>> Live from Las Vegas,

it's theCUBE!

Covering Dell Technologies World 2019.

Brought to you by Dell Technologies

and its ecosystem partners.

>> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage

here at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas.

I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante,

Special guest Michael Dell, Chairman,

CEO of Dell Technologies, CUBE alumni.

Great to see you again.

Yearly pilgrimage to come on the CUBE,

good to see you again.

Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, always great

to be with you guys.

>> All right, so I got to ask you,

'cause Dave and I were talking

on yesterday's kickoff on our intro

about the conversation we had, I think, 6 years ago.

We saw you standing there in Austin,

still a public company, you didn't go private yet,

and then a series of moves, going private,

and we were like, that's great.

Get behind the curtain, get things reset,

the cash flow's looking good.

You had that clear plan, as the founder and CEO.

It's kind of a reset, if you will,

and up to now, the execution and just the series of moves,

and when you look back now, where you are today

and where you were then, how do you feel?

What did you learn?

What's some of the highlights for you?

>> Well, look, we feel great.

Our business has really grown tremendously.

All the things we've been doing are resonating

with customers.

We've been able, I would say, to restore the origins

of the entrepreneurial dream and success of the company

and reintroduce innovation and risk taking

into a now $91 billion dollar company,

growing in double digits last year,

and certainly the set of capabilities

that we've been able to build organically and inorganically,

and with the set of alliances that we have,

the trust that customers have given us,

I'm super happy about the position that we're in

and the opportunities going forward.

And as I've said in my keynote yesterday,

I think of this is really just the pre-game show

to what's ahead for our industry

and the role that technology is going to play in the world.

>> Yesterday you said data is the lifeblood

of digital transformation,

the heartbeat of digital transformation,

and it's also revitalizing all the other components

of what looked like a consolidated market

is now actually being reborn,

the PC, technology infrastructure fabrics,

and other software opportunities.

So data has kind of brought in a whole nother level

of revitalization in the industry,

which is actually causing more investment

in what looked like older category of IT

and computers and whatnot.

This has been a big tailwind for you guys.

>> Well, data's always been at the center

of how the technology industry works.

Now we just have a tsunami explosion of data,

and, of course, now we have this new computer science

that allows us to reason over the data in real time

and create much better results and outcomes,

and that, combined with the computing power,

all organizations have to reimagine themselves

given all these technologies,

and certainly the infrastructure requirements

in terms of the network, the storage, the compute,

the build on the edge, tons of new requirements,

and we're super well positioned to go address all of that.

>> I enjoyed your keynote, Michael.

I thought it was excellent, one of your better ones,

and you painted a picture of tech for good,

really life changing.

Things you guys and your customers are doing,

you gave some examples.

The BMA example was great, Draper labs.

But you also need a platform

for this digital transformation.

We've seen the numbers.

80% of the workloads are still on prim.

What do you think that looks like 10 years down the road?

What's your vision say?

>> Well, the surprise outcome 10 years from now

is there'll be something much bigger than the private cloud

and the public cloud.

It's the edge,

and I actually think there will be way more

computed data on the edge in 10 years

than any of the derivatives of cloud

that we want to talk about.

So, that's the 10 year prediction.

That's kind of what I see,

and maybe nobody's predicting that just yet,

but let's come back in 10 years

and see what it looks like.

>> So, >> I'd like to do that.

>> Hybrid cloud has been around for a while,

been talked about.

It's been kind of the operating model, we see that.

Multi-cloud has really kind of surged in importance

and in conversations because I think people wake up

and go, "Hey, I've got multiple clouds.

I've got Azure over here, Office 365,

I've got some Amazon over here,

I've got some home-grown stuff over here,

and I've got a data center."

So I think people kind of generally can relate

to the reality of multi-cloud hybrid,

little bit more a different kind of twist,

but certainly relevant, but multi-cloud

has got everyone's attention.

And you guys launched Dell Cloud.

Is that a multi-cloud, or is that a cloud

to multiple clouds?

Explain your view on that and where this goes.

>> So, really what we're doing is bringing to customers

all the resources they need to operate

in the hybrid multi-cloud world.

First you have to recognize

that the workloads want to move around,

and to say that they're all going to be here or there

is, in some sense, missing the point

because they're going to move back and forth.

And you've got regulation, cost, security, performance,

latency, all sorts of new requirements that are coming

at you, and they're not going to just sit it in one place.

Now, as you know, with the VMware Cloud Foundation,

we have the ability to move these workloads seamlessly

across essentially all the public clouds, right?

4,200 partners out there,

infrastructure on premise built and tuned

specifically for the VMware platform,

and empowered also for the edge.

And all of this together is the Dell technologies cloud.

We have, obviously, great capabilities

from our Dell EMC infrastructure solutions

and all the great innovations at VMware coming together.

>> Scale has been a topic that we've talked about on theCUBE,

many years.

We saw Amazon get scale with public cloud.

Scale is a competitive advantage that's now

becoming kind of table stakes for customers

trying to figure out how to operate at digital scale

the speed of life.

You guys have a scale level now that's pretty impressive,

what you guys have done with the puzzle pieces,

you know, companies.

You've got capabilities now across the board.

As you look at scale as a competitive advantage,

which it is and we've talked about this before,

you now have to integrate seamlessly these pieces,

so as you compose, as customers

compose the variety of capabilities,

it's got to be frictionless.

That's a goal.

How do you look at that,

and how do you talk to your teams about this,

and what's your view on scale?

Is this something you guys talk about inside the company?

>> Well, inside the business,

the first priority was to get

each of the individual pieces working well,

but then we saw that the real opportunity

was in the seams and how we could more deeply integrate

all the aspects of what we're doing together.

And you saw that on stage in vivid form yesterday

with Pat and Jeff and Satcha and even more today again.

And there's more to do.

There's always more to do.

We're working on how we build a data platform,

bringing together all of our capabilities with Boomi

and data protection and VMware,

and this is all going to be super important

as we enter this AI-enabled age of the future.

>> Michael, you've got a track record

of creating shareholder value.

We all have CNBC on in the office and when Michael's on

everybody comes across the room.

Davos, Becky Quick, who we're also big fans of, asked you

to sort of knock down the three criticisms,

and it was really a conversation about stock price.

And you did, you knocked down the debt structure,

the low margin business, the ownership structure, et cetera,

but you never came back to stock price.

So it looks like a couple of ways to invest now,

VMware directly, also it looks like VMware,

you could buy it cheaply through Dell.

What are your thoughts on that,

where Dell sits in the market today, its value?

>> I think investors are increasingly understanding

that we've created an incredible business here,

and certainly if we look

at the additional coverage that we have,

and as they're understanding the business

some of the analysts are starting to say,

"Hey this doesn't really feel like a conglomerate!"

That was a direct quote, okay?

And if you think about what we demonstrated today

and yesterday and we'll demonstrate in the future,

we're not like Berkshire Hathaway.

This is not a railroad that owns a chain of restaurants.

This is one integrated business

that fits together incredibly well,

and it's generating substantial cash flows,

and I think investors over time are figuring out

the value that's intrinsic to the overall

Dell Technologies family.

Now, we've got lots of ways to invest.

We've got VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal,

and, of course, the overall Dell Technologies.

>> Yeah, and just a follow up on that,

I've observed on the margin side,

but when Dell went private,

it was around 19% gross margins,

and now you're in gross margin heaven with absorbing EMC,

and it seems to be headed in the right direction.

It's a nice mix.

>> In our cloud and infrastructure group,

almost 90% of the engineers are software engineers,

so you think about the innovations you saw in states today

with PowerMax and Unity XT and our PowerProtect platform.

This is basically all software running on PowerEdge servers

and platforms that we've created.

>> What's on your plate now, Michael,

as you come out of Dell Technologies World,

you've got business to take care of.

What's your goals, what's on your plate,

what's your objectives,

what are you trying to accomplish in the next year?

>> Well certainly continuing to execute for our customers,

growing faster than the industry,

maintaining and improving our customer MPS levels,

and keeping the innovation engine cranked up on high.

You saw a lot today and yesterday.

Stay tuned.

VMworld's coming in August,

and there'll be much, much more.

And we continue to innovate together, closely with VMware,

so we've got lots more in the queue.

>> And you've got cash flow coming in,

which means your suppliers have a lot of customers.