 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, special guest, Michael Dell, Chairman, CEO of Dell Technologies, CUBE alumni, great to see you again. Yearly PilmaGrid, PilmaGrid, come on theCUBE, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Hey, always great to be with you guys. All right, so I got to ask you because, you know, Dave and I were talking on yesterday's kickoff on our intro about the conversation we had, I think six years ago, we saw you standing there in Austin, you're still a public company, you didn't go private yet. And then the series of moves, going private, and we were like, that's great, get behind the curtain, get things reset, look at the cash flows looking good. You had that clear plan as the founder and CEO. It's kind of a new, kind of a reset if you will. And then up to now the execution just the series of moves. When you look back now, where you are today and where you were then, how do you feel? What's observed, what did you learn? What's some of the highlights for you? Well, look, we feel great, you know. Our business has really grown tremendously. It's all the things we've been doing. We've been resonating with customers. We've been able to, I would say, restore the origins of the entrepreneurial, you know, dream and success of the company and reintroduce innovation and risk-taking, you know, into a now $91 billion company, you know, growing at double digits last year. And certainly the set of capabilities that we've been able to build organically and, you know, inorganically. And, you know, with the set of alliances we have, the trust that customers have given us, you know, super happy about the position that we're in and the opportunities going forward. And as I've said, you know, as I said in my keynote yesterday, I think all of this is really just a pre-game show to what's ahead for our industry and for the role that technology is going to play in the world. And the role of data, you mentioned also, to quote you on yesterday, you said data is the lifeblood of digital transformation or the heartbeat of digital transformation. And it's also revitalizing all the other components of what looked like a consolidated market is now actually being reborn, the PC, technology, infrastructure, fabrics, and other software opportunities. So data has kind of brought in a whole nother level of kind of revitalization in the industry, which is actually causing more investment in what looked like older category of, you know, IT and computers and whatnot. This has been a big, big tailwind for you guys. Well, data has always been at the center of, you know, how the technology industry works. And now we just have a tsunami explosion of data. And of course, now we have this new computer science that allows us to reason over the data in real time and create much better results and outcomes. And that combined with the computing power, all organizations have to reimagine themselves given all these technologies. And certainly the infrastructure requirements in terms of the network, you know, the storage, the compute, the build out of the edge, tons of new requirements, you know, and we're super well positioned to go address all that. I enjoyed your keynote, Michael. So I thought it was excellent, one of your better ones. And you painted a picture of tech for good, really life-changing things that you guys and your customers are doing. You gave some examples. The B of A example was great, Draper Labs. But you also painted a picture, you need a platform for this digital transformation. We've seen the numbers, 80% of the workloads are still on-prem. What do you think that looks like 10 years down the road? What's your vision say? Well, the surprise outcome 10 years from now is there'll be something much bigger than the private cloud and the public cloud. It's the edge. And I actually think there'll be way more compute and data on the edge in 10 years than any of the derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. So that's the 10-year prediction. That's kind of what I see. And maybe nobody's predicting that just yet, but let's come back in 10 years and see what it looks like. I'd like to do that. Hybrid cloud's been around for a while, been talked about, it's been kind of an operating model. We see that multicloud has really kind of surged in importance in conversations because I think people wake up and go, hey, I got multiple clouds. I got Azure over here for Office 365. I got some Amazon over here. I got some homegrown stuff over here. And I got a data center. So I think people kind of generally can relate to the reality of multicloud. Hybrid a little bit more of a different kind of twist, but certainly relevant. But multicloud has got everyone's attention. And you guys launched Dell cloud. Is that a multicloud? Or is that a cloud two multiple clouds? Explain your view on that and where this goes. So really what we're doing is we're bringing to customers all the resources they need to operate in the hybrid multicloud world. And first you have to recognize that the workloads want to move around. And to say that they're all going to be here or there is in some sense missing the point because they're going to move back and forth. And you've got regulation, cost, security, performance, latency, all sorts of new requirements that are coming at you. And they're not going to just sit in one place. Now, as you know with the VMware Cloud Foundation, we have the ability to move these workloads seamlessly across now essentially all the public clouds, right? 4,200 partners out there, infrastructure on-premise, built and tuned specifically for the VMware platform and empowered also for the edge. And all of this together is the Dell Technologies Cloud. We have obviously great capabilities from our Dell EMC infrastructure solutions and all the great innovations at VMware coming together. Scale has been a topic we've talked on theCUBE many years. We saw Amazon get scale with public cloud. Scale is a competitive advantage. It's now becoming kind of table stakes both for customers trying to figure out how to operate a digital scale speed of life. You guys have a scale level now that's pretty impressive. What you guys done with the puzzle pieces, you got puzzle pieces, you know, companies. You got capabilities now across the board. As you guys look at scale as a competitive advantage, which it is, and we've talked about this before, you now have to integrate seamlessly in these pieces. So as you compose, as customers compose the variety of capabilities, it's got to be frictionless. That's a goal. How do you look at that? How do you talk to your teams about this? And what's your view on scale and is this something you guys talk about inside the company? Well, inside the business, you know, the first priority was to get each of the individual pieces working well. But then we saw that the real opportunity was in the seams and how we could more deeply integrate all the aspects of what we're doing together. And you saw that on stage, you know, in vivid form yesterday with Pat and Jeff and Sacha and even more today again. And there's more to do. There's always more to do. We're working on how we build a data platform bringing together all of our capabilities with Boomi and data protection and VMware. And this is all going to be super important as we enter this AI-enabled age of the future. Michael, you've got a track record of creating shareholder value. We're big fans of, you know, we all have CNBC on in the office. Michael's on. Everybody come across the run. Davos, Becky Quick, who we're also big fans of, asked you to sort of knock down the three criticisms. And it was really a conversation about stock price. You know, and you did. You knocked down the debt structure, the low margin business, the ownership structure, et cetera, but you never came back to stock price. So it looks like a couple of ways to invest. Now, VMware directly, also it looks like VMware, you could buy it cheaply through Dell. What are your thoughts on that? You know, where Dell sits in the market today, its value? I think, you know, investors are increasingly understanding that we've created an incredible business here. And certainly, you know, if we look at the additional coverage that we have, and you know, as they're understanding the business, you know, some of the analysts are starting to say, hey, this doesn't really feel like a conglomerate. It's a direct quote, okay? And if you think about what we demonstrated today and yesterday, and we'll demonstrate in the future, you know, we're not like Berkshire Hathaway, or you know, this is not a railroad that owns a chain of restaurants. This is one integrated business that fits together incredibly well. And you know, it's generating substantial cash flows, and you know, I think investors over time are figuring out the value that's intrinsic to the overall Dell Technologies family. Now, we've got lots of ways to invest, right? We've got VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, and of course, the overall Dell Technologies. Yeah, and just a follow-up on that. I mean, I've observed on the margin side, I mean, when Dell went private, it was around 19% gross margins. Now you're in gross margin heaven with, you know, absorbing EMC, and it seems to be headed in the right direction. So it's a nice mix. And you know, in our cloud and infrastructure group, you know, almost 90% of the engineers are software engineers. And so, you think about the innovations you saw on stage today with PowerMax and Unity XT and our PowerProtect platform, you know, this is basically all software running on PowerEd servers and platforms that we've created. What's on your plate now, Michael, as you come out of Dell Technologies world, you got business to take care of. What's your goals? What's on your plate? What's your objectives? What are you trying to accomplish in the next year? Well, certainly continue to execute for our customers, growing faster than the industry, you know, maintaining and improving our customer NPS levels and keeping the innovation engine cranked up on high. You saw a lot today and yesterday. Stay tuned. You know, VM world's coming in August and there'll be much, much more. And we continue to innovate together closely with VMware. So we've got lots more in the queue. And you got cashflow coming in, which means you're suppliers with a lot of customers. Congratulations. I want to get your final thought on my final question on the tech for good. One of the things I saw yesterday on the keynote that you gave was that popped out was it wasn't about the speeds and feeds around, you know, the performance. So there's a great performance on the tech side. So you got to be, you know, the infrastructure levels got to be performant. But it's about solving problems. And I think this is a direction that you're taking the company saying there's outcomes out there, there's problems that can be solved with tech. We're hearing a whole tech for bad narrative in the media these days, tech's evil, tech's bad, but there are awesome spots where technology is creating great things for society. This is a theme for you. Can you share why that focus and what are some of the highlights? It's right. I mean, if you step back from the, you know, what happened in the last 24 hours or 24 days and even 24 months and you start looking at, you know, 24 years, what you start to see is the outcomes for humanity have gotten dramatically better and technology's played an enormous role in that. I'm massively optimistic that in the next three decades, they're going to be really miracles, in terms of how do you address things like deafness and blindness and paralysis with AI and, you know, embedded technology inside the body, the, you know, things we're able to do now with sequencing the genome and using all this data to, you know, create personalized medicine solutions. Yes, technology can be used for bad, but the vast majority of it is used for good by people that have good in their hearts, right? And, you know, it goes beyond making great businesses and making people more productive. It's actually changing lives in very positive ways. One of the other big narrative in the press, you hear about is automation, taking away jobs and it's a serious concern. However, you know, there's no reason to protect the past from the future and there's great opportunities ahead, education and so you've been at you and Susan, big supporters of that, obviously. So we're optimistic for the future. I know you are, the best is yet to come, as I like to say. Absolutely, we agree. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, you've had great entrepreneurial track record. You celebrate with 35 years from the original dorm room. Saw some of your Facebook posts now here. You took a business that you knew, IT, mature, a couple players. This is a trend we're seeing. Zoom communications just went public. They took video streaming and holding meetings and completely went cloud-based and disrupted it. You're seeing- All runs on Dell EMC, by the way. Runs on Dell, did not know that. We got a little testimonial out of Michael. Great, but this is an answer and I want to get your advice to other entrepreneurs that might be watching this because you now, with the technology, with data and cloud and tech, you can go into existing markets that don't look good on paper, that people might dismiss as, that's over, that's a mature market. You've certainly taken Dell technologies, got all the pieces, and are executing at a whole other level. Zoom did it for video on the cloud. There are zillions of these opportunities out there that entrepreneurs. So the advice, don't be discouraged by what looks like a big, fat market, right? So your picture advice. And I feel something is coming that's quite significant. And right now, you mentioned this new wave of companies that are coming public, and they were built on a foundation of technology infrastructure capabilities that was established, let's say, 10 years ago. Well, right now, we're just at the kind of beginning of 5G and AI technology and all these embedded sensors and low-latency communications, and there will be a whole another wave of companies, I suspect many, many more across all industries that just unlock all kinds of new capabilities and opportunities. So I'm super excited about that. And I think it's just going to get more interesting. Well, it's amazing. Think of the tools you had 35 years ago when you started and how you've transformed. So congratulations. Michael, thank you for spending the time. And again, thanks for having us again here. 10th year Dell Technologies World. Thanks for having us and great to have a conversation with you. Thank you and the rest of the CUBE team for all your great coverage. Thank you very much. Michael Dell, Chairman C of Dell Technologies here with Dave Vellante and myself, John Furrier. Stay tuned for more day two coverage. We've got two sets here. It's a CUBE canon of content, blown out the content here at Dell Technology Worlds. Check out Dell's hashtag, Dell Tech World for all the highlights. We'll be right back after this short break.