 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Welcome back everyone, we are here live at EMC World 2016. It's a Silicon Angle Media's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of Silicon Angle, and I'm Coz Dave Vellante, co-founder of Silicon Angle. Our next guest is Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Technologies as announced on stage and in charge of the entire conglomerate that is now Dell Technologies. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you, great keynote. Great to be with you guys, thank you very much. I'm super excited because we've been following your career since you've been selling PCs back in the early days, and you made a reference on stage about 32 years ago, and your birthday's coming up at the company to now the changes and opportunities. And Joe Tucci passing, kind of the torch to you. He made a heartfelt comment, and you took the time to thank him for his friendship. What was it like up there? Share what you were thinking up there, I'll see you go back with Joe, but that was a seminal moment for this community because you got a standing ovation as a culture of Joe Tucci here, the legacy. Well, it was an honor for me to be on stage with him, and obviously the whole EMC community and family loves Joe and admires what he's done over the last decade and a half, and it's an honor for me to be able to take that on and continue it, and I was so happy to be able to share my excitement for what we're doing in this new company. There's so much innovation coming out of EMC and VMware and Virtustream and Pivotal, when you combine that with Dell, we're just incredibly energized. And you were visually excited too. You could see that you're excited about the future, and I want to highlight the comment quickly on the keynote. You mentioned the next Industrial Revolution, and Dave and I have talked on theCUBE before about how this cycle of innovation kind of blends the best of the PC revolution and client server kind of in one times 10, and it feels that way, right? And you were kind of highlighting that we're on a 10X every five years, kind of pointing to more as we're talking about some relics like Sun data centers and 3G. What is the most exciting thing for you? What it, share with the folks out there, you are perspective, because this really is an unknown time of new things, internet of everything, internet of things, obviously going to change the data center to wearables, connected devices, to how people are doing things differently. Why is it so big, this shift? What's going on is you have essentially an ability to make anything intelligent for almost no cost, right? So the cost of embedding intelligence is just dropping very rapidly. And whenever that happens, you have an explosion in the number of intelligent things. And so going from billions to hundreds of billions of connected things, and then the challenge for every organization is how do you use that information in real time to change your business, provide a better product and service? And we're just at the very beginning of that, right? And so that is an enormous kind of change factor in business and in society and in the world. And so we feel privileged to be a part of that and we feel incredibly well positioned to help our customers as they go into that next stage. When you started the transformation of Dell and you started to purchase software companies, you got into the storage business, more into the enterprise business, obviously EMC accelerates dramatically your vision of what you wanted to do with Dell. What's it like to put a deal like this together? You know, you hear Donald Trump always talking about doing a deal, I don't think he's ever done a deal like this. What's it like to put a deal like this together? How does it sort of start with you and your partners and how do you even conceive something like that? Take us, I mean, inside as much as you can. You know, I'd really go back to the early 2000s when we had the Dell EMC alliance. Many customers remember that and it became a couple of billion dollar enterprise, the Dell EMC partnership. And we actually looked at it in that timeframe, but we didn't do it, right? And as we looked at the evolution of our company, you know, it was, you know, the most recent activity really started up back in 2014, almost two years ago now. So it was the fall of 2014 and I called Joe and I said, hey, we should talk about this again, right? Talk about what we talked about, you know, five years ago and revisit it. And we went through, you know, pretty significant exploration together, sharing, you know, strategies, talking about, you know, plans and how this might work. And, you know, we weren't sure at the very beginning, yeah, this is absolutely right thing to do. It took some time for everyone involved. But we went through all that and, you know, the original notion that these two companies together were very complimentary and would make an absolute powerhouse turned out to be true. And we reached agreement with the EMC board. You know, if you read through the public filings, you'll see it was a long process, right? These things don't happen quickly. And it was definitely a very carefully thought through considered decision. Is that the fun part for you? Or do you love the finance side as well? Obviously a very successful individual is the finance stuff for you as exciting? Or is it more the customer, the partners at all, sort of just thrilling? You know, I'd say that the technology is always kind of my first love. I mean, I'm a geek, right? I'm a techie, I love technology. I get excited about the impact that it has on our customers, you know? And I love business, you know? I do, I love business and I love winning and it's fun. I got to ask you because you mentioned something on stage about the next generation. And there's also, when we were talking about you, personally before the intro, he's a hardworking guy. We know you're hardworking because we get texts from middle of the night on Snapchat now. I saw the Snapchat. Hardest working guy he knows. Hardworking guy's fit. Like us, kind of like we work hard, we love tech. You're hardworking. We know you're a listener, too. We're always customer focus. But they always say that to be successful in this age, whether you're getting older or as a company, to always be learning. So the question for you is, what are you learning right now? I mean, what are you really sharpening? Because you've mastered a bunch of things. What are you learning now? What are the things that you, Michael Dell, personally are sharpening the saw on to figure out how to prep yourself for the journey? You know, I'm learning a lot about Pivotal and all of the really interesting things that are going on at the application layer, at the microservices layer, sort of above the VM container infrastructure layer. And it's something really amazing going on in Pivotal in terms of how businesses are transforming. This is obviously a lot of new things to learn within EMC and VMware and Virtual Stream as well. So I'm learning about all of those, getting to meet the customers, getting to meet the teams, going around to as many of the EMC and VMware locations as possible and meeting the teams, learning about the business. Tons of enormously talented people. What tech is exciting you? What are you geeking out on the technology side right now? Again, I think what's exciting is all this data and then how does that data get turned into a better business? You know, you look at car companies sort of waking up and saying, you know, we need to make computers and wheels. And if we don't, we're going to have a problem. And how do we have all this information learned so that the next person that drives a car around that corner, around that bump a minute later has a better experience because of something that just happened. And, you know, again, that's a whole new area that we're really just at the beginning of. You mentioned you like to win. You won when they tried to take your company away. You had to make some comments about HP, you know, this morning, I feel like you had a winning spring in your step this morning. What's the winning formula, the playbook, for winning against the new entrants, the new upstarts like in Amazon who seems to have so much momentum? Lay that out for us. Well, you know, as David said, it's almost a $3 trillion industry. So, you know, if you got somebody with, you know, 10 billion or 20 billion or 30 billion, that's a pretty small part of the $3 trillion, right? So we've got a couple percent. We'd like to have a couple percent more. So it is a very big industry. That's kind of the first thing to begin with. I think when you look at everything that EMC is doing and now together as we close the transaction, Dell and EMC, our ability to compete in both the on-premise, the mission critical cloud, the hybrid cloud, you saw, you know, the updates to all the storage offerings. Incredible growth in converge and hyperconverge is really a function of moving the workload up to the application, data, user, quality of service, security level. That's what we're going to be really focused on. You know, building out the native hybrid cloud, building out this mission critical enterprise, you know, capability within VirtuStream. But look, you know, there are going to be lots of competitors, the public cloud will grow. I think for customers here, what I'm hearing is that they realize that they're going to have a variety of modes, right? They'll have some public cloud, they'll have some software as a service, they'll have some managed services, they'll have some on-premise. We're going to make those on-premise systems a whole lot more competitive. That's where you see this growth in VCE as an example. And EMC's done a great job building that business and we're going to continue to support it. Winning is also the scorecard too, the scoreboard, right? So Vince Lombardi once said, you're judged by the field that you play on, right? So you mentioned now you got Dell Technologies. You highlighted some scorecards of the Gartner 21 categories of siloed quadrants. In the future, what is the scoreboard? It might not be magic quadrants, because in horizontally scalable cloud, what does the new scoreboard look like? What is the new card that you have to look to as you move past under the current? I mean, Gartner's good today. I mean, you've got leadership positions, it's vis-a-vis everything else, but as it shifts from silo-based measurement. It's not a public income statement, evidently. I mean, that's a good way to do it, rev it in. I'll tell you the things that I'm paying close attention to. First is our customer net promoter score. Customer satisfaction, measure that. You know the focus and intensity that EMC places on customers. We were talking about that earlier. Dell does that as well. So customer NPS. Second is our employee, our team member NPS, because our team has to be happy as well. The third thing is the product innovation pipeline. And I was so pleased to see David up there on stage showing off just a preview of all of the amazing things that EMC is going to talk about here at EMC World. They have kept the innovation pipeline on sort of full tilt here. And having had the opportunity in the last almost two years to observe very close up what's going on, there's just so much innovation within EMC. And then fourth, it's our relative market share, right? In this entire, you know, market space, whether it's the data center, you know, all the different modes of computing. And those will evolve in terms of, you know, how they're measured and that sort of thing. But those are the things we look at. And we do all those things right. We've got a successful business. I mean, the leadership thing categories you on the slide there said mid-market global supply chain enterprise innovation. So looking back at the history of Dell, personal computers, you made them personal. You built scale to win kind of the mid-market self-service order direct. We all know that story. And you had innovation from a personal computer standpoint. Laptop, remember when you had the first laptop, it was, you hired the Apple guy away, it was some big hire. And then you guys dominated those categories and moved up into the enterprise with the scale and all those things. Now you have the enterprise, now you have to go personal. Is it the other way around? And how do you achieve those levels of scale? And does supply chain matter now more than ever? I mean, because he's now interesting dynamic. You came in from the personal side, went enterprise. Now you've got the enterprise side, everyone wants to go personal. Do you think of it that way? Is it the way to think about it? I think scale matters. And certainly, nobody has the scale that we have in the enterprise and the data center. So that's a huge advantage. It's also important to remember that the growth in our original business enabled us in the mid-90s to get into server business. And the growth and success there then enabled us now to combine with EMC and VMware. And so we're building a very special company, right? And we're not measuring our success in 90-day increments, right? And we're in this for more than a lifetime, I'll say. Because I'll care about what happens long after I'm gone. EMC and Dell World, have you made any decisions about those two franchises? Sure, well next year, Dell EMC World will be even bigger. And just think of it as we're going to combine the best of both and it'll be even bigger. Michael, thanks so much for taking the time out of your super busy schedule to come by on theCUBE. Final word, what's the vibe of the show here? What's the takeaway this year for the folks who couldn't make it here? What's the big message? I think the big message is customer focused innovation is unbelievably strong at EMC. And as we go into the next few weeks here, transactions totally on track with the original schedule, we're getting all the regulatory approvals, everything's kind of lined up, financing 100% fully committed. We're going to only accelerate that. I'm excited to see you and congratulations and success. Great to see you up on stage. Everything's looking great. I'm super excited. We're excited to have you. Thanks for taking the time. This is theCUBE, live here from EMC World in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, extracting the signal from noise with Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies. We'll be right back after this short break. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE because the discussion is always interesting and relevant.