 We've heard from all three of those groups today or this week and we'll hear more from customers and other experts today. Some news stew on Dell, Dell announced this morning that in a conference call that Michael Dell had with analysts, Wall Street analysts that the company is going to pay a dividend and stocks actually up pre-market on that news. We've got the open now so I don't know what the current price is but it was up earlier this morning. And so Michael Dell told the analysts that they're going to increasingly, first thing he said is we're going to cut two billion dollars of costs over the next three years and we're going to focus increasingly, he said, on the data center with a particular emphasis on gear, hardware, storage, networking and servers and a secondary focus on software and services. And as I say, they also announced a dividend of 32 cents a share and the closing price yesterday was just under 12 bucks. Yeah, Dave, it's interesting, at breakfast this morning I was talking to a Dell customer and a Dell partner and they were disappointed with Wall Street. They said, you know, Dell's really kind of turned themselves around. They're more profitable. They're growing and, you know, yeah, Dave, it's interesting, at breakfast this morning I was talking to a Dell customer and a Dell partner and they were disappointed with Wall Street. They said, you know, Dell's really kind of turned themselves around. They're more profitable. growing and you know we're kind of we were talking about the dividend and said you know when are they going to get a little bump on that so you know if they've got good growth potential as you've pointed out all these products that they're adding in the data center have better margins than they had in the PC and server error. Yeah so the stock's up almost 4% today on that news you know Dell is obviously an interesting company you know a lot of Wall Street I think all Street analysts are don't understand the company frankly they see Dell as a box seller with an aim on the box and and while that is is true for much of the company's business I'd say a couple things one is Dell always differentiated with the supply chain and its distribution channel it's an ability to to have a customer experience that differentiated it from the competition now of course I understand why the street is paying less attention to that in the post PC era but Dell is transforming into a company that owns a lot of its own IP. Stu the the company's a 60 billion dollar company and its valuation is around just hovers over 20 billion dollars and so and it's got 14 billion dollars of cash in the bank so in theory Dell could buy back the remaining shares outstanding and essentially own entire company so it's got you know I think a lot of upside from that standpoint the stock you know if they do aggressive buybacks that the stock could could go up I mean like say 14 billion in cash you know if it didn't net out the cash they're talking about talking about six billion dollars in value for a 60 billion dollar company you know personally I think that's undervalued to the extent that Dell can continue its transformation yeah so so Dave the other thing we had Carter George's keynote this morning and we've kicked off our broadcast on day one with Carter and what he talked to us about is Dell really creating that that storage personality so really an interesting way as to how Dell does acquisitions they don't just acquire them and try to grow them but they're putting together those building blocks understanding those software components that weave together the entire solution and really you know Dell's got a compelling message they're hitting all the notes that we expect they've got you know a flash message that they went into a little bit of depth on you know obviously on the server side Dell's been doing flash for a number of years but from the storage side starting to see that that bridge to the server and the storage together what they're calling project termies and the new term they came up to was that their nvm their nonvolatile memory where they can create a a shared global coherent cash between the servers and this is based off of the RNA networks acquisition that they made just a year ago and if you look at it I he Carter said you can even take a single server and you could just fold that up with flash and that could be really an appliance then that could serve up flash you know at the server to a number of other so what's happening here is we're seeing a total evolution of the the IO hierarchy and IO design 20 years ago all the action was at the server and really the server vendors were largely in control the server was the single point of control function over the last 20 years has migrated away from the host to the other side of the channel out to the disk array why for practical reasons of being able to share data being able to protect data things like snapshots things like replication and other capabilities that we've seen go out to the array and then the array became the single point of control for all those functions and there's of course a lot of processing power in the array as you well know stew and so now we're seeing with the advent of of flash and the difference is that flash is a persistent media right I mean you've got to have a persistent media and that that media has been spending disk for you know 50 years now we have this advent of flash driven by the consumer electronics trend really driven by Apple's choice to use flash in its iPods and then of course all its other consumer devices has really driven the cost of flash down so the enterprise has done some very sort of unnatural acts to make flash enterprise ready and what that's done is it's it's allowed the the price gap between memory you know nonvolatile memory if you will and spinning disk to to compress and now we're seeing a migration of function back to the other side of the channel and we're seeing that hierarchy of flash really get granular it started with enterprise flash drive stuffed into arrays but of course the array controller became the bottleneck and so they've seen people put PCI e-cards you know directly on the server you're seeing fusion IO do things like atomic rights directly to its product and then EMC comes out with VF cash now Dell has an opportunity according to Nick Allen yesterday to leapfrog that whole vision of what EMC put forth is VF cash so still the interesting thing to me is you're seeing the whales not wait they're all jumping in I say all well particular now we've seen EMC make moves we certainly heard IBM last week talk about its blue hawk which is a thunder like product and now Dell using its RNA virtualized memory technology combined with flash to really put forth the vision of a shared global cash coherent capability that it wants to integrate across all of its products yeah no Dave absolutely and another area we've we've seen a strong focus on and talked about the keynote app ashore CTO came on and talked about how they're really able to use the the snapshotting technology to have both a crash and application consistency and that that's going to extend to the flash cash so whether you have the storage in the server or whether you have it down in the storage array they're going to have that application awareness and be able to recover as they kind of joked and they said that the jokes always been backups easy recoveries hard now Dell's looking to make recovery simple well that's my friend Fred Moore would say backup is one thing recovery is everything so alright so we're seeing Dell really try to push the integration integration is nontrivial stew as you know used to work at EMC and I always felt that that in watching EMC integration sometimes got put on the back burner in in favor of execution of the individual portfolio products you're seeing a totally different message from Dell where integration is front and center at the same time again it's not trivial to do that integration it takes a long time we heard yesterday that it's going to take another year for that for Dell to get block based compression from Ocarina into the equal logic and compelling arrays I took IBM two years to do that with store wise so it clearly is not a trivial exercise but so we're going to be talking about all the stuff today we got another full day keep it right there we have Randy currents coming up next Randy is a senior strategist at the evaluated group the evaluated group for those of you don't know is a Colorado based consultancy they do a lot of both technical research and business research one of the sharpest consultancies around Randy is a real expert in storage been around the business for a long time we're going to get his perspective so keep it right there we write back live this is the cube from Dell storage form in Boston keep it right there