it's theCUBE!

Covering VMworld 2018.

Brought to by VMware and its ecosystem partners.

>> Hello everyone, welcome back theCUBE's live coverage

here for day two, were kickin' it off,

for wall-to-wall coverage,

three days of CUBE interviews here

in the VMware village, the VMworld village.

I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante,

our next guest is a special guest

CUBE alumni Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies,

Founder of Dell, Michael Dell,

named after the company.

Great to see you again, thanks for comin' on.

>> Great to be with you guys,

and thank you as always for the

incredible coverage you provide for our events,

and so many great events across the whole industry.

You got two

two teams goin' here at the same time.

>> It's great, isn't it?

>> Tremendous coverage.

>> Thank you.

>> Great community.

What's interesting is

this is our ninth year doing VMworld,

and we've gotten to know the community really well,

and it's just been so much fun

and it's been great to see everyone,

and more exciting now is this years keynote

which I thought was pretty interesting.

You know you look back just four years ago

the cloud, and what was doing cloud,

who wasn't doing cloud, and everyone's throwin' around

"well they don't have a cloud strategy"

what does that mean, right?

So it's very clear what's happening with cloud right,

everyone knows the cloud's going to be there,

but the role of infrastructure hasn't changed, so,

at the end of the day

you made a big bet,

going taking Dell private,

and the things that you've been doing

certainly with VMware and others;

infrastructure is never going away, so,

that was a good bet.

I mean, storage doesn't go away,

all these things are still happening,

and Amazon announcing RDS on VMware on-premises

is absolute validation from the customers

that on-premises activity

is still going to be super relevant in a cloud world,

and so it's not like anything's really changed

it's just the rearranging of the resources.

Your thoughts on this trend,

and your bet on infrastructure?

>> It's a data economy,

right, it's a multi-cloud world,

that's a two way street.

And if you think about the billions of connected devices,

the explosion in data, overlay on top of that,

all the new computer science,

that requires all kinds of new infrastructure,

there's a boom on the edge.

And so, absolutely,

this is why you see our business growing so quickly,

and doing as well as it's doing and

we're investing in innovation, strongly,

you saw it you know yesterday, today in the keynotes and,

it's resonating extremely well with customers.

And so, I think we're very well positioned,

we've been gratified by the response

you know from customers and partners around the world and

look

you know the

you know every business is increasingly

recognizing the importance of

you know technology and data, and,

you know that requires lots of new tools and technology,

and it's why we created Dell Technologies, right,

to be the essential infrastructure company

and you know it's working well,

it's actually working better than we thought it would work.

So, it's all good guys.

>> Well, you know, my old boss,

whom I think you knew Pat McGovern used to say that

90% of mergers and acquisitions

failed to meet their objectives,

so then we have many, many examples of that.

In roughly 36 months

from when you announced the merger/acquisition,

you've completely transformed Dell,

you went from a company that was like

sort of a half super power obviously in client,

and you were relevant in other areas,

but you weren't number one.

To like number one in all the magic quadrants and

in record time,

it was one of the most amazing transformations

I've ever seen.

>> Thank you, thank you.

>> You're welcome, but,

I'd really like to understand, you know,

what were the conditions that allowed you to do it,

obviously they say it's better to be lucky than good,

you're both good and there's probably some luck involved.

What were the conditions that allowed you

to make that transformation in such record time?

>> Well certainly a big one was the acquisition of EMC.

>> Well right. (all laugh)

>> And along with it,

you know VMware and Pivotal, right?

And we theorized,

and actually as you guys know,

this story goes back a long way, right?

It actually goes back to 2001

when Dell and EMC started working together,

when VMware it was just a little,

you know, when Sanjay showed the slide about

the server virtualization;

actually before VMware was server virtualization

it was workstation virtualization.

>> Workstation, that's right. (laughs)

>> And we were an investor in VMware,

and we thought that was cool.

Anyway, so you fast forward to 2013, we go private,

2014, Joe Tucci and I

restart the discussion that we'd had earlier

back in 2009 about combining together,

2015 we announced it,

and we thought that

if we could combine everything together

that customers would really like it.

And, you know, thankfully as we've found

that's been true, it's been more true than we thought, and,

and the innovation engines are crankin' on high,

you know $12.8 billion in R&D

invested in the last three years.

And you see here at VMworld

and at Dell Technologies World,

the strength of the roadmaps, so,

every turn of the crank

we're just getting stronger and stronger.

We never believed

that you know everything was going to go

one place or the other, okay,

it's actually great that the edge is booming.

Now if you said "Did you know that five or 10 years ago?"

No, I didn't really know (laughs)

but you could kind of see some things starting to happen.

Look, you know distributed computing

will be even more distributed in the future. (laughs)

>> And so you had good products,

you had a great combination, that makes a lot of sense,

and you know we were. >> And incredible people too,

>> The team.

>> The quality of the talent that we are blessed with

is amazing, and it's a flywheel,

because you can attract the people,

and the very best people,

and develop them and train them,

and they want to come be part of the winning company.

>> And we saw a lot of,

and they saw that on theCUBE

we commented about the synergies

that were probably unrealized or unrecognized by others,

you obviously saw that.

But then also there's the other side of the equation

of the financial opportunity,

you took a financial risk,

you put your own money into the deal,

there's a lot of engineering going on-

>> We took the risk, it's the man in the arena, you know,

and not everybody wanted to take the risk, and,

you know I,

I'm happy to take some risk.

>> Yeah, but the rewards are lookin' good, I mean,

I mean if you're keepin' score,

which I'm sure you are,

the numbers are lookin' pretty good, so.

>> This has been good.

>> There's the financial side of it,

and then also risk/reward payouts

are also part of the entrepreneurial thing. (laughs)

>> Yeah, I mean if you look at our last quarter,

you know, gap revenues up plus 19%,

non-gap revenues up 17%,

data center, ISG business up 25%, right?

I mean we're clearly gaining share,

number one in storage, in all flash, in NAS,

you know in backup and data protection;

and every category of storage unstructured,

you know, we're bigger than number two,

and number three, and number four,

all combined together! (John laughs)

Number one in servers, right?

Number one in virtualization in all flavors,

you saw what Pat showed

you know with the progress with NSX, with Workspace ONE,

obviously server virtualization.

You know, number one in client as well, right?

In you know client revenue, so.

The business is quite strong and healthy,

and what's really interesting

is if you look at it across customer types,

you know the very largest,

the small, the medium,

the government, the state, local,

top 50 countries,

pretty much everything is growing double digits

all across the world;

every customer, every route to market, every channel.

So, you know, I think the industry

is stronger than people understand, that's the first point,

I think there's this data economy,

and this tsunami of data that's being created,

and that's driving demand for

infrastructure products and solutions,

which we have the best in the world,

and then on top of that, we're gaining share.

>> These market forces are interesting.

>> So all of this together is,

it's a good news story.

>> And the market forces you mentioned

that really were somethin' that

I think a lot of people in the industry at the time

that you were contemplating the deal.

And we talked privately about this,

so I want to kind of bring this up here on theCUBE,

way back when.

The industry pundits were looking at the industry

almost like a siloed map of TAM,

total addressable market.

And these other forces,

if you factor those in as a market force,

it changes the analysis of what you talk about,

and we talked privately many times,

but one time we were talkin' about

the maturity and size of the on-premises IT market,

it wasn't "Oh, IT's dying!" It's like huge! (laughs)

I mean it's massively mature, so,

and we talked privately about that;

that's somethin' that a lot of people missed,

they didn't miss that the size of the market was so big,

might've been you know flat, but it's a ature market,

but then these outside forces transform,

and now the deal with Amazon highlights

that bet. >> It's a two way street,

now it's goin' the other way.

And look, if it's obvious,

there's probably no opportunity, right? (laughs)

And so, you know I've kind of made my life of

doin' stuff that maybe wasn't quite obvious to everyone,

okay fine, that's just how it goes.

So, maybe it wasn't obvious to everyone,

and I remember when we announced,

you know in 2015,

everyone was like "Whoa, whoa, what are you doing?"