 Live from the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE at Dell World 2014. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Hi, we're back to Wrap Up Dell World. Stu Miniman and I have been here all day. We'll be here tomorrow as well. We're starting at 8.30 local time, 9.30 East Coast time tomorrow. Getting started early. Michael Dell will be on tomorrow. We'll have the keynotes again. We'll be back tomorrow. We'll have the keynotes again. We're only broadcasting for a half day, but so today, Stu, I want to get your take on this. A lot of talk, of course, initiated by me and others about Dell as a private company. I think it's a two-edged sword, frankly, because I think that when things are really good and you've got a lot of momentum behind you, you've got transparent confirmation or quasi-transparent confirmation and that creates a lot of buzz and buzz begets buzz and some good things, some flywheel effects can occur from being public at the same time when things aren't so great and the headlines are bad and the earnings aren't great, you can go into this vortex, this abyss, which Dell was kind of there. As we were talking about with Matt Eastwood, the timing of Dell going private couldn't have been better from a valuation standpoint for Michael Dell and Silver Lake. I mean, I think they got a fantastic deal, even though there's a lot of risk in it that they're taking, but the fact that Michael Dell's willing to step up and do that now owns 75% of the company, yes, they have debt service, what is it, $18 billion in debt, I think was the number, but they'll pay that off over time because of the cash flow machine and they're going to be in a really good position when that happens. Yeah, David's real interesting. There's been a lot of change at Dell. There's been a lot of new faces here and some of the ones that we knew for many years are gone and you really are having that transformation inside. I heard one person kind of the over-heard in the hallway type thing is, there were certain antibodies in Dell and they're kind of sweeping through making changes and if there's some that aren't on board with where it's going, well maybe they'll need to take, I guess it was the voluntary exit type solution. But they're hiring aggressively in other spaces because IT is changing and for me, the real striking thing, Dave, is Dell talked a lot about choice and we say there's so many different markets out there. There's VMware in their ecosystem. That's what Microsoft's doing. There's the public cloud and there's all of these little sub-climates inside IT and Dell's playing a lot of bets which we talked about is how many bets can you place and actually make enough margin and win at what you're doing. So since Dell doesn't have to answer to Wall Street, they can do what they think is best for the company and really for the customers. It kept coming back to Michael and all the executives saying we're focused on what the customers are asking us to do. We can move really fast. We've definitely seen examples of Dell moving faster to deliver some of these solutions than they had when they were a public company. Things like the cloud marketplace, things like the Nutanix OEM. A lot of interesting technologies here and there's still lots of hardware, Dave. I'm looking through the Twitter stream and everybody's snapping pictures of the new FX2. Kind of the next generation Vertex. Vertex really being that remote office box to the FX2 really being a data center, nice hardware platform that you can build for a more scalable environment. Interesting stuff happening. Always a good vibe here in Austin. I think that one of the other things that's interesting to me, in a way, I think of, I'm reminded of Lou Gershner's, who says elephants can't dance. In a way, Michael Dell is orchestrating a different version, clear differences of that playbook. And here's what I mean by that. He took a company that was 100% essentially PCs and began a multi-billion dollar buying spree and transformed his company into what is now the only end to end enterprise company. Now, HP used to talk about that as a big deal. They've given up on that now that they're going to split up. What is the value to a customer of end to end? One is supply chain. Why does a customer care about supply chain? Because it gives Dell pricing power. So Dell's got potentially one of the biggest supply chains now in the industry. HP had a supply chain that was enormous. But now when they split it up, I don't know how they're going to continue to leverage that. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. It sounds like they won't be able to have that same leverage. IBM, when it sold its PC division to Lenovo, lost a lot of leverage. Dell is now able to claim number one in storage. Terabyte shipped. Why? Because it shipped so many PCs. It's not because of the server business. It's because every PC goes out with a half a terabyte disk drive in it. So add it up and Dell kicks butt. All of a sudden, boom, number one. So that's interesting. But from a customer standpoint, you can buy virtually anything from the company. Now, I talked about sort of an elephant stance. You're seeing that transformation being led by a number of factors. Certainly servers is a big part of that and networking and storage with the big acquisitions that they've made and networking with the acquisitions that they've made. But also Perot. Dell's got a big services organization that's very sticky. And then the other thing which not a lot of people talk about is Dell software. In fact, I got a tweet earlier from somebody saying, well, I presume, Dave, I presume when you talk about Dell having one of everything, you're not including software. Well, as we know, Dell's got almost a $2 billion software business. Now that's not ridiculously enormous, but it's substantial. How many multi-billion-dollar software companies are out there? So what I see is this big portfolio. I wouldn't say it's services-led. It's not. It's Dell-led. But there's a sticky services component with an increasing software component in growth areas like security, like systems management, like what Dell calls information management, which is a lot of the analytics and big data. So Dell can continue, if Dell can continue to make those acquisitions do the integrations, it's got a pretty good story for customers, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely, Dave. And it's that PC business and that server business that's generating the cash and allowing them to get into a lot of environments and try out a lot of pieces. The cloud broker model is really interesting because we talked about it a couple of years ago and clouds are not homogenous and until recently, moving from one environment to another was going to be difficult. Enter things like Docker and management tools like the Instratius acquisition that Dell made are enabling some of these multi-cloud environments. So we're seeing customers, from what we see, aren't going all in with one environment. We've got a survey going on right now and some of the data we've seen so far is that it's not like they're saying, oh, I've got Amazon and I'm only doing Amazon. Most customers, they're doing Amazon. They've got VMware inside. They might be doing something with Azure because everybody's got Office 365 and of course, they've got lots of SaaS applications. So where does Dell fit into this environment and can they be a broker, a supplier, an arms dealer for a lot of these pieces and how do they tie them all together? How do they grow those services? How do they add their software? You said there's pieces of software they don't have. They don't have 200 SaaS applications like IBM does. They don't have the breadth of the Amazon marketplace today but Dell is in a lot of customer environments especially in that kind of sub-5,000 user marketplace. So there's a lot of opportunity for Dell to add onto that. And like you said before, they can craft a story because they're not a public company that is very positive. Every CEO of a public company when he or she comes on the earnings call even if they have a miss, even if they have a quarter that they're disappointed in they spin a story and the street then starts opening up the books and parsing the numbers and doing the analysis and the street either buys it or they don't. And so what Dell can do is they can craft any story that they want and make it sound great and create their own momentum. Now it sounds like they're growing but even today in the keynotes you got a little mix of units and dollars and terabytes and geographies and different segments and so forth but Michael Dell was able to very effectively put together a story of growth that's been mirrored by his executive management team and I have no doubt that there's growth segments but think about it if IBM were a private company they could talk about cloud they could talk about their software defined stuff they could talk about the security businesses those businesses that are growing and not talk about their shrinking and not talk about the top line that's flat to down or whatever it is so Dell has that advantage in that they can craft a story and use that in their marketing to be relevant and I think that's really what customers want to know they want to know that the company I'm doing business with is relevant so they got PCs as the tip of the spear everybody knows Dell PCs easy to do business with no problem they've got the services piece that's sticky and they've got everything else in between which is this end-to-end strategy for mid-sized and smaller enterprises which really everybody else kind of poo-poo, not poo-poo's they give it live service this is where Dell really shines and so I don't know, Stu, it's going to be interesting to see David's interesting I was just ruminating on the fact that when you think about the early PC days Dell just made it so easy to buy first with the catalog and then with the website it could go in and click and choose the environments that I wanted if we look at converged infrastructure and cloud which is where the growth really is can Dell take those same type of experiences and move those to the environments and make those choices the cloud market place reminds me a lot of the Dell S&P which was really the offering that I could buy almost anything from Dell and Dell would take a cut even if it's a small one and they didn't necessarily have to support it huge success fall drove a ton of revenue for Dell so lots of things that they can take advantage of well and like I say when when Dell was public they were roughly $60 billion company with trading at 50 to 60 cents on the dollar Michael Dell and Silver Lake having taken that private the ultimate measure yes customer value et cetera et cetera but the real leaderboard is going to be if and when Dell decides to have another exit whether that's public offering or whatever the thing to watch is will Dell have been able to shift its business mix toward the enterprise so that it can even trade let's say it one to one if so it could create $30 billion of value that Michael Dell 75% of so to me it was just a brilliant move this company is still a cash flow machine these big companies that aren't growing that Wall Street seems to hate for some reason even core EMC these are cash flow machines oracle cash flow machine IBM HP cash flow machines that if they have good leadership they can transform their businesses into a success story alright we're getting kicked out here Stu look tomorrow we start at 8 30 a.m. the Cube will be live siliconangle.tv check out wikibon.org check out siliconangle.com for all the news we'll see you tomorrow this is the Cube Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante we're out see you tomorrow