 Live from the Mendeley 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. Okay, 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, my co-host this week. Stu Miniman, the 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 the 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? 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 would 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 thing and whoa, slow down. We'll continue 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 clouds. I mean, you don't see that. You usually see the pomp and circus as 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 these guys roll their sleeves up. And by the way, they're very vocal on social media so you can always get the Twitter speed. 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 to be a- Your first point. 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. Yeah, I mean, but again, with now Dell Technologies looming in the merge, it's going to be a big part of that. Yes. Technologies, and we'll ask some specific questions later, but I do want to get your thoughts of someone who's been in the industry as a power broker, founder, CEO now with going private. You've seen all the ways of innovation. Ecosystems become a really important part of it. In your world, it 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 the cloud and data center, you know, 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. I, you know, you think about the kind of, our motto of companies that are coming along as the ecosystem evolves. Again, you see it out there in 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. You know, the original growth in the hypervisor and then into software-defined storage, software-defined networking. And you can, you know, 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, you know, eventually being virtualized, you know, from the, you know, kind of cutting edge. So virtualized spec. 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 you know, 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 you know, there's many people, I still, during the keynote this morning, they're like, up, you know, soon as the deal's done, VMware is going to be sold off, you know, really hardware companies don't use software. That's totally wrong. Anybody who says that has no clue what they're talking about. So look, I think first thing is, you know, kind of do some math, right? If you look at the combined cash flows of Dell and EMC and VMware, what you find is that 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, you know, roughly four and a half billion dollars 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 businesses. 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 Bumi. 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, you know, we're not just about VMware, right? Dell Technologies is a company that embraces all of the major ecosystems, be it, you know, the Microsoft ecosystem, the Linux and OpenStack and, you know, container ecosystems. So the hardware platforms that we're creating allow customers the broadest set of solutions to be able to, you know, stand up, stand up against the requirements. So back at Dell World, Michael, you talked about, yet Satya and Adele up on stage, how Microsoft fits and understanding, you know, in many ways Dell Technologies is an arm 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, you know, very, very ecosystem? You know, 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, you know, 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. Right? As, you know, and I think you'll see others as well. And customers that have embraced VMware, 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, you know, deep into the public clouds. Get some questions from Twitter. I'll read a few 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 on VMware or Dell technology? And they ask both. So two questions. Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like? And what technology are you most excited about? I have, you know, met a number of the distinguished folks over in China for sure. And, you know, whether it be in one-on-one meetings or in group meetings. And, you know, I'm over there on a pretty regular basis. You know, China is the second largest market in the world for Dell to sell its products, okay? So, you know, it's also the second largest economy in the world, so that shouldn't be too surprising. But we have a, you know, roughly five, five and a half billion dollar business in China. Big part of our supply chain. On the second question, you know, it's kind of like saying, you know, which of your children do you love the most, right? So that's not a, you get a lot of trouble with that. But when I look across the whole. You need to categorize the areas. 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 on to where do you see the disruption coming from? If you had to point at 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're 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 and 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 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, it's 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, is there, do you worry about missing something? Like, I don't mean FOMO fear 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, mm-hmm, is that on your mind that 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, right? 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 is a bit 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 years, 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 solve the problems that customers have. Is the IoT in 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 on the early phase of the hype cycle. Michael Dell, we got to wrap it. I want to ask one final question to 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's got a very bright future. I've seen this in the past where people said, oh, you know, the PC's dead. So, you know, forget about Dell or, you know, 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 on your busy schedule to join us on theCUBE. 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.