>> Announcer: Live, from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center
in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2016.
Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors.
Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman.
>> Welcome back, everyone.
We're live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016.
This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE.
It's our flagship program.
We go out to the events and extract the signal
from the noise.
I'm John Furrier and my co-host this week, Stu Minniman,
for three days of wall-to-wall coverage.
Our next guest is the chairman and CEO of
Dell Technologies, Inc., that's the first time
we've actually used that.
Congratulations on, I think last Thursday or
Wednesday, the name officially became Dell Technology.
Michael Dell, welcome back to theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
Super excited to be with you and obviously super
excited about the formation of Dell Technologies
as we bring together Dell and EMC and VMware and
Pivotal and RSA and Virtustream and SecureWorks
and so many other great organizations.
>> So Dell Technology, now it's official, but EMC,
Dell EMC is not yet official.
Quick, give us the update.
That's the number one thing people are asking.
What's the update with the merger and the
China situation.
What's the quick update there from your standpoint?
>> You know, we announced this back in October of
last year and we're very much on track with the
original timeline that we said, which was that we'd
close between May and October of this year, and
on the original terms.
So everything is moving along and we're
making great progress.
>> Chinese government not playing monkey business
with you, looking at the big mega-merger and
thinking, whoa, slow down.
>> We're continuing to work with them, and as I said,
we're on track with the original schedule and terms
that we said when we announced it back in
October of last year.
>> Exciting things on the global landscape, we'll
get to that in a second.
But I want to get your thoughts on VMworld because
this is a geek show and this is a technology show
and on the keynote they're showing debugging ports,
migrating from the cloud, I mean you don't see that.
You usually see the pomp and circumstance, all the glamour.
Here, I mean you're a geek, you're always getting
down and dirty with the technology.
Thoughts on this community, because this is,
these guys roll their sleeves up.
And by the way, they're very vocal on social media
so you can always get the Twitter feed, but
your thoughts on VMworld, the culture of this ecosystem?
>> I thought the demos that Guido showed were
incredibly cool, showing sort of the evolution of
virtualization to the software-defined data center
to the hybrid cloud to now Cross-Cloud and all the
things that you can do.
And as you saw, live examples with Citibank and
Columbia and J & J, these are real live organizations.
And of course at VMworld you have the ecosystem of
VMware in all of its glory, with the whole industry
coming together and, as you said, a passionate
group of individuals that are excited about what
they're doing and VMware is kind of a big part of
how the industry is evolving.
And we're thrilled be an even bigger part of it now
than we have been in the past.
It's not my first time to come to VMworld, of course.
>> But again, with now Dell Technologies looming,
and the merger is going to be a big part of that.
>> Yes.
>> Technologies, and I'll ask that specific question later.
But I do want to get your thoughts as someone who has
been in the industry as a power broker, founder, CEO,
now going private, you've seen all the waves of
innovation.
The ecosystem has become a really important part
of it in your world there was the Wintel and the
developer communities during those days, for the
software business, aka the computer industry per se,
but now we're on a new inflection point where
the computer industry-like movement is happening
with cloud and data center, hyper-converged environments.
What does the ecosystem mean?
Because we've seen the ecosystem kind of sitting there
kind of waiting for this explosion with the cloud.
Your thoughts on what the ecosystem means in this
new era, vis-a-vis other times in history?
>> You know, I don't see them waiting.
You think about the kind of armada of companies
that are coming along as the ecosystem evolves.
Again, you see it out there on the show floor.
You take NSX as an example.
There's tremendous growth in software-defined networking.
And NSX is kind of leading the way.
And you see all the leading networking companies
in the world here at VMworld using NSX as the
platform for the software-defined network.
It's just another great example.
The original growth in the hypervisor and
then into software-defined storage, software-defined
networking and you can, if you look further on the
show floor, right, you'll see kind of
software-defined everything.
And all aspects of the network, layers four through
seven, eventually being virtualized.
From the cutting edge --
>> John: So, virtualized stack.
>> New things all the way to the mainstream and
of course there's a lot of growth in our industry
around converged and hyper-converged because it's
making it easy to deploy these solutions
in a rapid fashion and we're right in
the middle of all this.
>> So Michael, you speak pretty passionately about
VMware and their role in the ecosystem.
There's still a lot of noise out there that
people I don't think understand how you're going
to finance the debt and there's many people, like
still during the keynote this morning, they're like,
as soon as the deal's done, VMware is going to be sold off.
Really, hardware companies don't
want to do software. >> Absolutely incorrect.
That's totally wrong.
Anybody that says that has no clue what they're
talking about.
So look, I think first thing is you've got do
do some math.
If you look at the combined cash flows of Dell and
EMC and VMware, what you find is they're many,
many times greater than the debt service.
And so we have, in fact, an advantage capital
structure that allows us to not only do what we're
doing and have tremendous scale and investment in
innovation, roughly $4.5 billion annually invested
in R & D, the largest enterprise systems company
in the world, the strongest supply chain,
and also have the speed and flexibility
with some of these new startup instances.
You guys are familiar with what we're doing
with Pivotal and Cloud Foundry and all the
great things that are going on there.
With SecureWorks, with Boomi, so we've got
both the speed and agility of a startup plus
the scale and breadth with the broadest ecosystem
and access to customers, and while we're here
at VMworld, we're not just about VMware, right?
Dell Technologies is a company that embraces all
of the major ecosystems, be it the Microsoft ecosystem,
the Linux and OpenStack and container ecosystems.
So the hardware platforms that we're creating
allow customers the broadest set of solutions to be
able to stand up against their requirements.
>> So back at Dell World, Michael, you talked about,
you had Satya Nadella up on stage, how Microsoft fits
and understanding, you know, in many ways Dell Technologies
is an arms supplier to a lot of environments.
You've got the enterprise data center.
You've got the public cloud.
Where do you see VMware in this evolving multi-cloud
very varied ecosystem?
>> I think if you look at VMware's business in the
first half of this year, it's done quite well.
And when I look at the trends for the forward
outlook and kind of growth characteristics,
VMware is making a very nice transition into
this emerging cloud world.
And it's doing that by taking the whole
virtualization and software-defined technologies
beyond the hypervisor into the whole software-defined
data center.
And things like the VMware Cloud Foundations
make it a lot easier to do that, whether you're doing
it on premise in a private cloud or whether you're a
service provider, a telco, an IBM, for example.
And I think you'll see others as well.
And customers that have embranced VMware and
of course there are 500,000 plus around the world,
are looking for ways to be able to extend out
to the public cloud.
And the kinds of announcements you saw today
with IBM, with the VMware Cross-Cloud initiative,
will allow for this to extend deep into
the public clouds.
>> We're getting some questions from Twitter.
I'll read a few of them here.
Two questions.
Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like?
And two, what of the technologies in the portfolio
are you most excited about.
And I asked VMware or Dell Technologies and
they asked, both.
So two questions.
Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like?
And what technology are you most excited about?
>> I have met a number of the distinguished folks
over in China for sure, whether it be in one
on one meetings or in group meetings and I'm
over there on a pretty regular basis.
China is the second largest market in the world
for Dell to sell its products.
So it's also the second largest economy in the world
so that shouldn't be too surprising.
But we have roughly $5.5 billion business in China,
a big part of our supply chain.
On the second question, you know, it's kind of like
saying
>> John: Your favorite child.
>> Which of your children do you love the most, right?
So that's not, you can get in a lot of trouble with that.
But when I look across the whole --
>> We need to categorize here.
I'll just rephrase the question because I think
that's, I mean that's a political response, I get that.
But let's go into, where do you see the disruption
coming from?
If you had to point out a disruptive enabler that
is a lever for the portfolio, where would you look at
and say okay, that's going to be a real enabling
technology that's going to one, propel Dell on
a domestic and global basis, and two,
power the ecosystem?
>> I think this digital transformation is real.
And I think that we are at the very beginning
of this period of time where the cost to make
things intelligent is approaching zero and the
number of them is going to explode.
And so the influence and impact that our industry
has on the world will expand geometrically as a result.
And so the challenge that every organization is
going to have, is how do you take all this information
in real time and also in time series, because I think
there will be some value to the historical data, and
turn it into better insights, to be able to make
better decisions, to make better products and services.
And we're just at the very beginning of that.
So, to me, that is the most exciting thing going on
and obviously, we're right in the middle of that
from lots of different perspectives.
>> I've got to ask you a personal question.
And I want to get your thoughts on this as someone
who's been in the industry and is a chess master,
3D chess player, also running a big business,
global business, billions of dollars.
In 1994, Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead and he
talked about the future and he completely missed
the internet in his forward-looking book.
And I bring that up because now we're living in
a time where IOT and autonomous vehicles,
looking at digital state, digital transformation
is a big part of that, so I ask the question,
do you worry about missing something?
I don't mean FOMO, fear of missing out, but there
are big moves being made like technology in
autonomous vehicles, drones, all this AI going on,
machine learning, do you look at that and go hmmm.
Is that on your mind, like maybe you might miss
something and how do you handle that?
>> It's a good point.
If you look at all the smartest people in the
industry, whatever that means, and you say what's
their ability to predict what happens in five years,
10 years, 15 years, it's actually not
been very good, right?
And so that has been humbling, if somebody included
me in that category of people that could try to do that.
But we've got a lot of smart folks.
I think we have, at the core of our company, this
concept of having big ears, which means we want
to listen and we want to learn.
And our job is to take all these things that we're
learning from our customers and all of our understanding
of the core molecular elements of technology, and
make the magic happen in the middle that go solves
the problems that customers have.
>> Do you see IOT and cars and this kind of consumer
experience very real for Dell Technologies to play in?
>> I think there's no question that the elemental cost
of computing is declining and whenever you see that
happening, you see, it's like a gas, right?
It expands to fit the space available.
And I think you'll absolutely see this explosion,
proliferation, you're already seeing it.
We have hundreds of IOT projects going already
within our company and we know of many, many others,
so it's real.
>> It's in the early phase of the hype cycle.
Michael, we've got to wrap but I want to ask
one final question and then kind of wrap it up.
Everyone wants to know, what's the future
of VMware in your words, talk to the customers
that are watching and the people in the ecosystem
and employees and partners.
What is the future of VMware
in the Dell Technologies vision?
>> I think VMware has got a very bright future.
I've seen this in the past where people said,
Oh, you know, the PC is dead so forget about Dell.
Everything's going to the cloud, so forget about
all these other companies.
I don't think that's quite the way it all works.
So what I see in VMware is an incredibly vibrant
ecosystem that's getting stronger.
I see VMware remaining independent and we're
obviously the majority shareholder and helping to
ensure the ecosystem stays very, very strong.
And I see very exciting new things, like NSX.
Extending the reach of virtualization technology
well beyond the core original business of VMware
which was a great business and continues to
actually be a great business.
>> Michael, thanks for spending the time, with
your busy schedule, to join us on theCUBE.
I appreciate it.
Great to see you.
Michael Dell here inside theCUBE.
I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman.
You're watching theCUBE from SiliconANGLE Media.
We'll be right back with more.
I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman.
We'll be right back.