 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. I want to welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Dell Technology World digital experience 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is theCUBE virtual. It's a virtual event. We're not in person this year, obviously because of the COVID pandemic. Our guest, Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Technologies. Great to see him back on again remotely. Michael, sorry, we couldn't be there in person, but thank you for coming on virtually. Thanks for coming on. Great to be with you, John. You know, what a year it's been. I got to say it's been one of those years where you don't know what's going to happen next. And it's been kind of crazy. I want to get your take on how you guys are getting through it. And specifically you guys have had great business performance. We've seen the results of, what's going on with Dell Technologies, VMware. But there's a crisis. People need more machines. They need more internet access. There's a huge demand for modern applications with cloud and on-premises. Not everyone's going to be there on-premises. So the workplace, the workforce, the workloads are all changing. But you hit all of them. The consumer from having a great machine to internet access. This kind of digital divide where people are remote schooling is super important. Can you talk about how you guys are doing, how the company's doing, how you're doing and what you guys are doing to help bridge this new cultural environment of this digital divide? Sure. So again, great to be with you. And thanks for all your great coverage in Dell Technologies world. Once again, this time virtually. Look, I think having a resilient supply chain is always important, but these last eight months it's been incredibly important. Demand has certainly shifted around and having a secure remote work from anywhere has been a high priority for lots of organizations. I think something like 4.5 billion people were asked to go stay in their homes. So it was work from home, learn from home, entertainment, e-commerce, telemedicine, everything went online. And I think we got a glimpse of the future. And I think a lot of this actually gets carried forward. And certainly the priorities that we've been focused on, you know, multi-cloud, app modernization and containers, the tremendous growth at the edge, data management, software defining the networks, AI, 5G, all of these things I think get accelerated. So amid the tragedy and the challenges, I do think there's a great acceleration of the fourth industrial revolution. You brought this up last time, last year as well. And again, this is pre, everything's kind of going to be before COVID, kind of after the COVID world, but you were kind of teasing this out last year. I want to get your thoughts because now more than ever, you mentioned some people don't have laptops to even do the remote work and remote schooling. And then internet access has been discussed for a generation of having more broadband in areas that are underserved. This is a super important piece. Can you just share some of the initiatives that you guys are taking because I know you guys have some things going on. You're doing a lot of philanthropy. Again, the supply chain is on the business side is super important, but specifically with society, how are you guys helping? Right, so just in the United States, you've got roughly 15 million kids who don't have either the broadband access or a device. And we've got a pilot program running to begin to address this. And it's part of the broader 2030 moonshot goals that we laid out actually last year for the next decade. But I do think what the pandemic exposed, it exposed the fault lines in our society in access to healthcare, to education, to justice and certainly we have a kind of digital inequality. If you don't have a device and you don't have access, you're left out of economic opportunity. And that's something we should all be focused on. We believe our broader ecosystem can make a big difference there and it's one of our priorities. You know, technology has been a big enabler over the years. We've talked many times privately, also on theCUBE around these inflection points. I mean, you started Dell Technologies in your dorm room and now you've got kids doing stuff in the elementary level just to the thing on space with cybersecurity and space is a big trend and they're starting early in elementary school. Now you've got the boardroom and everywhere in between. The tech trends are the big opportunity here. I want to dig into it and I want to get your thoughts because with cloud computing, gen one, you say check, scale, it matters. But the big wave right now is everything is a service. And so you've got to be nimble, you got to be agile. But that's easy to say and hard to do. I want to get your thoughts on how you see everything as a service from platform to SaaS, to developers of service, to Cube as a service, to Dell as a service. Everything is becoming a service. What's under the covers there? Because it's not easy, automation, obviously machine learning. What do you see? Because this is going to get us out of the pandemic as more people are agile. Give me your thoughts. It's right. So we've actually, as you point out, we've been at this for a while. And if you look on our balance sheet, you'll see almost $24 billion deferred revenue. So it's not a completely new idea to us. And we are aggressively expanding as a service. So our customers and partners can access our solutions any way they want. And we're committed to making everything that we provide available as a service. And one of the things we're talking a lot about here Dell Technologies World is providing a consistent experience no matter where customers run their workloads. And so we've unveiled Project Apex, which is really bringing together all of our as a service and cloud offerings into a consistent, unified effort. We're enhancing the Dell Technologies Cloud Console. And this is going to give customers the power to manage every aspect of their cloud journey and as a service journey through a simple, unified self-service experience. We're going to be talking a lot about storage as a service. Storage is always important in Dell Technologies and providing scalable elastic storage resources that can be deployed, owned and managed on-premise, but owned by Dell Technologies. And we're going to bring some updates to the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to make it easier, simpler to consume, lower the barriers to entry and extending our subscription availability. You know, in the platform business and all the people talk about platforms and over the years, when you have a platform business, you have to kind of dog food or kind of do it first before the customers dig in to use in the service. You mentioned you guys have been doing Dell's service across your product lines and we've documented that certainly on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. But now you got to bring it to customers. Can you tell me how that's going? Because with the pandemic, some things are obviously, customers need to double down on building modern apps, having programmable infrastructure. As you guys have everything as a service from the Dell side, now the customers have to do their part. They have to turn their offerings into as a service. Can you take us through trends you're seeing in your customer base around the pandemic and is it permanent? Is it cyclical? What's the customer impact of everything as a service? I think this is clearly the demand trend from customers. And as I said, we've been embracing it for some time. One of the reasons we created this project, Apex is to bring it all together because I'll say, we want to go faster, right? And we always want to go faster. And what you've seen from customers in the last eight months is you kind of exposed the digitally enabled and the not so much digitally enabled. And a lot of customers have accelerated their progress on their digital journey quite a bit during these last eight months. And as I said, I think a lot of that gets carried forward. We ourselves over a weekend basically said, okay, everybody worked from home now. It's worked really well. There's lots of benefits to that. There are productivity benefits, environmental benefits. And I think we're all finding ways that we can be more productive. And I think a lot of this will persist after the pandemic. Now, when we were covering VMworld just recently, this event I had the virtual event, what claim out of that was the 5G trend. And some of the conversation was 5G is not a consumer app. It's really a business app. Could you share your thoughts on 5G because it will enable the edge, the intelligent edge. 5G is super important. What's your vision on how 5G will roll out? Do you agree with it more as a business app, not so much a consumer? Yeah, I mean, the first application will be, hey, let's have 5G phones. Great, but you really can't talk faster on your 5G phone. So what is it all about? It's about making things intelligent and having the things talk to each other. And they're gonna be way more things talking to each other than there are people. Imagine every ARM processor or embedded processor out there in the world now being connected and intelligent, the amount of data that gets created. So it's really about connecting all the things. And that is an incredibly exciting possibility. Organizations have to reimagine themselves given that future. And 5G will be the digital fabric that allows this new future to be created. When you look at Dell Technologies out 10 years to 2030, what does it look like? You eliminated about the internet of things and the edge. What's the vision for Dell 2030? So first, I think you're gonna have autonomous infrastructure and it's going to be highly distributed on the intelligent edge. And that's gonna enable enormous advances in really all human endeavors. And Dell Technologies is gonna be the essential infrastructure company to power all of this. And our moonshot goals point the way in another sense where we talk about advancing sustainability, cultivating inclusion, transforming lives and upholding ethics and data privacy. And we didn't create those priorities for the last eight months, but certainly the last eight months put a real magnifying glass and exclamation point on their importance. And we continue to be super optimistic about the role technology has in the world and the role that we can play in helping customers achieve that. And the role of cloud, is cloud going to be abstracted away? Is that cloud going to continue to be a big part of it? Is cloud on premise? I mean, as these environments look more cloud-like and operationally and autonomous, does that kind of go away in 10 years? You see that becoming just part of the resource pool. How do you view that? Well, clouds are infrastructure, right? So you can have a public cloud, you can have an edge cloud, a private cloud, a telco cloud, a hybrid cloud, a multi-cloud, here cloud, there cloud, everywhere cloud. Yes, they'll all be there. It's basically infrastructure. And how do you make that as easy to consume and create the flexibility that enables everything? Yeah, and we saw that VMworld had talked about telco cloud as a trend. We see that everything's going to be a cloud, everything will be a service. That's our view. I want to get your thoughts on entrepreneurial thinking. You've always been an entrepreneur. Even as you've got this mess of billions of dollars in companies out there, you're still innovating. Right now, entrepreneurial thinking is needed more than ever. And can you share your advice to people out there who want to be more digitally enabled, who have to think about the next 10 years? What entrepreneurial thinking can they apply now? Because let's face it, COVID has exposed what needs to be worked on, what should not be worked on. So there's clearly a digital push there. What entrepreneurial tactics, what would you share to the folks out there who really want to be on the wave here and be digitally enabled position for the future? Well, you know, I kind of start with the experiment, take a risk, find a new problem, and figure out how to go solve it. And look, I continue to be inspired by all the new entrepreneurs and new companies out there being created. And while there's certainly, you know, one trend in consolidation in parts of our industry, there are always new and interesting things happening in the world of technology. And that's where you see a lot of these new companies being created. And, you know, that always excites me. I don't see too much of a shortage of entrepreneurial thinking out there. But we can always use more of it because that's how the world pushes forward when you have people with new ideas, willing to take risks, capital available to, you know, support that risk-taking. You know, that's where you get new innovation. Yeah, can see the opportunities execute on them. I want to give you thoughts on AI, obviously, as we've seen huge backlash on some of the, with the elections here going on, and you got all the, you know, tech for good on one side, tech for bad on the other, and everything in between. Technology isn't an abler and it does have some consequences. But there's some great things going on with technology. I know you've been an advocate for the past two years and specifically hardcore for technology for good. As AI becomes more prominent as machine learning and data comes into the picture, can you give your thoughts on where we are with technology for good? What are some of the highlights and what areas we need to work more on and how does the role data and AI play in it? I do think technology is overwhelmingly used for good. And, you know, a long time ago, you know, fire was technology, right? Somebody came to the village and said, hey, we got this new, this new thing, you know, called fire. And, you know, it can, it can warm a home or it can burn down the whole village, but overwhelmingly technology innovations have advanced human progress. And I only think it's accelerating from here. And as everything becomes intelligent and connected, AI is the only way to be able to reason over all that data, especially the streaming data in real time. And all of that is going to accrue positively to great human outcomes. And every business has to reimagine itself to create better products and services, to create better outcomes for the students, the patients, for manufacturing, to create success and competitive advantage. And, you know, AI, machine learning, these are just tools. Sure, there are always going to be challenges, but we as humans have to make sure that the tools are used overwhelmingly for good. Again, I tend to be optimistic. I think the vast majority of people do want to do good things in the world. And so prevent against the kind of worst case scenarios, but I remain optimistic. Fire, the wheel, tools, it's all about the humans running them. And that's a big impact. Michael, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate you coming on virtually with theCUBE and thanks for allowing us to be part of your virtual digital experience. For the final word, just share for a minute what people should walk away with this year. I know it's virtual, it's not face to face. It's a very intimate event when it's held face to face, but you do it in virtual, a lot of content out there. But for the people watching, what should they walk away with this year from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience? What's the main message? So, you know, Dell Technologies wants, as ever, to be your best partner in the digital transformation. And we're investing heavily in multi-cloud, in the edge, in data management, software defining the networks, providing the compute to deal with all these enormous workloads with AI, 5G, and continuing to create this secure work from anywhere environment. So, again, thanks to our customers and partners for the tremendous trust they place in us and we're looking forward to a great year ahead. Well, thanks for everything that you're doing. I know you supply a lot of equipment for kids in school and for businesses and continue to innovate. You're doing your part of the supply chain. Thank you for having your team stay on that. Of course, we're doing our part, trying our best to get the content out there. Thank you so much for the time. Michael, great to see you. Hope to see you in person soon. Thank you for coming on. Thank you, John. Okay, this is theCUBE covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.