 So Michael Dell actually spoke this morning he was up on stage taking questions and asking questions of Phil and Darren. Right and dispelling rumors and preconceived notions that was a big part of this. I learned a few things today. How do you learn? Well I learned that Dell started as a storage company. Yeah he talked about how Dell started as a storage company they were doing hard drives. A customer walked into their office. Martin Marietta he said. Martin Marietta walked into their dorm room office. Right and said well are you selling those things as opposed to the hard drive meaning a computer and he's like oh that's a brilliant idea. So we're talking about having a but talking about a company that's sort of customer driven in terms of the direction that they go and so that was that was good. Yeah I did talk a little bit about how you know they've moved and in the 90s they realized that you know the client server was a really important thing and that kind of kept their focus going. Most business apps prior to that have been running on Unix and saw the big client server initiative and wanted to get into the Intel based server market in a big way so big investment there. And then bigger faster storage wasn't enough and their customers were actually wanting them to focus more on their industry needs. What about the medical industry? What about education? You know things like that and so they started focusing a little different and they took on a solutions mission is what he said. Yeah and said that that was a big part of the Perot acquisition because they've got a big play in the medical space, medical services, things like that. So needing more industry expertise you can't continue to differentiate just on speed and connectivity and things like that. So that was a big focus of today's talk. Yeah it was good you know I mean he was cracking jokes and making light of you know the things. He was just he was being funny. Did you find him funny at least? I was laughing. You were cracking up. I was cracking your knee. I was cracking up. So and then the other thing he talked about was channel. So I think it's greater than 25% of their of their business into commercial accounts is going through the channel and a lot of channel partners coming up and talking about thanking them for continuing to invest and integrate and give them a place to play. I mean obviously they're going to talk about how focused they are on the channel here at the Dell Storage Forum. Yeah because there are a lot of channel partners here. A lot of customers that buy through the channel so they want to show the investment there. Do you think you know outside of the Dell Storage Forum that's obvious yes it's a focus but are they making it seem bigger than it is? I think what any supplier wants is for their channels to be value-add. Right so someone made a comment yesterday not volume at its value-add so what are your right I think I heard that from somebody yesterday and and so what's that value add some of that value add maybe an industry expertise if you've got a if you've got a if you've got a channel partner that knows the manufacturing industry really well or knows this education business really well or knows government really well then they become a logical partner for Dell. Sure. So I think that's that's one of the ways that they're that they're looking along the channel lines you know they they even said that please fill out the forms here give us give us your feedback of course but also opportunities they're looking for yeah and so they said that they would sit down with Michael himself and look at the interesting opportunities that came from the feedback sessions right and then of course there's the one customer who said you have anyway for me to migrate off of my three my Dell branded three-letter storage system and so can you help me with that and I was surprised I was shocked that Michael actually said yes we can help you with that yeah I didn't think he was gonna expect from a CEO right around about answer that never actually was very direct on that he was so they they talked about you know the fact one of the things that sets them apart is by adding Ocarina technology they can they can have a better product because no one else in the market has those assets well no one has the Ocarina assets but there are a few other assets out there like data domain and you know so they so so there's other solutions that you can sort of integrate in but I think that the interesting thing is from day one both with the acquisition of Exonet and the acquisition of Ocarina they just they made a strategic decision not to sell those as discrete products but actually to integrate them into the storage systems and so now the question is how quickly will they start to come out with some of that there was an announcement of scalable file system here integrated with the equal logic here at the show and and and ultimately and it's already available on the Power Vault line as well and so that's sort of some of their NAS strategy I think somebody said they wanted to use it as their their their way to kill NetApp so good luck with that good luck so so they've got that actually they get some of that Power Vault line from NetApp so you know we at least some of the software not the file system but the software for the Power Vault line from NetApp which was in Jenny in genio and genio bought by NetApp so anyway a lot of co-optition with tired old word but a lot of that going on so sure well there always is always will be always has been you know yeah so my Darren actually asked Michael because they switched it up you know Michael asked questions first of Darren and Phil and then Darren and Phil asked questions of Michael right and then the audience asked questions of them but so Darren actually asked you know what can Dell bring that no one else can and so just a few notes on that because everybody you know things like that Dell focuses more on the mid market instead of the world's biggest customers because he says the most of the market is the mid market as opposed to the biggest customers yeah there's no question the mid mid markets growing it's a huge market and there are so many more companies in that in that area that's right that's right somebody made the analogy that Dell wants although no one likes to note no systems company wants to be compared to another systems company they want to be thought of as completely unique but the analogy that I heard the other day was you know Dell is sort of the IBM for the mid market right so you're wrapping trying to wrap services systems financing to serve the mid market customer yeah so and then the other thing the other thing that you know they wrapped it up with was that you know somebody asked him what gets you excited after so long of being a CEO working since he was 12 and CEO since I don't know how long how I what age he turned CEO well what he when did he found it's he founded it when he was in college so I think he was a freshman or a sophomore yeah so 19 20 years old something like that for a while for a long time well no I did not say that and that sounds like I'm calling them all but he talked about how you know the that the fact that there's enormous amount of data that you know needs to be organized and pushed forward and you know there are so many opportunities in the medical field yeah he wants what drives him is that he wants to be the solution for organizing the data at least he wants to be part of it I need to be interesting to see what kind of investments that he continues to make in he keeps talking about the medical field so that's an interesting little right and there's a lot of work that needs to be done in the medical field so we're not making necessarily great decisions on the medical side so I think better decision-making is big part of what do you what do you think the bad decisions are oh I just don't think we you we don't leverage the data we have a conflict between data privacy and data and data analysis and so being able to get all of that data redacted into a pool that you can then analyze and see what kinds of solutions actually might work with with different people I think that's a huge thing I actually went to I went to what was the I'm trying to remember the name of the conference I've been to many conferences but bio it world I went to bio it world and there was a there was a company there who was talking about what they had launched which was called patients like me okay and and patients like me allows you to put in your disease and all kinds of factors about yourself and it's a you know it's a self-identifying community and you can decide how much you want to disclose but essentially what you end up with there is 100,000 person clinical trial potentially of people saying I've got this disease I'm taking this medication I'm having this side effect that sort of thing so I think that kind of data that's coming out of those kinds of communities actually could could have a huge impact on so yeah I actually like that I may sign up I just need to acquire disease hopefully not I'll be right back to you I have laugh line disease right just make it up anything else that caught your attention I you know I think those were the big things okay I I took a few notes I was doing a little tweeting while actually live tweeting Twitter ID by the way way too long because I need to find another Twitter ID JT MacArthur 56 where's the 56 come from I can't imagine you just ever 51 through 55 was taken I was yeah exactly so the last one taken was born in 56 yes that's right okay the