobile first, and that's all about recognizing. Were acts are gonna run on what devices and what kind of service is. And that redefinition, I think, is important for any industry leader, regardless of how long you just brought us to the tagline of this show, M C World is redefined. So any comments, How's the emcee doing it? Redefining themselves, I think the emcees a terrific company. Joe's a longtime friend of mine. I mean, I know Joe forever on. It's been amazing to see how it's gone from being a storage company to this federation of companies that have capabilities that are so broad and so diverse. I hope they don't get pushed to do something that isn't in the best interest of customers, but maybe enamored by some investors. The angel of the activist pressure. Yeah, that's always and that that's unfortunate, but I think they have a nice balance now. They have a huge installed base and this competitive pressure so they gotta push that. But I have to. I have to ask, is that? You know, I was getting some tweets earlier about Microsoft, and I know you, you know, you're only chairman of the board executive chairman. But you were involved in a very historic where you were on the executive search committee for the CEO replacement for Steve Balmer, of which they chose sake. Nutella Cube alumni We interviewed at the XL Partners Innovation Summit in Stanford that that's about culture. That's about transitions, about inflection points. And Sister used to mention Cisco. Not similar situation. But Microsoft is the legend company. I think the computer industry like an apple. Microsoft was their big part of the computer revolution. Big seismic changing. You were right there. Just share some color on what that whole experience like for you personally. And if you can share any insights to the audience, I know it's a sense might be sensitive topic. But what's that like? And, you know, the outcomes. Looking good. As he says, he's doing great. What? What can you share? Well, I think it would be fair to say that it was a more consuming process than I ever thought it would be. I went from being a new board member of Microsoft in the spring of 2012 to be in the lead independent director in the fall of 2012 to leading the search starting in the summer of 2013. I mean, I never could have imagine my involvement there changing that dramatically, Nor would I have imagined that searching for a CEO of a company would consume 80% of my time when I was also running a company. So for a period of about six months, it's like athlete right there. I had two full time jobs where I was on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for the eye and on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for Microsoft as well. It was, I would also have to say and incredibly incredibly exhilarating experience. I talked to some phenomenal leaders from around the world way had hard, long look anywhere we wanted at any CEO or candidate that we wanted, and we settled on someone who was a Tech athlete. We believe that the company was at a really, really important inflection point where over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, we're gonna have to make some really, really important technology decisions that would set the course from Microsoft for many, many years to come. And so, while there was much speculation in the press about this person or that person, and what a great business leader, that person waas What we, as a board concluded, was that what our company needed at that moment in time was a true technology visionary who could drive the strategy of the company because it had assets. I mean, they had a whole search thing that they quote missed on paper. But they had, like you said, they could come back at it again with being the subtle art of assets. Here, Cloud was built out. Everything was kind of like in place for that tech athlete on. And I think soccer has done an amazing job. I'm quite proud of them. I'm happy toe say I have some small part in that, but I'm or happy for the way he has executed in the job. I mean, he steps into the job with a level of humility but confidence that is so important for the CEO of a company of that size, and to maintain that cultural DNA because you have one of most competitive companies on the planet. A question to the point where they had to be almost broken up by the DOJ from the Bill Gates kind of DNA and bomber to continued, be competitive, live in this new era. Really tough challenge. Well, he's he's a bright guy. He, as I said, has great humility and has the respect of the team. And it's been interesting to see the internal shift behavior and attitude with a guy who I jokingly say he has two ears and one mouth and he uses them proportionately. And that's a very important lesson for someone trying to transform a company. You must listen more than you talk, and I think he does a great job. We try to do that. The Cuban we talk all day long way do interviews, but I gotta ask you back to virtual instruments. Okay, gets a good business going on with the emcee Goto partner about the anywhere in the federation of a partner with you as well, say, Is it all Federation? It's mostly through E M. C. And while the em wears of small V I customer, we don't do much with them on the go to market side on the go to market side. We rely more heavily, if you will. On AMC, that partnership has evolved. I mean, from the early days it was viewed as G. We're not sure who you are and what you do and whether or not you're competitive with us today, we have very, very common go to market processes around the globe. I'd love to see them stronger. I just left to cheese office in San GI Joe. We could doom. Or but when it's when it's all said and gone, this is one of the strongest go to market partners we have that's also shared the folks out there what they might not know about insurance, that you could share their hearing this now for the first time and working on the radar future of your business, your division product, extensive bility. Future of Internet of everything. Future Internet of things, whatever you want to put on a big data and the data center now, and the migration of cloud is all here. So at our core, we believe that every large enterprise will inevitably have some, if not all, of their work in the class. So the question is, how do you help them manage that inevitable migration to the cloud by de risking the migration and ensuring appropriate infrastructure performance management. Once you arrive there, we focus on the largest enterprises in the world. So unlike many tech startups, that will start with a midsize or small company and work their way up well, the largest banks in the universe, the largest insurance companies in the universe, the largest of every sector in the universe is a customer of the eye or will be someday. And that notion of solving very, very complex problems is something that our team has great pride in our ability to do that I want to get philosophical with you. You can for second kind of sit back and, you know, have a glass of wine and kind of talk to the younger generation out there with all your history on experience. How great of an opportunity for the young entrepreneurs and CEOs out there right now. Given the the confluence of the shift and inflection points, can you compare this to an error? We on the Cubes say It's like the PC revolution bundled in with the clients, terrorists and the Internet. All kind of at once do you agree? And would you say it? Guys, you have an amazing opportunity. Well, I think example of just how crazy it is. I I was driving to the airport this morning, and what I thought would be our long drive took two hours. Because there's so many people on the road in the Valley going to work. There's just so much going on in Silicon Valley right now. It is amazing. And for anyone who has a really, really great idea, the thing that's equally amazing is there's lots of capital out there to support those ideas. And so I would encourage any young entrepreneur who has a thought socialize your thought, Get it out so people can learn about it and then go get money to support and back that though. There's lots of money out there for good ideas. Lots of money. \ewelry officially taking the time coming out. Your busy schedule. CEO Virtual Instruments, chairman of Microsoft Here inside the Cube tech athletes is a big deal. You are one of the great great. Always have a conversation with you, sharing your thanks so much. Just the Cuban. Be right back with more insights and the signal from the noise at this short break

lying from the austin convention center in austin texas it's the q @ l world 2014 here are your hosts dave vellante and Stu miniman hi we're back to wrap up 2l world's two minima and I have been here all day will be here tomorrow as well we're starting at eight thirty local time 930 east coast time tomorrow getting started early michael dell will be on tomorrow we'll have the keynotes again only bar broadcasting for a half day but so today's do i want to get your take on this a lot of talk of course initiated by me and others about dallas a private company I think it's a two-edged sword frankly because I think that when things are really good and you got a lot of momentum behind you you've got transparent confirmation or quasi transparent confirmation and that creates a lot of buzz and Busby gets buzzed and acted some good thing some flywheel effects can occur from being public at the same time when things aren't so great and the headlines are bad and the earnings aren't great you can go into this vortex this abyss which dealt was kind of there and I think as you were talking about with Matt Eastwood the timing of del going private couldn't have been better from a valuation standpoint for Michael Dell and Silver Lake I mean I I think they got a fantastic deal even though there's a lot of risk in it that they're taking but the fact that Michael Dell's willing to step up and do that now on 75 percent of the company yes they have debt service what is it 18 billion dollars in debt so i think i think was the number but they'll pay that off over time because of the cash flow machine and they're going to be in a really good position when that happens yeah David's real interesting you know there's been a lot of change Adele there's been there's a lot of new faces here and some of the ones that we knew for many years are gone and you really are having that transformation inside I heard one person kind of overheard in the hallway type thing is you know there were certain antibodies in Dell and you know they're kind of sweeping through making changes and if there's some that aren't on board with where it's going you know well maybe they'll need to take I guess it was the voluntary exit type solution around and but they're hiring aggressively in other spaces because yeah I T is changing and for me the real striking thing dave is they'll talk a lot about choice and we say you know there's so many different markets out there there's you know VMware in their ecosystem that's what Microsoft's doing there's a public cloud and there's all of these little you know sub climates inside IT and devils playing a lot of bets which we talked about is how many bets can you place and actually make enough margin and win at what you're doing so since dell doesn't have to answer to Wall Street they can do what they think is best for the company and really for the customers it kept coming back to you know Michael and all the executive saying we're focused on what the customers are asking us to do we can move really fast we've definitely seen examples of Dell moving faster to deliver some of these solutions that then then they had when they were a public company things like a cloud marketplace things like the new tanukhs OEM you know a lot of interesting technologies here and there's still lots of hardware Dave you know i'm looking through the twitter stream and everybody snapping pictures of the new FX to kind of the next generation vertex it went from vertex really be in that remote office box to the FX to really being a data center you know nice hardware platform that you can build for a more scalable environment so you know interesting stuff happening always a good vibe here in Austin I think that one of the things that's interesting to me in a way when I think I think of I'm reminded of Luger stirs you know can who says elephants can't dance in a way Michael Dell is orchestrating a a different version with clear differences of that playbook and here's what I mean by that he took a company that was 100% essentially PCs and began a multi-billion dollar buying spree and transform this company into what is now the only end-to-end enterprise company now HP used to talk about that as a big deal they've given up on that now that they're going to split up what is the value to a customer in the end one this is supply chain why does the customer care about supply chain because gives you a dell pricing power so Dells got potentially one of the biggest supply chains now in the industry HP had a supply chain that was enormous but now when they split it up I don't know how they're going to continue to leverage that maybe they will maybe they won't that sounds like they won't be able to have that same leverage IBM when it sold its pc division to lenovo lost a lot of leverage gel is now able to sit claim number one in storage terabyte shipped why because it ships so many pcs it's not because of the server business it's because every PC goes out with a half a terabyte disk drive in it so add it up until kicks but all of a sudden boom number one that's interesting but from a customer standpoint you can buy virtually anything from the company now I talked about second elephants dancing you're seeing that transformation being led by a number of factors certainly servers is a big part of that and networking and storage with the big acquisitions that they've made and networking with the acquisitions that they made but also Perot gels got a big services organization that's very sticky and then the other thing which not a lot of people talk about is Dell software in fact I got a tweet earlier from somebody saying del I presume Dave I presume when you talk about Dell having one of everything you're not including software well as we know tells got a almost a two billion dollar software business now that's not ridiculously enormous but it's substantial how many how many multi-billion dollar software companies are out there so what I see is this big portfolio it's not i wouldn't say it's services lead it's not it's it's dell lead but there's a sticky services component with an increasing software component in growth areas like security like systems management like so quick tell calls information management which is a lot of the analytics and big data so jeal can continue if Dell can continue to make those acquisitions do the integrations it's got a pretty good story for customers don't you think yeah absolutely Dave and there's still it's that PC business in that server business that's generating the cash and allowing them to get into a lot of environments and trying out a lot of pieces you know the cloud broker models really interesting because we talked about it a couple of years ago and clouds are not homogeneous and it's not you know until recently moving from one environment to another was going to be difficult enter things like docker and management tools like the Australia saquisili del made are enabling some of these multi cloud environments and so we're seeing customers you know from what we see aren't going all in with one environment you know we've got a survey going on right now and some of the data we've seen so far is that you know it's not like they're saying oh I've got amazon and i'm only doing amazon most customers they're doing amazon they've got VMware inside they might be doing something with a jour because everybody's got office 365 and of course they've got lots of SAS applications so you know where does dell fit into this environment and can they be you know a broker of supplier and arms dealer for a lot of these pieces and you know how do they tie them all together how do they grow those services how do they have their software you said you know there's pieces of software they don't have they don't have you know 200 SAS applications like IBM does they don't have the breath of the amazon marketplace today but you know Dell is in a lot of customer environments especially in that you know kind of sub 5000 user you know marketplace so you know there's a lot of opportunity for Delta add on to that and I said before they can craft a story because they're not a public company that is very positive you know every CEO that is of si of a public company when he or she comes on the earnings call even if they have a Miss even if they have a quarter that they're disappointed in they spin a story and and the street that starts opening up the books and parsing the numbers and doing the analysis and the street either buys it or they don't and so what Dell can do is they can craft any story that they want and make it sound great and and create their own momentum now it sounds like they're growing but you know even today in the keynotes you got a little mix of units and dollars and terabytes and geographies and in different segments and so forth but Michael Dell was able to very effectively put together a story of growth that's been mirrored by his executive management team I'm gonna have no doubt that there's this growth segments but you think about it if IBM we're a private company they could talk about cloud they could talk about their software to find stuff they can talk about you know the security businesses those businesses that are growing and not talk about the business that are shrinking and not talk about the top line that's flatted down or whatever it is so so dell has that advantage in that they can craft a story and and and use that in their marketing to be relevant and I think that's really what customers want to know they want to know that the company I'm doing business with is relevant so they got pcs is the tip of the spear everybody knows dell pc is easy to do business with no problem they've got the services piece that's sticky and they've got everything else in between which is this end end strategy for mid-sized and smaller enterprises which really everybody else kind of pooh-poohed enough poo-poos they all they give it lip service this is this is where del really shines and so I don't know still it's gonna be interesting to see yeah David's interesting i was just ruminating on the fact that you know when you think about the early PC days del just made it so easy to buy first with a catalog and then with a website i could go in and click and choose the environments that i wanted if we look at converged infrastructure and cloud which is where the growth really is you know candle take those same type of experiences and move those to the environments and make you know those choices you know the cloud marketplace reminds me a lot of the dell S&P which was really the offering that I could buy almost anything from dell and dell would take a you know i cut even if it's a small one they didn't necessarily have to support it hugely successful drove a ton of revenue for dell so you know lots of things that they can you know to take advantage of Wow and like I say when wouldn't tell was was public they were a roughly sixty billion dollar company with with trading at fifty to sixty cents on the dollar Michael Delta and silverlake having taken that private the ultimate measure yes customer value etc etc but the real leader board is going to be what if and when tell this hides to have another exit whether that's public offering whatever what the thing to watch is will del have been able to shift its business mix toward the enterprise so that it can even trade let's say it one to one if so it can it could it could create 30 billion dollars of value you know then that Michael the open 75% of saw to me it was just a brilliant move this company is still a cash flow machine you know these big companies that aren't growing that Wall Street seems to hate for some reason even Corey MC these are cash flow machines Oracle cash flow machine IBM HP cash flow machines that if they have good leadership they can transform their businesses into a success story alright well getting kicked out of here still look tomorrow we start at 830am the cube would be live SiliconANGLE TV check out Wikibon org check out SiliconANGLE calm for all the news we'll see you tomorrow this is the cubes two minima and Dave vellante we're out see you tomorrow