 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back to theCUBE Live here in San Francisco for VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante for CUBE Coverage. Live, we're here with Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies. CUBE alum, great to see you. Great to be back with you guys. Thank you guys for all the great coverage here at VMworld. Thanks for coming on and I know you're super busy a lot of time, so just get right to it. You're not on stage, you haven't been involved in the keynote, it's been pretty much a VMware show, but Pivotal being bought by VMware, Big News, Carbon Black, those were the acquisitions coming in that got everyone a buzz, but there's a lot of technical integrations going on with VMware, as Dave called it once, the crown jewel for you. What's going on? What's inside your head right now? Share what's going on. What's on the chessboard? Well, if we step back to 2015, when we announced the combination and fast forward today to 2019, we're really delighted with the progress and how we've been able to bring the Dell Technologies family together, the great progress and innovation going on here at VMworld, you see it on stage and more today as well, integrating Kubernetes right inside of vSphere, that's super important. Obviously bringing together the developer and the infrastructure with Build, Run, Manage, Connect and Protect, all the progress we're making at the network layer with NSX, with security, with Carbon Black, and all things Dell are powered by VMware, so our Dell Technologies cloud vision, the multi-cloud vision, again think about it from the perspective of the customer, we always start with a customer. Customer is looking for a developer-centric environment that is location-agnostic, right? And they don't want to get locked in. And when you think about computing increasingly, it's highly distributed, right? You've got Edge, you've got all sorts of clouds, you've got softwares of service, and how do you seamlessly move things around? And VMware Cloud Foundation is the perfect substrate to be able to manage in that future world. I want to get into the whole disparate parts coming together, you guys are pulling a lot together with Dell Technologies, but first I want to say that this is our 10th year covering VMworld, it's our 10th year. Congratulations, thank you. This is the last show standing, because the first show we did was EMC World, which you bought, so that's technically part of Dell Technologies. We've been covering theCUBE, when we first met you. Still there, it's just, it's now even bigger. It's even bigger. When we first met you, you were a public company, and I remember we had conversations around going private, some of the things that you saw and you wanted to do, you're doing them, so we're now five, six years into that, you've been number one in a lot of categories, you like to talk about we're number one in servers, we're number one in storage, you've been number one in a lot of those things that you used to compete and still do. Now the game has changed, the platform of cloud is certainly there, you're bringing all these piece parts together. Not easy, I mean it's not, you look at it, it looks obvious on the surface, but it's not obvious putting it together. This is kind of what's happening right now, this seems to be the top story for Dell Technologies. You're bringing the collection of Dell, plus VMware, and new stuff into the fold. Is that the right kind of way to categorize it? You know, I think if you look at it as a trajectory, it's all very clear and it's not really that different from the vision that we laid out in 2015 and 2016, and certainly we were given an incredible opportunity to be able to bring EMC and VMware into the Dell Tech family along with Pivotal and it's resonated with customers. We've had incredible revenue synergies and I couldn't be more excited about the level of innovation that we're driving and the feedback we're getting from customers continues to be quite positive. And what I see out there looking out five years, 10 years is this boom in edge computing. And I think there again it plays to our strengths and how do we enable this digital future for our customers and to be able to unleash all this data to enable humanity and that's why we built this company. So as it relates to the edge and one of the areas you're not number one in, one of the few is public cloud. So you're kind of redefining the notion of cloud with multi-cloud. So I wonder how you think about that opportunity. You're known for go big or go home. You like big markets. How do you look at the total market for multi-cloud and edge and as it relates to sort of the existing on-prem business, the public cloud growth that you're seeing. What do you see for that multi-cloud slash edge new cloud opportunity? Well, since we're here at VMworld, VMworld has about 70 million workloads. I think it's actually bigger than the public cloud. You'd correct me if I'm wrong, right? Yeah, I mean, look, on-prem's way bigger than the public cloud, right? No question. Exactly, and what's happening, of course, is the line. I'm growing faster, sorry, but it's much easier. The line is blurring between what's a public cloud, what's a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, edge. And so look, our opportunity is to really make all that go away for customers and allow them to choose and express our unique value add in whatever form a customer wants to use it. So you've seen us align with all the public clouds. You're seeing us take steps in the edge. We're continuing to improve the on-premise systems with project dimension. Now it's the VMware cloud on Dell EMC that we're managing for you. And it's on-demand, it's consumption, and it's consumed just like a public cloud. So- I'm on the numbers there. It's all coming together and who's got a better capability or position than we have. Well, that's what I was getting at with about the piece parts being put together, bringing the spare parts, because I would agree that that on-premise is bigger than the public cloud, but it's like, it's a declining old technology that's being refreshed. So you have the customers looking at, that's why containers are popular, they can put containers around legacy, but those technologies have to transform into new ones. This is the cloud platform, I think, opportunity. And so you guys now have VMware cloud on Dell EMC, which looks like it's a managed service for the on-prem as a kind of a starting point to kind of replatform IT or the enterprise, because yeah, it's a big market that's declining or transforming the spends there, but it might not be the same as it was before. You know what I'm saying? So that's kind of where we see that. Your thoughts on that dynamic. Customers don't want to be locked into a particular way of doing things. And if you think about workloads and containers and where these things will reside, one thing we know is it'll change over time, right? And new requirements, security, regulation, performance, cost, et cetera, we see things moving back and forth. And I maintain that when we're here on theCUBE at the 15-year anniversary or 20-year anniversary, we'll be talking about the edge being bigger than all the clouds combined. Yeah, I like that edge story. One of the things I want to get thoughts on, you said on theCUBE last year, data tsunami. You've always been pro-data that the data piece is a critical aspect of this new equation. There seems to be a competitive battle for what I call the control plane of data. That's my words, no one's really written that up yet, but data is a strategic asset when you're dealing with applications, whether it's cloud-native and or on-premise using microservices, but edge certainly data is a critical thing too. Do you move compute to the edge? Do you have data at the edge? So data is a critical ingredient all this. What's up in your update in your mind in terms of how that's changed or is it still the same course? What's the current vision of the data role? I think it is the critical ingredient. I mean, it's sort of the plot, right? And when you think about neural networks and machine learning and AI and all those great tools, they're nothing without the data. And we're just at the beginning, we're in the pre-game show of 5G and we have an increasingly intelligent and connected world. And so if you think you have a lot of data now in five years from now, you have 1,000 times more. And so we're building out this infrastructure to enable humanity to really bring value from that data. Michael, when you bought EMC, I was having a conversation with one of your, CEOs of one of your competitors and that individual said that, well, Dell's not going to be able to buy companies anymore because all this debt. And I said, well, what about VMware? How about 40 companies in the last four or five years? There you go. The question to you is around M&A, you obviously, as Dell, you bought a lot of companies, Joe Tucci before you bought a lot of companies. Now you and Pat are buying a lot of companies, you've learned a lot about M&A. What do you look for and what have you learned? What do you look for? I'm sure you've made some mistakes along the way, but what do you look for in M&A? I mean, what's the secret sauce as to how you're successful in M&A? Well, what we don't do is wake up in the morning and say, let's go find a company to buy. We actually start with the strategy of the company and what are we trying to accomplish and what is the strategic intent and the problems that we're trying to solve on behalf of our customers. And there are many ways to do that. We have organic innovation, the list of the top patent holders and producers just came out for 2018. We were ranked number 12 of all companies in the entire world. That's pretty good, up from number 18 the year before. We were a couple of patents behind Apple and our organic innovation engine is very, very strong. Then we have partnerships, right? We're not going to do everything ourselves, right? Look out there at the expo, you see every company in the industry is part of the VMware ecosystem. Love it, fantastic, right? Then we have investments. We have our Dell Technologies Capital and we're continuing to make investments. We're going to announce another one here. It'll probably get your attention, in the compute space and the AI space. And we continue to sort of shoot ahead three to five years into the future with these new investments. And then, of course, acquisitions are also a tool to accelerate. And if you think about how we built NSX and adding new capabilities into the software-defined network, which I continue to believe is an enormous opportunity that we're incredibly well positioned for. So we have a platform to add new capabilities, but acquisitions are just one of the best. It's on the strategy. Well, you also have some dry powder, if I may, and it relates to this, that you haven't really pulled the trigger on yet, which is Dell Boom E-Secure Works and RSA. I mean, these are assets that, it's not exactly clear where they fit in the whole family. You have a lot of options there. I don't know what you can share about those, but... We do have a lot of options and we have some great assets that continue to grow. Boom E continues to boom along and adding thousands of customers and continues to be quite well adopted. But here at VMworld, I'm super excited about the ability to bring together Kubernetes and Pivotal and VMware all together. I think, if you look at the endpoint business, on a revenue basis, nobody has a bigger endpoint business than Dell Technologies, right? And with what we're doing at Workspace One, which was already having great momentum and now with Carbon Black, the ability to secure those endpoints, which are increasingly very diverse as we were talking about before, our capabilities continue to expand. You guys done a great job. I mean, David, I was commenting, the shareholder value, stakeholder value, both shareholder and stakeholder that you've done, when private, then when public, all this financial success, congratulations. But I want to talk about Pat Gelsinger and VMware, because we were commenting during the VCloud Air transition before the Amazon relationship where Pat saw the waves, like, look at, we got to go and make a decision to clean this mess up. I think that was one of his exact words, but some of them on those lines. They made the team, looked at Amazon, partnered with Amazon, since then, the VMware stock price, shareholder value, stake it a little bit, went up. So all good moves around, so props to everyone, but the whole tech for good thing is now part of it. I want to get your thoughts on this, because there's backlash against tech these days, right? And I thought Pat's keynote yesterday was clever to point that out, that it's a neutral opportunity to shape it. This isn't a big part of, it's not window dressing anymore, this isn't about just throw some niches out there. This is part of corporate culture that is just directly relevant to some of the political wins happening. Your thoughts on balancing and shaping tech for good and leveraging the financial success be stakeholder success, not just shareholder, your thoughts. Right, well first of all, I think the biggest thing that we can do is to use all this data to enable humanity in a positive way, right? And that's sort of our core mission as a company and what we do. I think as Pat correctly pointed out, AI doesn't wake up in the morning and say, today I'm going to be bad or today I'm going to be good. It's what do we as humans ask these things to do? And storytellers are good at scaring people, right? And as long as there've been humans telling stories to each other, we've been fearful of new things, right? And, but the reality is that the vast majority of technology is used for good. I do think there are some companies in today's world that have been looking the other way because they've been minting money, you know? You know they are. By using customers data and they're exploiting their privacy in a way that is not good. And I think they're going to be subject to regulation and the rules will change. We're not one of those, right? I mean, Facebook. But I mean, so if I may, I mean look, the tech industry, yes, there's some examples, but the tech industry in general has, I think I got a bad rap. I mean, and I like, I'm glad that people like yourselves and leaders like yourselves are sort of saying, hey, we actually are doing good. Here's some examples and really leaning into that because I would say on balance, the contribution to society of tech has far outweighed the negative. And look, the way we've always approached this is to say, you know, what do, you know, what is the best possible thing that we could be doing here? And, you know, if we're waiting for a regulator to show up and tell us that we did it wrong, that's completely the wrong answer, right? So if you look at, for example, in our sustainability and, you know, the environment, we're way, way ahead of any rules or thing. You know, we're proactively thinking about how do we dramatically improve our footprint and, you know, the materials and the energy consumption. And certainly we have legions of stories about how technology and genomics research and disaster recovery and, you know, imaging to, you know, understand, you know, what's going on, you know, across the globe is having an enormous positive difference. One of the things you mentioned about the Facebook example, I could actually say Facebook, but it pretty much was Facebook, was it was weaponized and it was some digital damage and some collateral damage. But when you talk about edge computing, one of the national defense security concerns is when it's not just malware attached, we're worried about the steel credit cards, there's takeover of action machines, right? So the industrial IoT piece of it, there's a lot of concerns around the role of leaders like yourself and companies around national defense because with the ransomware, 13 cities hit, was that cyber, was that intentional, was that just, you know, blackmail? We don't know, I mean, you take over a self-driving car and you can make it do something. That's lives are now in danger, not just credit card data. So the whole discussion around cyber defense becomes now a topic that politicians are not really that qualified to address right now. And all of this is our industry is changing. Yeah, it's something we spend a lot of time on and obviously with RSA and secure works and the intrinsic security that we build into our software and hardware infrastructure solutions, we spend a lot of time on this, you're absolutely right as everything becomes intelligent and connected, the attack surface and the vulnerabilities also become much, much larger. So we have a real responsibility, not only in securing our supply chain, but in securing all of those, you know, devices and virtual machines and containers that are out there running the infrastructure of the world. I mean, we have about half of the world's mission critical, you know, organizations, right, are running their most important things on Dell technologies. It's great that you've been proactive on having good judgment as a corporate citizen. I think that's a great leadership, congratulations. That's something that everyone should emulate. My final question for you is, what are you excited about right now? I mean, a lot going on. You got a spring tier step, VMware stock is, you know, still out on high even a little dip here with some of the political landscape going on, but still a lot of integration. New techs happening, you got Kubernetes, you got a lot more on top of that with microservices, you got 5G, as you mentioned, pre-gaming right now, but a lot of other stuff's going on. What are you most excited about? Well, you rattled off several of them, I think, you know, on- Pick your favorite. With Ray O'Farrell and Greg Lavender, they had a kind of landscape there of 21 new technologies that are super interesting. I could geek out and get excited about it. Your favorite. Any one of those. You know, look, I, I, I, Hey guys, it's my turn. Oh, hey, hey. You know, you ran over here, my turn. Okay. All right. Ah. Love it, didn't do okay? I did good. He's doing great. Do it, okay. Thank you, Michael. Sure thing. Are you ready to let you take over? All right. Come on in. Mike, come up. I think he's got to go. Michael's got to go. Okay. Well, Pat's, Pat's on deck here. I'm saying 5G. Pat wants to get in the batter's box here. He wants to get into the game. 5G data explosion. Thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. We'll be back with Pat Gelsinger, who's on set right now, ready to go. We'll be right back.