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