 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live on the floor at the VM Village at VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier. We are here with Michael Dell, the CEO, founder of Dell Technologies. Chairman of the board of VMware with Michael's Dave Vellante. Michael, great to see you again. Always great to be back with you guys. This is a lot of fun. Thanks for being here at VMworld. Every time I see you, you've got a spring in your step, got a smile, people love you. You're in the crowd, walking around, checking things out, congratulations. And VMware stock is really looking good. It's got a nice slope up into the right. I've noticed that. I think it's highly correlated to how the business is doing. And look, the open ecosystem of VMware has always been a hallmark of its success. And it's as strong and as vibrant as ever. And now of course you see, we're putting up new cylinders on the engine. You got a great bet on VMware. You said on theCUBE here, it's the crown jewel of Dell Technologies when you, before and even during the Dell EMC combination, it's certainly now valued and we dave things undervalued. What was your thesis back then that others didn't see? Well, look, when you imagine forward in this world of multi-cloud, there is absolutely no question that the answer isn't public or private, it's both, right? And then you layer in managed services and software as a service. And in that world, the capabilities that VMware has are absolutely incredibly valuable to connect to all of the public clouds, right? And to integrate beyond-premise infrastructure, which we continue to see having a very important role. We're having double-digit growth in our server business. There's a lot of infrastructure being laid down in private data centers all over the world, as you guys know and have reported on. And when you think about future scenarios out to 2020 and beyond, the boom in edge computing. And the thing I'm seeing, which is really fascinating, is all of the companies outside of the IT space making their products smart and intelligent. And so IT's breaking out of IT, it's becoming business technology and that's gonna create a whole nother wave of technological innovation. And VMware has an incredibly special position in the industry to be able to bring all that together. So Michael, John's right, I do think the company's undervalued. Usually a chairman's not going to comment that the company's overvalued. I've never seen that happen before. But if you look at the operating cash flow of $3 billion and you look at the multiple in that, it is a relatively inexpensive stock. People talk about the Dell discount. Is that even a viable concept? Why would there be a Dell discount and why, on the other hand, would Dell give it a lift? What kind of governance or guidance do you give that should give that company a lift? Well, if you read through the detailed financial filings, what you'll find in there is that the Dell Technologies generated revenue for VMware is growing very, very fast. And so, as I said on stage, I think VMware, Dell EMC go together like peanut butter and chocolate. And so the more we do together, the more we drive innovation, it's fueling the success of VMware and Dell Technologies and Dell EMC. So, the market will do what it's going to do. And in the short term, I don't really care to be honest. What I care about is the three, five, 10, 20 year outcome, the lifetime outcome. And we're building a great company here and the team is executing, innovation engine is on high. And the more we do across the Dell Technologies family, the better it gets. You saw what we're doing with Pivotal. You know, we're in a great spot and overall Dell Technologies, our revenue synergies are running more than we thought. And, you know, for a company of our size, we're growing way faster than the industry. Well, but in the ecosystem has responded quite well. Somewhat surprisingly, maybe better with Dell's ownership than it had perhaps with EMC's ownership. Do you think people had a misconception about that coming in and what have you learned in the one year or so that you've watched this unfold? Well, it's been almost two years since we announced the plan to combine a year since we completed the combination. And we've been very clear the whole way through, you know, and now again and into the future on the importance of the open ecosystem. And this is why we created this concept of strategically aligned businesses. So Dell EMC can work incredibly closely with VMware, but so can all of Dell EMC's competitors, right? And that's great. And you see them all here. You see them announcing things. That's fantastic. And Pivotal has a great open ecosystem. And now you see us extending out to these major public clouds, you know, AWS being the biggest. I got to ask you because one of your partners, well first of all, it has been working great. The ecosystem seems buzzed up about, they now know what's going on on-premise and cloud. Well, you do what you say you're going to do and you stick to it and good things happen, right? You know channels, you know ecosystems. Clarity is the gold for the channel. But one of the things interesting is Andy Jassy showed up. One of your now key partners at VMware, on stage with Pat Gelsinger. I noticed a new hugging thing going on with Pat, kind of cool, hugging Andy Jassy on stage and then when he left. But Andy Jassy very much looked in the camera, looked at the audience and said, this is not an optical illusion relationship. And I got your back, okay? And coming from the cloud leader, that's a pretty big testament. What's your thoughts and reaction to Andy Jassy on stage? So I was involved in the discussions early on, before everything came to fruition. I won't take any credit for that. Pat and team deserve all the credit. But what I've seen behind the scenes is the incredible amount of co-innovation going on across AWS and VMware. And it's not an announcement, you know, there's an enormous amount of work that's gone on and we have a real product that we're standing up with a large number of customers and it's going to roll out rapidly across the world. And of course it's a VMware operated service and it'll also, you know, connect into all the things we're doing on premise. And so I'm delighted with how it's all come together. Everybody's executed according to what they said they were going to do. And, you know, it's rolling forward. I mean, he's also very clear too. We listen to customers. That's kind of the Dell way in a lot of parallels there. I don't know how you could actually succeed in a business without that. But that's just me talking, right? When you talk to... That's how we've done it. That works for some models. We don't go there. Paperware models. When you talk to customers, let's say in the past year, since the AWS announcement of the partnership, how do you feel that that's brought clarity to customers? And has that been a factor in VMware's momentum? In other words, the fact that you're not going to build your own hyper cloud. There's not all that confusion about what the strategy was. How much of a factor has that been when you talk to customers in terms of VMware's momentum? I think more and more customers are figuring out that it's a multi-cloud world that there is a right place for any particular workload. And it's not one size fits all, right? And, you know, this idea of everything to the public cloud, that's not really, you know, very likely to happen. And as we've been able to improve the on-premise systems and make them more competitive, the modernization, the automation, that's great. And look, customers ultimately will decide where they want their workloads to run. And, you know, when you think about this coming boom in edge computing, that's not all going to go to the center somewhere. So is it public cloud? Is it private cloud? Yes, it's both, right? And, you know, we're well positioned for this multi-cloud future. And, you know, we've got incredible capabilities with Cloud Foundry, with Boomi, with Virtustream. You know, our whole portfolio has been architected not only to help customers with the existing, you know, Platform 2 apps and modernize, automate the infrastructure for that, but also to enable this new, you know, cloud-native future. But cloud, as I've said in the past, cloud's not a place, right? Cloud's a way of doing IT. And you can do cloud on-premise very efficiently as well. Michael, thanks for coming on. I know your handle is wanting to get you on, but my final question is, we were just talking with our Wikibon analysts about how the computer industry has been tossed in the air. You're a veteran of the computers. You built Dell computers, now Dell Technologies. Now it's going to land on the table with multi-cloud. What is the number one thing that you're focused on to help customers pull that together to make it really easy to execute in this complex new era? We see four big things. We see a digital transformation, IT transformation, the workplace, workforce transformation and security. And we've architected our whole Dell Technologies family to be able to address that. And certainly the work that Pivotal's doing around applications and developers and developer-ready infrastructure now joined with the VMware ecosystem were a lot more relevant for developers than we were a few years ago. You're pleased with VMware's execution to date. Well, how could you not be? Companies firing on all cylinders, putting up new cylinders and Pat and team are doing a great job. They're delivering some great cloud with Amazon, Web Services now, the Pivotal opportunity with VMware and Google Cloud, Kubernetes orchestrating, making it all easier. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. As always, great to see you. Thanks for sharing your perspective. Great to see you guys. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante with Michael Dell here, Chairman of the Board of VMware, also Founder and CEO of Dell Technologies. We'll be right back with more live coverage at VMworld 2017 after this short break.