 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for the wrap up on day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE coverage at Dell EMC World, our eighth year covering EMC World now, first year covering Dell EMC World. It's part of the big story of Dell and EMC combining entities, forming Dell technologies, all those brands. I'm John Florey with SiliconANGLE, my co-host this week, Paul Gillum, and Keith Townsend, CTO advisor. Guys, great week. I thought I'd be wrecked at this point, but I mean, a lot of energy here, but we heard every story. We heard all the commentary. We heard the EMC people trotting in about their customer references. We hear the executives on message. Bottom line, let's translate it for everybody. All the messaging, pretty tight. All singing the same song, she might take away real quickly on messaging. They want to portray that this is all good. Everything's fine, no icebergs ahead. We're going to help customers, trying to move from speeds to feeds to a bigger message. Not getting there yet, still speeds and feeds. 14X fast, 14G, that's kind of the high level of thoughts. This company wants to dominate. I mean, what we heard again and again these last few days is number one, number one. They want to own the top market share in every market in which they play, and they have a broad array of products to do that. They have a huge mix of products, maybe too many products, but with some overlap, that's okay. But they clearly are trying to blanket or carpet bomb those markets where they think they can win. Interestingly, there are some markets like Big Data, like software or cloud infrastructure where they're not, they're choosing not to be a big player, and that's okay too, it means that they're focused. Keith, your thoughts. So again, I agree with you, tight marketing. They wanted to get out this message. I think that the analysts, the press and analysts get together at the beginning, they emphasize 310 analysts from analysts and press, from all over the world, they get out the message, they got these guys and guys and gals in here to cover that message that Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, is the leader in this space. You know what, when big mergers like this happen, I can't think of one that happened well. They're usually rocky to begin with. We haven't seen those rocks at the beginning, we haven't seen that at the show. It seems like the messaging has been consistent, the customers more or less get it, and that we can't detect the chinks in the armor. So I think they did a great job of getting that out there and portraying the strength of the brand and throughout the show, it was a great show for it. They have a good story, their story better together. I was seeing that's the whole theme. My impression is in weaving through all the messaging is generally, authentically, the people are pretty happy with it. I think EMC people have been trying to break out of this more storage company, you know. And I won't say they had a little bit of VMware envy because the VMworld events were always different than EMC worlds, so those culture classes weren't necessarily too divergent, but different. You had storage guys, you had VMware developers, right? So I think EMC was always trying to break out and be bigger and just couldn't get there. Dell wanted to be more enterprise, right? So I think the two together actually is better, in my opinion. Now, will it work? I still think your post is still open. I still, they merged for the right reasons, but look at it, they're not done. They got a boatload of work to do. Well, I think they're aware, you know, to Keith's point, they're aware that history is against them. The mega-merchers don't work, never have worked in this industry, and so that creates a lot of pressure to make this one work. And the good thing about that for both companies is that they're aware of what went wrong in the past. I mean, we had Howard Elias on the show the first day. Howard Elias went through two of the worst tech mega-merchers in history with Compact Digital and HP Compact, knows where a lot of those landmines are. So they seemed hyper aware of getting everyone on message, getting everyone talking positively about synergy, and as you said, John, the language was consistent from the start. I want to ask you guys a pointed question on that point, because this kind of brings out the next question. Management team, do they have the chops? Because to your point, history's against them, okay? We set out with Michael Dell, founder-led entrepreneur, still at the helm, he's a billionaire. They're private, so no shot clock on the public markets. Marius Haas, he's a pro. Howard Elias, a pro. Goulden, he does this thing. On and on and on. I think they got a pretty deep bench. I mean, your thoughts, guys. So, let's think about that. How many bad mergers has EMC gone through? Data domain. Home run. Incredible. Home run. Home run. DSSD. DSD, well, not so much, but that wasn't really that big of a merger. They kind of cleaned that up pretty quickly. Yeah, they did. Just what doesn't work, they get it out quick. So, great management team understands the complexities of mergers. VMware merger, or acquisition, probably one of the best in the history of tech. So, the management team has the chops to understand where the value is added, extract that value, and expand it. I think they- That's a great point. And that's forced too. They know when to leave stuff alone, too. Yeah, they're engineering led, but they're also, because we heard Jeff Pedro on talking about the storage challenges. He's like, we know what to do. We took the lumps trying to late to the game on Flash. We're not going to be the late to the game on these other areas. And he's very hyper focused. But the other thing that we need to talk about is that EMC has just been an impeccably credible sales organization. They know how to sell. They know how to motivate sales people. They know how to tell the enterprise sales motion, which is the biggest challenge in today's industry. Every company I talk to, start up to a growing IPO, as we need better enterprise sales. Look at Google. Look what they're doing in the cloud. They are struggling. Because they have great tech and a horrid sales people. They're hiring young people doing phone work. Enterprise sales is a tricky game. Arguably the best enterprise sales force on the planet is EMC's. I mean, these are the guys who we get on a plane at midnight, we charter a plane at midnight to get to the customer's site to fix a problem. I know why the company does it like that. And Dell has a lot to learn from that. If Dell can really take that knowledge and that culture and absorb it into their own enterprise sales force, they're going to have huge opportunity when they serve it. I want to take a minute to just thank our sponsors for the awesome CUBE coverage. You guys did great. Dell, EMC, Toshiba, Virtustream, Cisco, Datos, Nutanix, Druva, and VMware. Thanks to your support, we had two CUBEs covering VMworld. 20 plus videos a day for three straight days. All that's on youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE. Of course, SiliconANGLE.com for all the journalism and reporting. Wikibon.com for all the great research. And also a shout out to Keith at CTO Advisor. Check him out on Twitter. He's always part of the conversation. Super influential. Guys, great job this week. Just high level marks, my takeaway. Hyperconverged, big time focus of these guys. VMware is the glue. Hybrid cloud. And they're defensively using Pivotal to hold the line on Amazon. So, thoughts on that point. I see you're rolling your eyes. I just got out with James Water, the SVP within that business unit. Pivotal is a key part of this. You know, Michael has stretched on the CUBE, on Twitter, how important Pivotal is to their long-term success. One of Dell's challenges. Dell EMC's. And this is not just Dell EMC. It's infrastructure companies throughout the landscape. It's getting out of that conversation with the VP of infrastructure. Getting into the offices of the CIO, COCMO, and having these business conversations. And it's going to take a Pivotal type of solution to get that done. I thought Michael made a very great point that that white glove services, that's basically, their service organization is basically the older EMC services organization that's used to getting on the flight, solving the problem, whatever the original statement of work was. They're willing to tear that up, and get down, and get dirty, and get that done. They need to translate that. The question for you then is this. Without Pivotal, they have no play for the app developers. Amazon would wipe, mop that up, and they'd have no position. So I would say it's certainly a placeholder, a good one, I'm not going to deny that. The question is, how big is that market for them? Can they get there? Can they hold a line on Pivotal and bring in some resources and cavalry to keep that going? This is where VMware comes into play. VMware has the relationship with the software layer, at least, and they have a great story to tell. They need to get into the front of the right people and tell that story. That cross-cloud story, I've been able to develop using CF, and then move that to any cloud using NSX. Great story, but John, to your point, they have to get into the right rooms, they have the right conversations, and that's a tough one to do. I also got to give them some time. I mean, this merger happened eight months ago. I think it's pretty remarkable what they've pulled off here in such a short time. And to think about, developers are probably not their first priority. All right, so we're going to do the metadata segment of our wrap-up, which I just made up since it's such a good name, metadata, and the spirit of surveillance. What metadata can you pull out of your interviews, guys, that's a tea leaf that we could read? And just nuanced points, I'll start. Pat Gelsinger talked about Pivotal, Sharon in between the conversations weaved in. Yeah, we had to spin out Pivotal, but I could almost see it in his eyes. He didn't say it specifically, but it's like, we shouldn't have sold it, right? It's because they had to, because he said he had to work on the foundational stuff, get NSX done, get that right. But you almost see that now, it's like, I like to bring that back in, although a separate company. To me, I find that a very interesting data point that that actually makes a lot of sense to your point about VMware. That might be an interesting combination. Why take Pivotal public? Roll it into VMware. Yeah, I think that is going to be an interesting space to watch over the next few months. VMware and Pivotal have started to, once again, come back together with solutions. This NSX cross-cloud talk makes it very compelling. It's hard to predict Dale EMC being relevant long-term. They understand the value short-term. They have a short rope to take advantage of this cross-selling between the Dale and EMC customer. They can grow this business, get revenue short-term, but there will be a cliff where they need to make that transition. Cisco is trying to make that transition into a services company, a software company, and it's hard to turn now one knob and turn the law one up. We'll see if Pat, Michael Dell and the team have the chops to get it done. Cisco has to endure the public markets while they're doing that, which is one advantage Dell has. Data points that you can extract that you take away from this. Synergy, synergy. Two companies this big come together. You're looking at a lot of product line overlap. I came out of this though thinking that there really isn't that much product line overlap. You've got a company that's strong in the mid-market, small companies, companies that's strong in the enterprise, storage, servers, not a lot of overlap there. The big question for me, so I think the synergy question is, this merger makes sense from that perspective, the big question is software. What are they going to do with those software assets? And to your point, the future is going to be software to find everything. And that's not a story they're telling yet. Keith, extracted insight that you observed that was notable that you kind of picked out of the pile of the interviews. Is there anything notable to you? Oh. Something obscure that made you go, wow, I didn't know that. Oh, that's a good piece of the puzzle to put together. You know what? I didn't, just the scale of, you look at the merger, $57 billion, and you're on paper, you're like, okay, that's interesting. But a lot of the numbers coming out, we talked to the senior VP of marketing, and he said, you know what? My guys are making bank. And actually, that's a paraphrase of him. You said that, John, that they're making bank. And one of the things that I worried about was the culture, the sales culture between Dell and EMC. Dell, sales culture, very web based, very, I had a Dell rep, and there was not an awful lot of value add. EMC, you know, the value add, and those guys earned their money. And bringing those two together, and making sure that customers don't miss a beat, and still get that EMC value, but Dell is able to maintain that same cost structure. I thought that was a really complicated thing to do. It seems like they're executing really well on that. And I thought, from a customer's perspective, you want your supplier to make money, and you want it to not be too disruptive, but you want to see some value. It's a great point. I was one of my things of my highlights of my takeaways. Marius has this interview around sales and comp and structure, and there used to a lot of bank those sales guys, and now it's like, hey, we're going to give you a haircut. What? How about making a million dollars in commissions this year? This merger will not work unless the sales organization is in sync. Other notables for me, just that jumped out at me, that kind of made me go, that amplifies the point, that's memorable, is Michael Dell's interview, hits home the point of entrepreneur, founder led guy, okay? And there's only three left in the industry, Allison, Dell, and Bezos, in my mind that are billionaires that are actively, not mailing it in, they're actively driving their business, have a great ethos and culture that is creating durability. I find that the key point for me, that was a moment, I think he does self-divide a little bit too much, which gives me a red flag, like, why is he pushing pivotal so much? What is he hiding? Oh, that's a different story. Michael Dell, founder. Gelsinger shared some personal commentary around his personal life, 2016 was the hardest year of his life. That was a meeting story. Personal and business, almost got fired, remember last year? Pat Gelsinger fired. So he had a tough year, now he's kicking ass, taking names, valuations on the rise, that jumped out at me. And finally, the little nuance in this merger is the alliance opportunity. Dell has the Intel-Wintel-Microsoft relationships from day one. That history, Intel is on stage. EMC's had it, but not at the deep level that Dell did. So I see the alliance teams really grooving here, so that's going to impact channel marketing, SIs, I think you're going to see a massive power base to your scale point around alliances in the industry, the ecosystem. It's either going to blow up big or blow up bad. Either way, it's high octane power, it is a big bet. It's a big bet. Those are my points. Anything that jumped out at you? Final thoughts, interviews? Jeff Townsend threw off an interesting statistic. 70% of the traffic on the internet will be video by 2020. I had never heard that one before, but that has some pretty interesting implications for how infrastructure has to manage it. Yeah, it's great for our business. We're doing video right now. Keith, anything that jumped out at you? Anything else? No, the scale of this show compared to, I've been a Dell role. I've been to EMC world. The energy is different here. I can say that for sure from the EMC worlds and the Dell worlds that I've been at. Customers, I think, are wide-eyed. I've been to plenty of VM worlds. This doesn't quite have the flavor of a VM world, but I think customers are starting to understand the scale of Dell EMC, the entire portfolio. You walk the show floor, you're like, wow, I didn't know that- The relevance has increased. Little bits of this larger Dell technologies that customers are picking up on that they're keying on that there's value there. They have the 800-pound gorilla, the very relevant impact people are taking notice of. If you're a one-product Dell customer, a one-product EMC customer, you're coming to this show for the first time. I think you're a little bit wild. All right, guys, great job, Keith. Great to have you, host of theCUBE. Great job, as always. Really appreciate you bringing the commentary to theCUBE. Great stuff. Always a great being here. Great editorial, great insight, great questions. Great to work with you guys. Great to the team. Thanks to our sponsors. Go to silkenangle.com, wikibond.com, and go to youtube.com, slash silkenangle. Check out all the videos in the playlist. More coverage, great. Thanks for watching our coverage, special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. See you next time.