 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and I'm with Wikibon.org, I'm here with Stu Miniman also of Wikibon. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage. We're here live in Boston at the Dell Storage Forum 12. We were here last year, actually we were in Orlando at the Dell Storage Forum. Last year was Dell's first breakout event within storage. In the last five years we've seen a major transformation of Dell. It used to be that Dell was essentially a reseller of other technologies, other storage technologies including EMC and LSI, and Dell has completely transformed its portfolio, making major acquisitions, not the least of which were Equalogic and Compellent and Exonet, more recently Appassure. Of course, as many of you know, Dell get into the services business in a big way with a giant acquisition of Perot Systems and it's completely transforming the company at the direction of Michael Dell, its chairman and CEO. Stu, we're here live all week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we've got a great line up of guests. We were just in the channel keynote and of course Dell, like many of the other storage players, is reaching out to the channel, in what I've called a big channel land grid. Yeah Dave, absolutely. Channel's critically important for, especially in the markets where Dell plays, they start from really kind of the SMB market up to the mid-range and into the enterprise, not usually the high-end enterprise but in a lot of these environments, you know, Dell is critical. At the opening keynote, they said they had over 340 channel partners here, just over double what they had last year, so good push by Dell, definitely want to dig into that a little bit more in our coverage. Dell executives really were very aggressive, in my opinion, Stu, of talking about going after EMC Clarion. Now of course, as you know, Dell has an enormous base of EMC and stall base of EMC Clarion, one of the most famous reseller slash OEM relationships in the history of the storage business, a multi-billion dollar deal, that Dell is now transforming into its own IP, bringing in equal logic and compelling systems. So essentially, have cut off EMC and gone directly after the customer base through its channel, through its own channel and through its reseller channel, very aggressive messaging around deal registration, end to end, bringing in server and networking and storage together. Dell is a major player in storage. Stu, why is Dell relevant, in your opinion, in storage? Yeah, so Dave, you hit on a piece, kind of the end to end message is Dell's one of the few players that has the server, the storage, the network, strong services play through the Perot acquisition and software. We're going to talk a lot about software. Dell's made a ton of acquisitions in the last four years, really a transformation of Dell's position in the marketplace and kind of reemergence as not just bringing it all to you, but actually making a lot of that or at least bringing all the pieces together and they've got a lot of engineers in a lot of different places, so creating a tone of intellectual property. Dell has an enormous supply chain, of course, because of its massive PC business. Dell also seems to be focused on integrating its piece parts, Stu. I've noticed that Dell puts a greater emphasis, in my opinion, on integrating its acquisitions than some of the other competitors, but the big thing in my mind that Dell has is cash. Dell has $14 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Just to give you a comparison, EMC has $6 billion in the balance sheet. NetApp has $5 billion. So HP, HP, I believe, has about $8 billion on the balance sheet, even the massive IBM $12 billion. So Dell has more cash than all of its other storage competitors, with the only exception being Oracle. I don't really consider necessarily Oracle a storage company, but it's certainly Oracle as a storage competitor. Oracle has $30 billion in cash, but Dell has more cash and the ability to do acquisitions. In any of these other companies, I tweeted today, had Dell wanted the three-par deal, it could have gotten it. It has the cash to do it. That's a really great point and actually surprised me because while we're at a storage conference, remember, Dell's much more than a storage company. They've got lots of servers. They've got lots of PCs. That's thrown off a ton of cash, which they can now help themselves to transform the company. So Dell picked up compelling for about half the price that it got three-par. It could have had three-par for, and in my opinion it's a better fit because it's targeted toward Dell's main base. Although some tweets that we got around networking were suggesting that Dell is really, let me add, we talked to Darren Thomas last year at the Dell storage forum. We asked him, why is Dell different? What is Dell's vision? And he said, very simply, Dell wants to be the number one storage supplier in small and medium-sized business. Dell is the only company that would make that statement as the primary mission. Now, some of the tweets that we saw today were suggesting that Dell's networking goes to the higher end, you know, a little breaking out of that SMB. What's your take on that? Yeah, so Dave, absolutely. You know, when we were at HP last week, HP with three-par is trying to take on the traditional tier one storage players, and Dell's more, you know, kind of the small to mid-range. Definitely SMB varies by who you talk to. IBM has their pure systems. It starts at 120,000, which I sure don't consider SMB, but that's how IBM's positioning it. Dell is definitely better positioned for SMB. If you look at the Power Vault, Power Connect on the networking side, Dell has a campus and lower end offering than some of the other big Wells like the IBM or HPs. But definitely some challenges when you're trying to range from the real small SMB up to the mid-markets where there's a lot out there. So we're here in Boston for the next three days. Stu, it's a big week for theCUBE. You and I are here at the Dell Storage Forum. We've got the Intel Forecast Show down at Cloud Expo, and we also have the Hadoop Summit in San Jose. So our colleague, John Furrier, will be handling those two events. We've got a number of folks on the ground at both of those, as well as here. We'll be covering this wall-to-wall, bringing you all the guests. This is theCUBE, where we bring you the best guests that we can find. We extract the signal from the noise, and bring it to you, our audience. This is SiliconANGLE.tv. Stu, final words before we get started? Yeah, just, we're going to be broadcast in 10 to two Monday through Wednesday. We're going to be watching some of these other shows that are out there. We've got Scott Lowe down at Microsoft TechEd. Cisco Live's going on this week for all the networking folks. We're going to have some good coverage of some of those pieces, and exciting week in tech, and excited to be part of it. So as you're watching, you can tweet me. I'm at D. Volante. He's at Stu. Tweet us questions, comments, and keep it right there. We'll be right back. SiliconANGLE.tv's live coverage, wall-to-wall of the Dell Storage Forum 2012. Keep it right there.