 Live from the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE at Dell World 2014. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Hi, we're back, Dell World 2014 is wrapping up there. They've shut down the exhibit hall, but we're still going live here at theCUBE. Peter Bookman is here, entrepreneur, co-founder of E3 Systems, former Fusion IO. Peter, great to see you again. Thanks for having me. So I ran into the other day here at Dell World, we were walking the floor. It's always great to see you. So what about Dell World? What's happening here? Oh, this is exciting. This is my first Dell World, but it absolutely is game-changing. The energy is awesome. I felt like the partner keynote opened it up really well of that this is a change Dell for partners, which is what I'm experiencing. I've not experienced this kind of energy and level in the past, and it's awesome. So the big theme that we've talked about, one of the big themes this week is in addition to the transformation of Dell is the privatization of Dell. We're just talking to Michael Dell about that as a company that does business with Dell, as a partner of them. Have you noticed a change? Oh yeah, as a serial entrepreneur, I've done a lot of deals and I've worked with Dell in the past. I sold a company that became two Sonic wall that became obviously Fusion and in the past Dell has been very, very great, but it's not exactly known for its agility. It's let's put something together and get something done really, really fast. And from our perspective, and what we're seeing is we're transitioning and being able to leverage Dell so fast that just about no other initiative or partnership is able to keep up really right now. I don't know if you were able to hear the Michael Dell interview. I asked him one of John Furrier's questions is if you're in the dorm room back, you know, you're 18 years old, 2014, he said I'd be building something. I'd be doing some startups. I mean, what's it like out there? I mean, you're a serial entrepreneur. Have you ever seen a better time and easier market entry? Although that has brings competition. What, how would you summarize the innovation world? I think it's an innovator's opportunistic world. It's, there's so many problems to solve and it's never been as frictionless as it is for anybody to solve a problem. The tools are there, you know, with the cloud that simply makes it so you pay for what you use. It means that you pay to solve the problem and then you're in the market. It's awesome. Are you solving a problem? It's that fast, that easy. So it's really exciting. So what are the customers telling you? Where do they need help? Where do you see those opportunities? Well, I mean, a sphere, what we have is this application containerization technology for Windows, sphere acquired V3 systems that has the distributed virtual desktop technology for hyperconverged appliances. What we're showing here actually was a solution to a customer need. There's a lot of drive at Dell with Google for Chromebooks for education and a real problem with what do you do with the legacy applications? So using our Glassware technology, we, it was attempted with a Dell Vertex, really cool server platform to deploy as many of a single education-based app as they could and it was quite limited using traditional hypervisor type technologies. Over on at our booth over here, we've been showing and we started at zero every day and have ended the day at over 7,000 concurrent sessions running on a Vertex, which to me seems pretty amazing if you know the platform. Yeah, it's so cool. Peter, can you give us a little flavor? You know, what's the customer vibe at the show here? What kind of conversations, you know? Usually this show to me, it's my third year being here. It's going through a little bit of transition. When I first came two years ago, it was really business kind of CIO, you know, a lot of suits. They had Bill Clinton here last year. They did Elon Musk and they're starting to pull in a lot of the more the user group event. Next year, my understanding, the Dell Enterprise Forum fully wraps into here. So I expect, you know, more trainings and labs and things like that. What's the kind of customer base? Is it, you know, business, technical? What are they excited about? I've definitely heard that and seen that and I think that vibe is really clear. What I'm seeing and what we're seeing is this, I don't have a lot of experience with previous Dell worlds, my observation is there's a lot of partner opportunities here. In fact, I was commenting that this is at the top of my list at this point for partner ecosystems, partners to talk to, whether that's partners that we value add or add something to the flavor or sphere technology plus Dell plus something else allows us to go do something together very rapidly. The theme for me is partner ecosystem that can move really rapidly. It's really impressive. Can you unpack that a little, you know, why Dell? Is it, you know, does the other server guys either compete or don't have the channel in reach? Or, you know, why is it that Dell is the one that is number one for you? You know, I was standing right here but I really couldn't hear a lot of what was being said but it seems a lot of a lot, like there's a lot of effort being put into that and that's felt, that's easy to see. Top-down, the partner ecosystem is important. It seemed to me that all the announcements made over the course of Dell were very partner-centric. So, there's a big energy top-down that bleeds really well into do you have something to offer that Dell can help you with as a partner that we can go collectively go do something together? I had that huge list that I was reading off and I was walking around, I bumped into you the other night. It's just, it astounds me how much stuff Dell has and what they've amassed. I mean, they've transformed from a PC company and but I, you know, I'm not an M&A guy but when you've sold a bunch of companies there's always white spaces to fill. But I still got quite amazed at the portfolio that the company's put together. I guess, you know, it's one thing to spend 13 billion, it's another thing to actually spend it on things that customers need and be able to integrate it in a way. Where do you put Dell? I mean, IBM obviously very good at acquisitions. Oracle very good at acquisitions. EMC's had some blockbusters and does seems to be do well at integrating them. Microsoft pretty well, I guess Intel too. Dell's right up there. But how would you sort of, you know, handicap the horses? You know, I'm probably going to get in trouble for this so tweet away, but you know, my observation is I honestly wonder if everybody isn't envying Michael Dell at this point. You know, he's obviously a visionary anyway but everybody else is shedding resources and having to and Dell, as you're saying, gets a stand and I was talking to a Dell executive yesterday who was jokingly saying we're very comfortable in this world where I know what I'm good at and therefore we're great for partners and what I'm good at is hardware and software. And then they said, and then the funny part is we continue to dialogue and they say, well, hardware, software and services. Well, hardware, software and as you're describing the list goes on, right? But I think that being able to be end to end and play such a vital role, for example, again in education with Chromebooks, I don't know what other people are able to do but it seems to me like everybody else is kind of in a handicap position because Dell has so many offerings and has the agility of effectively a private company now. I think people way underestimated Dell. You know, trying to sort of position them is not relevant and then Dell, Michael Dell in particular just sort of weathered that storm and now it's like this Cheshire cat. I got this giant company that's now energized and I'm throwing off probably more cash, he won't say, but I bet you they're throwing off more cash now as a private company than they ever had. He sort of hinted to that. He said his costs today of servicing the debt are lower excuse me then if they were when he had to buy back stock and do dividends. So that says to me, he was hinting, he didn't say it but at my inferences, they've got, they're throwing off more cash. So I think you've got this, they're not sleeping, they're a giant that's actually much more nimble. So it's going to be really interesting to see and meanwhile, Peter, you've got these big companies just getting pulled apart. You're seeing Symantec split up, you're seeing HP split up, you're seeing pressure on EMC to split up, even not just enterprise tech, but eBay and PayPal, really interesting dynamics. They're all driven by the sort of short term financial gain. Then on the other end of the spectrum, your world, the startup world, you got startups that are sort of delaying IPOs. They're raising, like Cloudera raises 750 million from Intel, which forestalls an IPO. Amazing. And in recent rights, an article saying that basically, sucks being a public company. What do you see there in startup land? I mean, you're living it now in terms of exits, is it an IPO? Do people not want to go public? Are we ever going to see another big company emerge from the startup world? I think absolutely. I mean, this is one of those, I think we're one of them. This is one of those things where when you solve a problem, I would define the world we live in as volatile, and that's neither good nor bad. That just is. And if you can leverage it, it's great. I love surfing. And one of the things that I learned early on in surfing is the first wave is almost never the one you want to catch. So if you're lucky, and surfing is a great example of it, you can hang out and watch the waves. You can understand and gauge the waves. And through partnerships and the volatility, I think the sky's the limit as to what kind of an exit do you want, because there's lots of exits. People who will buy you out, buy out portions. I'm accustomed to a standard kind of venture capital policy where as founders at a certain point, they want to de-risk you, so to speak, and you get some portion taken care of anyway. So whether you go IPO, whether you exit to somebody, whether you go and stay private, and very, very, very, just to me, it's about being able to win. And that will take on an independent strategy for each startup company. And will probably change depending upon the market conditions over time. Well, Michael Dell, everything, any conversation you have with Michael Dell always reverts back to the customer, right? When you have a conversation with entrepreneurs, it always reverts back to the customer. Now it doesn't always with investors, but entrepreneurs and founders, you know that you really got to have three things, right? You got to have great, happy customers. You got to have happy employees, and you got to make some money, you know? Absolutely. If you do those three things, you're going to succeed, right? That's simple. All right, give me the last word. What's next for you guys? Oh, we have a lot coming. I mean, we have the eminent close of Overland Storage that'll add to our portfolio a lot of storage offerings that have yet to be announced. We have a lot of good opportunities we'll be seeing from a use case case study perspective that we've done to collectively with Dell, and will continue to work on. So from the moving things to the cloud in a componentized way that can be utilized however we want to, I think we're just getting started. I think from this DevOps phenomenon that was a theme here is just really beginning to be understood that operationally, those who control the workflow are just getting involved with IT and being able to take web services and applications that are containerized and desktops and virtual desktops and be able to integrate workflow into all of that and that's a huge transformation we're seeing. Yeah, the DevOps piece is interesting. Dell's software business, which doesn't get a lot of play and airtime. It's a multi-billion dollar software business so we're watching that as well. Peter, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing what's going on with you guys and sharing your thoughts on Dell. Thank you guys very much. Good to see you again. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live still from Dell World 2014.