 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2016, brought to you by Dell EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Austin, Texas, everybody. This is day two of Dell EMC World. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Michael Dell is here. Michael, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for making time to come to theCUBE. Great to be with you. It's great to have you guys back here at Dell EMC World and your coverage has been super. Thank you. So two years ago, Stu and I were here and at the time EMC was under fire from activist investors and I asked you what advice or have you talked to Joe Tucci and what advice did you give him? And you said, we'll just leave those conversations between me and Joe. And I said, okay, well it's clear Joe asked for some advice. Now it was revealed yesterday that back in 2009, you guys actually talked about potentially doing this type of acquisition or merger. So it's been in the works for a long time. We did and when you asked me that question two years ago obviously I couldn't disclose what we were working on but we had already started the serious discussions that led to the announcement a year and six days ago. And so this has been years in the making dating back to 2001 we originally created the Dell EMC Alliance. So the roadmap of how to integrate the supply chains, the R&D, the go-to-market, the IT, the HR, the finance, every aspect of the company, we've known for a long time how to do that. And so that's why I think if you listen to what David Goulden had to present today in terms of the blizzard of new offerings that we're delivering right now just six weeks after the official combination, the reason we're able to do that is because we've known for a long time exactly what we would do. So you started on the transformation of Dell. You looked at what was happening say a decade ago and you began to acquire companies to transform Dell into an enterprise powerhouse. And you've now completed that transformation. You're not done, but you've achieved your vision. I mean, nobody expected that you would get there this fast. How's it feel? Well, it feels great, but like you said, it's an ongoing process. I mean, when things are going well in our company, we say please, but not satisfied. And when you think about the digital transformation that's underway inside organizations, we're just at the beginning of that. So there's a lot of work to do with and on behalf of our customers to enable that digital transformation. It's absolutely true that we have a winning hand. We're really excited about the capabilities we have, but by no means is our work finished, right? There's a lot to be done here and a tremendous impact that we can have tremendous impact we can have in the world. And you talked about being a private company. We've talked before about the 90 day shot clock and I'm sure you still have goals internally, but there's a new private equity model out there. It used to be private equity would suck out all the cash and leave the carcass. But the private equity model today is invest in companies that are EBITDA positive, which obviously EMC is, which dramatically increases the value. Can you talk about the change in that mindset that you and Silverlake and others of course have promulgated? Well, this is a little bit different than a typical private equity as I'm the larger shareholder in the company, but Silverlake's been a fantastic partner. And like you said, it's all about how do we grow and use this flexibility of being able to focus on the long term as a real asset to enable us as a company. And so they've been great partners. I think it would be very difficult to find ourselves here in this tremendous situation if we had had two public companies. But I think whether you're a public company, a public company, a private company, everybody's got choices. And we made a decision to go big and to invest heavily. And the response from customers, from partners of bringing together the very best capabilities in the industry has been tremendous. If you just pause there for a second and take us a thought experiment, the 20 areas where we're leading in the industry. And you said, well, what if it was 20 companies instead of one company? There's no customer in the world that actually wants that, right? And so we're making it easy for our customers. This is why VCE was so successful. This is why Dell EMC was so successful. And this is why Dell Technologies is going to be so successful. Why the customer partner reaction is so positive. So we're making it easy to deploy the infrastructure and to create the solutions that are required for this whole digital transformation. Michael, when we talked two years ago about being private, beyond kind of the Wall Street angle, you talked about how internally, employees needed to be enabled to be able to take more risk is something that you were encouraging. And that's a shift that needs to happen inside. Can you talk about now EMC coming into the fold, that merger, what changes need to happen inside EMC? I mean, I know organizationally, there are certain corporate functions that are being pulled in some of the organizationally, but a mindset for East Coast company, decades of strong, successful positioning in the marketplace. But there's got to be some shifts that you're making now that you're private and can refocus and change some of the direction for the employees. One thing you do is you don't focus on earnings per share, right? And you focus a bit more on cash flow for a financial standpoint. But when you take a really talented team, and EMC as an incredibly talented team, you say we want to reimagine this business in the context of the longer term. What would you do differently if the goal posts were more long-term oriented? And the wheels start spinning, right? And you get all kinds of great ideas. The amazing thing that I've been fortunate to benefit from is Adele, I believe we have had an all-star team. EMC, all-star team, VMware, all-star team. You put it together, it's an Olympic team that's winning gold medals and unmatched in the industry in terms of talent and capability. So as you put the minds that you've had here on theCUBE to work, how do you reimagine all this together? And just look at what David showed earlier today. We have tons of opportunity in the context of being a company with a long-term horizon. Michael, on a more tactical piece, last week there was the announcement of VMware on AWS. You're the chairman of VMware. You're also Dell Technologies. There's many people, myself included, that says, okay, I think I understand from a VMware standpoint why it makes sense. I understand the AWS piece. For the rest of the Dell family, is this VMware being allowed to be independent or can you give us some color as to how this helps the rest of the Dell family? Oh, it's actually very simple. First of all, what's good for VMware is good for Dell Technologies. Because VMware is a big part of our family. The other thing is if you step back and you think about technology, and I have a little bit of a unique perspective here, we were one of the first investors in VMware before EMC bought them. And what I saw in VMware was, here's a company that's going to take our server and virtualize it. Now you could look at that as a server manufacturer, you say, that's a bad thing. What I've learned in our industry is if something good comes along and it's good for customers, if you stand in the way of it, it'll be at your own expense and detriment, okay? And so, look, we see growth in the public cloud but we don't think everything goes to the public cloud. And we think the hybrid cloud and the multi-cloud environment is what all of our customers are certainly embracing. And as we modernize the data center, as we automate that data center infrastructure, the opportunity to move the workload up to the application level, we can make that on-premise infrastructure extremely competitive. So customers are going to have lots of choices but if it's good for VMware and it's good for customers, it's good for Dell Technologies. And what role did you play in that relationship? Did you catalyze it? Did you support it? Did you help negotiate it? You know, success has many fathers and I'm a huge fan of what VMware is doing. I joined the VMware board and I was immediately promoted to chairman, so I was a... Congratulations. Nice thing. And I've been intimately involved with the team there through all their decisions, but I tell you, it's a great team. And they're doing great work. Now, obviously, most of them are at VMworld in Barcelona this week, but what they're doing with AWS and IBM, I've been intimately involved in from the beginning. So again, go back to 2014 when the discussion restarted. This is a full year before the announcement last year. We were in intimate discussions, understanding everything that was going on inside VMware. And so safe to say I'm very involved, but look, it's a great team there. Pat's a great CEO and there's something called doing by not doing, right? And so if they're doing a great job, we'll let them keep doing that. As you know, one of the things customers like about the cloud is the financial flexibility. Largely, your transactions are capital-driven, but at the same time, you can use Dell Financial Services as a tool. As you retire debt, the more expensive debt, can you use Dell Financial Services to simulate some of those OPEX related transactions? Oh, we don't have to wait for that. We can do it right now. So we're increasing our originations with Dell Financial Services every quarter. And of course, with the combination of EMC, it takes a big step up. And we fully have the capacity to do that. So that's no problem at all. In fact, David talked about a number of new capabilities bringing together the very best of what EMC did with financial services, Dell Financial Services, with utility options, all sorts of flexible payment options to turn CAPEX into OPEX. And so we're all over that one. And that's certainly a big priority for us. And that's available today. And can you confirm our assertion that we've been talking about theCUBE? We've said that the debt service is less than your stock buybacks and the dividends that you would have paid, EMC paid as a public company. Is that accurate? Absolutely the case. So the EMC as a public company was spending about $3.5 billion a year on its share buybacks, interest, and dividend. Now, share buybacks and dividend are not tax deductible. Interest expense is. Our interest expense as a private company is about $2.4 billion. By the way, that includes all Dell as well, okay? So it's less and it's all tax deductible, okay? Let me also put it in context. Our cash flow for the last 90 days when you add up this all publicly reported information of EMC, VMware, and Dell was $3.6 billion for 90 days. So our debt service coverage ratios are phenomenal and we have tons of capacity. And by the way, we have additional capital to invest in the business if we need to go acquire other things. So anybody who's out there saying that somehow we're less than capable in that area is just fundamentally misinformed. So we're getting the rap side. We're just getting started, guys. But we reviewed some of your epic comments in the keynote this morning, so I guess we don't have to review them here, but I'll give you the last word, Michael. It's so great to see you look enthused. Give us the last word. You know, I think this is pretty straightforward. We have created a company that's number one in everything and it's all in one place. And we're investing. I'm personally investing. Our company's investing very significantly and we're in it to win it, right? And you know, if we're number one in everything, somebody's got to be number two and number six and everything else. So we're very excited, but particularly how IT can have a much bigger impact in the world and we're just at the beginning of that digital transformation. Well, so much to talk about, Michael. We'll have to continue it on Twitter. Thanks for the hospitality here and Austin really appreciate you having us here. Great to see you guys. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. It's theCUBE.