 The Cube presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Hello, and welcome to theCUBE here at Dell Tech World. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, here with Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Technologies. Cube alumni comes on every year, we have theCUBE here. It's been two years, Michael, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Hey, John Dave, great to be with you guys. Thanks for being here. Wonderful to be back here in Vegas with you. Well, great to be in person. Two years ago, we had theCUBE with the pandemic. A lot's happened. We were talking end-to-end solutions here at Dell Tech World in person. Two years ago, pandemic hits. Thank God you had all that supply for the people having to remote into work. Now back in person, what's it look like now with Dell Tech World end-to-end? The edge is important. What's the story? You know, edges is the physical world. And if you step back from clouds and, you know, multi-cloud, you sort of think about what is the purpose of a cloud or a data center? Well, it's to take data out of the physical world and move it to this place to somehow enhance it or do something with it and create business value and hopefully create better outcomes. Well, it turns out that, you know, increasingly a lot of that data is going to stay in the physical world. And all of those nodes are going to be connected. They're going to be intelligent. And we're seeing it in manufacturing and retail and healthcare and transportation and logistics. We're seeing this rapidly intelligent edge being formed. And then of course with the new networks, the 5G, we're seeing, you know, all this develop. And so here on the show floor, we're showing a lot of those solutions but our customers are highly engaged and certainly we think that's a big growth factor for the next decade. You know, it's been interesting to watch the transformation of the IT world and the cloudification and the as-a-service consumption model which you guys are putting out there has been very successful. But cloud operations is more prominent now on premises and edge and cloud. So the combination of cloud, on-premise and edge, hardware matters more now than ever before. Silicon advances, abstraction layers from modern cloud native applications are what people are focused on. What's the story that you say to the CIOs saying, we're here to help you with that new architecture, cloud, multi-cloud, on-premise and edge. What's the main story for you guys but the customers? Well, you know, customers want to go faster, right? And they want to accelerate their transformation. And so they want to shift more resources over to developers, to applications, to access their data to create competitive advantage. And so we talk a lot about the value line and what are those things below the value line where we can provide that as a service on a consumption-based model and accelerate their transformation and kind of do for them what we've done inside our own business and it's absolutely resonating. We're seeing great growth there. People continue to need the solutions but as we can automate the management and deployment of infrastructure and make it super easy, it gives them a lot of cycles back. You know, Michael, the favorite part, my favorite part of your book was you were in, I think you were in his home court in his dining room at Carl Icahn's house and you said, well, why don't you just buy the company and then you'll do what you're doing. I'll buy it back for cheaper. Now thankfully you didn't have to do that because you had an environment of low interest rates and you obviously took it into the other direction at a tremendous value, $101 billion in revenue last year, 17% revenue growth, which was astounding when you think about that. Now we're entering a new chapter with VMware untethered, of course, you're the chairman of both companies, so how should we think about the new Dell? What's next? Well, so look, we have some unbelievable core businesses, right, we have our client system business and we've all learned during these last two years how incredibly important it is to enable and power your workforce with the right tools in the remote and hybrid work and we're showing off all kinds of new innovations here. That's a huge business force, continues to grow, continues to be super important. Then we have our ISG, the cloud data center, the network of the future, the edge, you know, the sort of epicenter of where we're embracing consumption-based business models, that's absolutely huge. Then we have these new businesses that we're building with Telco, with Edge, put it all together, it's a $1.3 trillion TAM that we operate in, as you said, more than $100 billion last year, so there's plenty of room for us to continue to grow and expand and as we make this shift to outcomes, it's obviously more valuable for customers and that increases our opportunity, increases the value we can create for all our stakeholders. Number one share in PCs, by the way, congratulations. Again, hit that milestone. All of our gamer fans in our Discord want to know what's the hottest chips coming? What's the fastest machines? How's the monitors coming? They want faster, cheaper? What's the coolest monitors out there right now and machines? Well, you know, what's amazing is the pace of innovation continues to improve, so whether it's in the GPU, the CPU, the resolution, I'm pretty partial to our 41-inch display, 11 million pixels of fun and look, I mean, it's clear that people are more productive when they have large screens and all the performance is enabling photorealistic, you know, gaming and photorealistic everything and these are immersive experiences and, you know, again, what companies have figured out to bring it back to a little bit of business here, John, is that when you give people the right tools, they're more productive, they're more engaged and look, people are smart. They know what tools are available and, you know, the thing that actually is most representative of how a person thinks about the tools they have at their organization is actually the thing that's right in front of them and so, you know, this ability for us to provide a full set of solutions for organizations to keep their workforce productive, to run their applications and infrastructure securely anywhere they want, that's a winning proposition. Michael, trust was a big theme of your keynote yesterday and when you acquired EMC and got VMware, it really changed the dynamic with regard to your ability to go into new parts of organizations. You became a much more strategic supplier, I would argue and now with VMware as a separate company, do you feel like you have built up over the, you know, five or whatever years that muscle memory, you kind of earn that trust? So how do you see the customer relationship with that regard to that integration that they loved? The ecosystem competitors might not have loved it so much, but the customers really did love. In fact, the USAA gentleman yesterday kind of mentioned that, how do you see it? You know, customers are not as interested in the balance sheet and where different holdings are, but they want things to work together, right? And they want partnerships in ecosystems and certainly, you know, with VMware, even before the combination, we had a powerful partnership. It obviously solidified in a super special way and now we have this first and best relationship and I've remained the chairman of VMware and super excited about their future, but our ecosystem is incredibly broad and you see that here in the show floor and again, making things work together better and more effectively, building these engineered solutions that allow people to very quickly deploy the kind of capabilities they want, whether it's, you know, Snowflake now working with the on-premise and the edge data and more of these, you know, multi-cloud ecosystems that are being built. It's not going to be just one company. You called the edge a couple of years ago. You really prominent in your speeches and your keynotes. Data also was a big theme, you mentioned data. Now data engineering seems to be the hottest track of students graduating with data engineering skills, not data science, data engineering, large scale, data as code concepts. So what's your vision now with data? How's that fitting into the solutions and the role of data, obviously data protection with cybersecurity, data as code is becoming really part of that next big thing. Yeah, I mean, if you look at anything that is interesting in the world today, at the center of it is data, right? Whether it's the blockchain or the DeFi or the AI drug discovery or the autonomous vehicles or whatever you want to do, there's data in the middle of that. And of course, with that data, well, you've got to manage it. You need compute engines, right? You need to be able to protect it, secure it and, you know, that's kind of what we do. And we're not going to create all of those solutions but we are going to be an enabling layer to allow that data to be accessed, no matter, you know, where it is. And of course, you know, leading in storage continues to be a super important part of our business. Number one, larger than number two, then number three, number four combined and most of the number five as well. And growing share. And you saw today the software defined innovations, allowing that, you know, data layer to exist across the edge, the colos, the on-prem and the public clouds. It threw out a stat yesterday. I can't remember if it was a keynote or the analyst around table, but it was nine million cell towers. And if I heard right, you kind of look at those as potential data centers. Talk about it a little bit. It's actually seven million, but it probably will be nine million and not too long. I don't have the update. But so, yeah, the public clouds altogether is about 600 data centers. There are about seven million cell leader base stations in the world. Every single one of those is becoming a, you know, multi-access edge compute node. And what are they putting in there? They're putting mini data centers with compute and GPUs and storage. And, you know, 5G is not about connecting people. That was 4G and before, 5G is about connecting things. And there are way more things than there are people. And, you know, this edge is rapidly developing. You'll also have private 5G and you'll have, you know, again, embedded intelligence, I believe is going to be in everything. This next decade is going to be about that intelligent connected future, taking that data, turning it into useful insights and outcomes. And, you know, lots of new businesses will be created. Existing businesses will be transformed and also disrupted. Yeah, I mean, I think that's so right on. And not the pad ourselves in the back day, but we called that edge distributed computing a couple of years ago on theCUBE. And that's what's turning into the home with COVID. You saw that become a workplace, basically compute center, these compute nodes, tying it together is what everyone's talking about right now. So as customers say, okay, I want to keep my operations steady and secure. How do I glue it together? How do I bring these compute nodes together? That seems to be the top question on top of people's minds. And they want it to be cloud native, which means they want it to run cloud like and they want to connect these compute nodes together. That's a big discussion point. What's your view on that? Well, you know, if you sort of have a cloud here, a cloud there, a cloud everywhere, and you have lots of different Kubernetes frameworks, and you've got, you know, everything is spread out. It's a disaster, right? And it's a real challenge to manage all that. So what people are trying to do is create ruthless standardization. It's like, how do you drive cost out and get speed? It's ruthless standardization. Create consistent environments where you can operate things across all the different domains that you want. And so, you know, this is what we're bringing together in the capabilities that we're delivering. That chaos is a great opportunity for you. How are you feeling about VMware these days? New team, give us the update there. Yeah, the team is doing well. You know, I think the Tanzu message is resonating. You know, people want Kubernetes and container-based apps, for sure. That's the main growth in new workloads. But they also wanted to work with what they have. And they don't want it to be locked into one particular infrastructure. So, software defining everything, making it run in all the public clouds. You know, we've had a great success with VxRail. You know, that absolutely continues. We have 200,000 plus nodes, 15,000 customers and growing. We have Edge satellite nodes. And we continue to work together in SD-WAN, in software-defined networking, in VMware Cloud Foundation, expressed in all locations. You know, one of the things that we've been seeing with the trend towards future of work, which is a big theme here, is a lot of managed services are popping up where the complexity is so high that customers want to manage services. And also the workforce of IT is kind of changing. You've got a younger generation coming in. How do you see that future of the workforce? The next level IT, it's not going to be like yesterday's IT, it's going to be distributed computing, dashboard-based. And then you've got these managed services. You don't need to have the training and expertise, maybe to run something at scale. How do you see that connecting? Because that seems to be another big trend people are talking about. Hey, it's complex, someone manage it for me. And I want ease of use, I want the easy button in IT. Yeah, well, we've all been at this a while, so we can remember, you know, the beginnings of converged infrastructure, and then hyper-converged, which wasn't that long ago. And now we have consumption-based business models. These are all along the trajectory of the easy button that you're talking about, and customers really thinking about the value line, where are the things that really differentiate and add value for their business? And it's not below the value line in those infrastructure areas. So we're creating that easy button with appliances, with consumption-based models, and allowing them to deploy the scarce resources they have to the things that really drive their unique differentiation. And, you know, if you look at our managed services, flex on demand, all the sort of ancestors and predecessors of Apex, those have been great businesses for us. And now with Apex, we're kind of industrializing this and making it at scale for all customers. You know, the three of us, we go back, our first interactions with you separately were in the 90s, and then we reconnected in 2012, I think it was. Tarkin Maynard had a little breakout session with CIOs. You brought us to early on a Dell tech world in Austin. And of course- It was just Dell world then. Dell world. Yeah, sorry, Dell world. Yeah, thank you. And then EMC world in 2010 was our first cube. And now that's all come together here in Las Vegas. So, you know, it's been great. The three of us come together, and so I really appreciate that. Yeah, awesome. Absolutely, well, you know, really appreciate you guys being here, the wonderful work you do in bringing out the stories and helping us show off the innovations that our team has been working on during the past year. It's been great conversations. And on a personal note, it's been great to have chats with all the top people and your company appreciate it. Someone told me to ask you this question I want to ask you. We've all seen waves of innovation, cycles up and down. We're kind of on one now. You're seeing an inflection point, this next gen computing and web three, cultural shift with workforces and distributed computing decentralization. You mentioned that DeFi earlier. How do you see this wave coming? Because we've seen cycles come and go.com bubble kind of looks the same as the web three NFTs and stuff now. It seems to be a little different, but how do you see this next wave? Because looking back on all the other ones that you've lived through and you wrote. Well, so the way I see it is, to some extent these are like foundational layers that have to be built for the next phase to occur. And if you look at the sort of new companies that are being founded today, and we see a lot of those, you see them, we invest in a bunch of them, they're not going and kind of redoing the old foundational layers. They're going deeply into vertical businesses and disrupting and adding value on top of those. And I think that's really the point of technology, right? It's enabling human progress in all fields. It's making us healthier. It's making us safer. It's making us more successful in everything that we as humans do. And so all these layers of technology are enabling further progress. And I think it's absolutely going to continue. It's all been super exciting, so far for the first several decades, but as I believe, it's just a pre-game show. It's clear your strategy is really building that foundational layer, hardening it, but making it flexible enough. Anybody who read your book, you're a technology visionary. A lot of people put you in a finance bucket, but you can see that you can connect the dots and that's what you're doing with your foundational layers. That's where you're making the bets, isn't it? You can't predict the future. You've said that many times, but you can sort of see where it's going and be prepared for it. Well, you think about any company in the industry or any public sector organization, right? They're wanting to evolve more quickly and transform more quickly, right? And we can give them an infrastructure, a set of tools, a set of capabilities to help them go faster. Yeah. And the other one thing in the 80s when you started Adele and we were in college, there was no open source really then. If you look at the growth of open source, talk about those layers. Open source, better silicon, GPUs, faster cheaper and more. And now we even have open source instruction sets for processors. So I mean, the whole world's changing. It's exciting. You have people around the world working together. And when you see our development teams, whether they're in Israel or Ireland or Bangalore or Singapore, Hoppington, Austin, Silicon Valley, you know, Taiwan, they're all collaborating together and, you know, driving innovation. And our business is not that dissimilar from our customers. Michael, great to have you on theCUBE. Great to have a physical event. People are excited. I'm talking to people. Hey, I haven't been back in Vegas in two years. Thanks for having this event. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Absolutely. Thank you guys. Michael Dell here on theCUBE. CEO of Dell Tech Knowledge. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back more. Live coverage here at Dell Tech World.