Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here at the final wrap up segment for EMC World 2016. Three days of wall to wall coverage here in Las Vegas. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Seven years we've been covering EMC World right at the beginning of the formation of theCUBE in Enterprise Tech. Now the leading event program, independent media program at all events in Enterprise Tech. I'm so proud. And my co-host Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. Guys, another EMC World in the books. Seven years, Stu. It seems like yesterday the chowder post, legal seafood giveaway day in Boston in 2010. We've seen EMC up close in person, right on the front row on the field with them. Embedded coverage. It's been amazing. And I got to say, this event is historic. The Dell merger, the largest in the history of technology. Michael Dell on stage. We're talking about the biggest mega merger. And then of course, most notable, Joe Tucci, stepping down, sailing off into the sunset. Really, really to me, a really amazing event of historic proportions, your thoughts. So, John, six or seven years ago I wrote a post. Oh, Stu, remember this, can EMC remain independent? And in that post, I sort of underscored the fact that most of EMC's value was coming from its ownership of VMware. At that time, I said, if EMC is not able to grow its core business substantially and grow its value of that core business, it probably wouldn't be able to remain independent. But I bet that it would be able to do that. It didn't happen. All right, and now we're talking about the EMC World 2016. We're talking about the merger. They're using that term merger. It's actually technically not a merger. Dell is acquiring EMC. And of course, there's obviously a merge going on, but it is an acquisition. Michael Dell firmly in control of this new company. Obviously leaning on EMC executives. He's acquiring a lot of talent. And Dell Technologies is really the new umbrella brand. It's very clear whose hand is guiding this company. Still, you were an EMC employee at the Office of the CTO and started a technical position and that eventually signed the NDA for the first VMware meeting, which ended up becoming the crown jewel of EMC's Federation strategy. I want to get your thoughts. And also, Federation seems to be blowing up and Federation is now Dell Technologies. Yeah, let's unpack that, John. And you used the term. You said this is historic and I think you're exactly right there. I talked to a lot of the EMC alumni here. So, you know, those of us who worked with the company and a lot of us were still in a little bit of shock. For the last two decades, every year it was IBM's going to buy EMC, Sysco's going to buy EMC, you know. HP. I mean, John, we were at Amazon re-invent and the rumor came out, Dell's going to buy EMC and you're like, no way. I was like, well, you know, think about the history. I was so convinced it would never happen. Yeah, but it happened. So, first of all, you talked to the Federation. The Federation is dead, but what does that mean? The term is being retired and Dell Technologies, the term they say is it's a strategically aligned family of businesses. So, Michael Dell is, you know, the godfather of the new family of businesses. As Joe was the godfather of the Federation, you've got Dell EMC, very clear what that is. David Goulden, very important piece. Guy, you know, has very important piece. The EMC leadership is going to be in a lot of strong places and, you know, EMC's not going away and I wonder if we look two years from now, how much kind of that Dell portfolio looks heavily like EMC, like Dell, how VMware plays, Virtus Stream, there's whole, you know, bunch of businesses. Yes, too. I mean, I got to say, I mean, first of all, I make some outlandish predictions that usually become true most of the time, almost 100% of the time, as we always talk about too. But in this one, I was so convinced that it would never happen. I did not see Dell's move coming in. I've been a huge fan of Michael Dell. He's in my grade. He's my age. And Washington grow through the ranks and he had the trick up his sleeve. He had the cash and he had the drive. And why I'm so impressed with him now is that he's at the top too, founder in charge. It's his company with his name still on it. And he's so young and strong. Technically, he has, and as a private company, I believe it's going to be an absolute strong execution. I think they'll get the merger done on time. I think it's going to happen, but it's going to be fun to watch Michael Dell roll his sleeves up, have some fun. He's already made billions, so it's not about the money. It's about putting up some great numbers. You know, I want to pick up on something you said. You said EMC's not going away. I actually think EMC is going away. I think EMC, as we know it, is going away. I think Dell, as we know it, is going away. You think about HP and Compact, that mega merger. What emerged was not HP. It wasn't Compact. It was this new thing and then it split apart. I think the same thing's going to happen here. I think there's going to be a whole new persona of Dell EMC, Dell Technologies that emerges as a completely different company. Now, of course, the difference is you got Michael at the helm, but he's going to inject his cultural ethos onto EMC, and that is going to change the company. I would agree with you, Dave, on this one. I'll tell you why. In talking to Jeremy Byrd, he was very candid, and he's very candid with us and honest. And he's a guy who could pull it off, remaking this new entity. And Michael Dell, not a marketing genius per se, certainly a great marketer in terms of what he's done, but Jeremy's got the golden touch. And Jeremy said, I'm looking forward to working with him. He's the kind of guy I can work for. So there's mutual respect there. I think Jeremy's going to have some latitude to do what he wants to kind of remake things. So I think you're exactly right. I think EMC's value and culture will morph into a new entity that will be. Well, and Jeremy said, we asked him, are you going to, I don't know if you heard this, are you going to keep Dell World and EMC World separate? And Jeremy said, I'm a fan of big. I'm a fan of one big show. So essentially he's hinting he's going to merge the two events, that in and of itself, to me, totally changes. So I got to ask you guys a question. So one of the things that was obvious and kind of the elephant in the room, people were certainly talking about in the hallways is Michael Dell's beating on HP. Is that a little bit bullying? Is that Michael's just taking the shots for a trip down memory lane? I mean, certainly Oracle, Larry Ellison, he takes his shots at his competitors. But is that the right competitor? Brian Grace, he asked Joe Tucci in the question, maybe it's Amazon, they should be taking shots at. Do you think that was fair? Do you think that's legit? Or is that just kind of old school buddies kind of elbowing each other? Yeah, so I mean, for Michael, HP's been competitor, you know, one, two and three for a long time. That PC business, that server business, HPE, still number one in servers. Michael wants that position. EMC's helping. Their position in hyperconvergence helps them. So, you know, that's the first piece.  Amazon's an ordnitude of magnitude, you know, of a, you know, dangerous competitor out there. So Dell's aware. The cloud story is something that, you know, is going to be interesting to watch. Has Dell EMC put together, how do they compete in that world? So you see a legit competitor, not a weaker competitor. Certainly they give the impression they're shrinking their way down to success. What his direct quote was. Well, in the spirit of Donald Trump, HP started it, right? They were taking ads out in the Wall Street Journal, saying, hey, we are going to pounce on EMC, which of course, HPE would be foolish not to do that. So, Michael's, you know, counter-punching. Having said that, we talked about this in theCUBE. You know, the real competition that's emerging that should really worry this company is Amazon. So it's a share shift, though, with HP. Let's get back to that point, because one of the things you just mentioned was that Wall Street Journal had the obvious thing notable in the keynote in the story of the EMC role is David Goulden's direct explicit statement on stage that said, almost basically saying the potential concern for the pace of innovation, meaning, hey customers, don't go anywhere. So, oh, thanks for reminding me. Yeah. So, I mean, why would he say that? Yeah, so, for first of all, just one thing.  The big threat that I'm worried about is it's the applications. Dell plus EMC don't own the applications. If you look at the cloud marketplace, two thirds of that is SaaS. Microsoft owns apps, you know.  Amazon is trying to help build those next generation of apps. EMC and Dell is trying to play there. But this is why Amazon is such a threat, don't you think? Absolutely, Amazon's a threat. No, because of that reason, you're absolutely right on, is because they don't have the up-the-stack apps like an Oracle or an IBM, that means they're really directly competing against Amazon. Now, what they're trying to do is position, they said a couple of things that I buy. The market's huge, no question about it. But they're essentially saying, look, we can modernize your legacy infrastructure and we can deliver cloud-native. Now, when you start peeling the onion, and we've done this, we've done this on Oracle, we've done it to a certain extent on EMC's offerings as well. But when you start peeling the onion on their cloud-native, it doesn't literally look like Amazon, does it? No, I mean, most of the cloud-native here is infrastructure for cloud-native. So pivotal folks are here talking about what they're doing, but it's the underneath substrate. So the other messaging in the show, summary here, guys, on our report we're filing here, is I'll see a, certainly a positioning of IoT. I just don't see it, Stu, Dave. I see the messaging for IoT, but I'm not seeing that. So the also I want to say is I'm not hearing anything platform two and a half either. That whole platform three thing seems to be gone. Well, no, platform three was the second S-curve, right? That Goulden was showing. There was no platform 2.5 really, at this show. Not platform two, right? But not this event, they're not really talking about it. IoT was talked about more at Dell World than it was here, from what I saw. Yeah, so that was one note. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, they'll participate in IoT because they're just an arms dealer, but I didn't see an end-to-end IoT strategy. It was not big enough, but it was messaging. Like you are hearing that from IBM, you're hearing that from HPE, they're talking about an end-to-end strategy. Certainly Cisco is talking about that. We'll be at HPE Discover, we're going to see that IoT, looking forward to hearing that. But I think these guys can certainly participate in the IoT tailwind, I mean, by selling components, devices, software, et cetera. So more from my notes, you just kind of run down my list of things that I wrote as most notable. Cloud Native, obviously the big move by EMC to put that out there formally. I mean, we've been talking about Cloud Native for a while, Brian Graceley has a seminal report on wikibon.com, but Stu, Cloud Native is now out there. It's in the emerging technologies division. That's what they're calling that group developer cloud and then enterprise hybrid clouds kind of let traditional stuff, thoughts.  I mean, enterprise hybrid cloud, they want to be able to layer the cloud native pieces on top of it all the way down to kind of the converged infrastructure pieces of it. Scale I.O. is one of the growth engines that EMC has in the emerging technology group. We've had that with Iceland, which I think it was Nitro they announced. I mean, you know, we've been talking a lot about Dell.  Jeremy made sure there's a whole litany of announcements and went through. So, you know, in the emerging tech group, I mean, Iceland's over a billion dollar business. Scale I.O. grew, I think it was 345% year over year, you know, well positioned in what we call the server sand market place. CJ, by the way, said a billion and a half on the queue, gave us that data price. Some other props, by the way, for EMC, I think you're picking up on a really important point. One of the things that EMC has always done really, really well is get products from R&D out into the pipeline, out into the field. Many, many companies in the storage business have struggled to do that, not the least of which is IBM for years, struggled to get, you know, development dollars into the pipeline. EMC's done a great job of that. You saw that again. Just a continuous flow of product. You know, people complain or they criticize saying that's not innovation. It is, they're spending money on R&D. Yes, many of those R&D investments are incremental, but they're showing people the pathway, so that's really good. I'm curious, will the acquisition slow down M&A for the combined companies? Well, this is a really interesting question that we talked about the other day. I think, given that they don't have to do, they have a debt service, obviously, but they don't have to do stock buybacks, right, anymore, I would think that if they can delever to some degree, they will begin, Brian said this, they must begin acquisitions. They have to, or they're going to stop. They're not going to be able to organically, they're not going to be able to, but they pay cash for most of their acquisitions anyway, and they got a lot of cash, but they are not going to be able to organically innovate at the pace they need to, in my opinion. All right, so I want to get your thoughts on some other key notable notes from the session, the summarized event. Their goal is to be the one-stop shop for navigating a successful path from today to the future with the mandate of getting above the silos of the data center. The goal, simpler, easier, reduced steps. That's their core message right now. Can they pull it off to your point? One-stop shop, I don't know. There's one set of thinking that says, hey, the guys who made the mess should clean it up. Okay, and EMC contributed to this silo mess. There's another point of consideration, which is that the guys who made the mess aren't the ones who should be cleaning it up. It's the new upstarts with the new mindsets that should be cleaning up. That's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see. I think there's no question that EMC, because of its service, because of its customer loyalty, because it does such a good job of servicing the fat middle, will take its customers with it. Because its customers generally are not the leading edge guys. Not the leading edge guys. And to that point, EMC's done a great job at making sure that day one experience is better than it was in the past. The thing we're a little bit concerned about is to really take the benefits of what we call true private cloud. You need to simplify and automate operations. And I didn't hear as much of that this week as I would like to. There's the code, the DevOps pieces we're talking about. So EMC's starting to get there in bits and pockets. You're going to hear that at VMworld though, right? We better. We better. So on the vision product innovation side, the theme was edge to core to cloud. Do you guys buy that? So product like Isilon, what they're doing with Virtustream, primary storage, plugged right into their cloud, and making it really easy to take advantage of that. We don't yet know the pricing, but Brian and I talked to Rodney Rogers. They understand where they play and they're not going after the Googles and Amazons of the world, but, you know, that they do similar to what Oracle and HVN is. But is that what customers want to do because David Floyer and Dave and I on our opening day today really laid out what we believe is the product innovation architecture and that's moving compute to the data. So what's moving? What's out edge core cloud? I mean, what's moving? I think that's where Dell is interesting, right? Because Dell can do edge core and cloud, at least, you know, together. So I think Dell brings that edge piece. You know, the Isilon edge core cloud messaging to me is less compelling than the Dell contribution. I don't really know exactly what Isilon did to go outside of its sort of, you know, one data center global namespace. I don't know, that's a Floyer question. He's going to have to unpack that. Final thoughts, guys. What do you think of now looking at this stage that we just saw? Three days of coverage. The Dell merger, EMC looming, Dell technologies, and Dell EMC Enterprise Division Group. What's the rocket ship here? What is the, what's going to explode out of this scene in terms of growth, revenue, share taking? What do you guys see as rocket ships for this world? So as the chapter gets closed on the Joe Tucci era and opens up on the Michael Dell era, what's going to be the explosive rocket ship within the portfolio? So to me, the rocket ship is the acceleration of Michael Dell's vision of how to transform Dell from a PC company into an enterprise powerhouse. And with a $67 billion acquisition, he has done that. He's now going to take this company private, hide the ball on, you know, the numbers that he doesn't want to show anybody and expose the numbers that he does want to show. They could control that narrative. And at some point, emerge as a cash flow powerhouse, possibly a growth powerhouse. I don't see this as a growth company right now. They could talk growth. That's what I'm trying to get. What will be the crown jewels? So I think that's going to be a long transformation to Michael Dell's original vision. I think they will ultimately emerge as a public company with a great cash flow story and in a modest growth story. That could be a rocket ship or a battle carrier suit. What it's going to come out of the woodwork would be the main driver for growth that's going to be the rocket ship enabler. Well, it's a great question. I think one of the reasons that it's going to be great for EMC to go private is that EMC has strong positions across the board, but take the all flash array. Extreme IO, number one in its category, doing real well, but overall that eats away at some of the other businesses, it's tough for them to grow beyond that. Data domain, 70% market share in where they're doing, but the storage market overall is not in growth. So the Dell EMC needs to be outside of just what the traditional storage is. EMC, the last big rocket ship that helped them, it was their affinity with VMware. They got a much greater percentage of deals that were associated with VMware than they did in the overall marketplace. So where can they get those pieces and grow the overall puzzle? Joe Tucci yesterday said it's a zero sum game. It's very hard in a zero sum game to gain dramatic market share. They are going to fight tooth and nail for every single market share point they can get. And I just, I don't see how EMC is going to go from a 30, 33% market share player to a 50 or 60% market share player. Unless they change the game, which I was trying to get to Stu's analysis, they were just good, is they're going to cannibalize their own to make the next generation happen. So what I'm looking at is, okay, yeah, there's going to be some zero sum game stuff going on, share shifting. But ultimately, if you don't eat your own, someone else will. So I see Dell kind of shaping this, get the scale IOs of the world, get Extremeio DSSD out there, figure out where the rocket ships are in the portfolio. They're going to be an, what, 80 billion dollar company? Okay, this, who's going to get that 100 billion first? AWS or Dell Technologies? Well, you might be looking at the wrong TAM. I mean, the TAM could be completely in a different area. Oh, I'm just asking the question. Who's going to get to 100 billion in revenue first? Dell Technologies is at roughly 80 billion. Who's going to get there first? AWS or Dell Technologies? Michael Dell said that there are three times more. I think Dell will get there faster. Michael Dell said there are three times more new opportunities than the cut. Dell will buy HP. Okay, if they make an acquisition. Let's, are they making an acquisition? Oh my gosh. I got your attention now, okay. Okay, so I'll make a prediction. I will say that Amazon will get to 100 billion dollars faster than Dell Technologies. That is a huge long shot, by the way, because Amazon's what, 10 billion? 10. They got to get 10X before Dell goes incrementally to 20 billion. My guess is Dell is also shrinking. No, I don't see that, David. I'll tell you why. I don't know. I don't know the numbers. Dell doesn't share its numbers. Well, we kind of conceived, we were the first ones to predict the actual revenue when we were kind of digging in there. Who knows how big Dell is? Even at Amazon's rocket ship, here's what I see happening. And I said this two years ago. Amazon is a tsunami that's going to take all the enterprise beach head. If they don't put up a seawall, these vendors, they are going to get washed away. Remember that? Guess who's putting up the walls right now? Oracle. Oracle's building their enterprise castle. Dell has to do that. The faster Michael can get that up, Dell will not get taken down by AWS and they might hit underwear. I think you'll sell us PC business? I mean, if it's commodity and could be, maybe it goes into IoT. If IoT- How big is Dell PC business? It's huge, right? It's huge. It's huge. 30 billion? That won't make the 100 million help with an 100 million. Exactly, so maybe they keep it. Well, it depends. Michael said that he's been in the RFID stuff and he's been through all components that IoT is a natural extension for them. If the IoT team expands, Dave, then you're talking about some growth. A whole different way, different category. So that could be the giant tailwind. I don't know, I just don't see it as within the next five years is that going to power Dell beyond 100 billion? Maybe. Well, we're speculating here on theCUBE. Of course, we love to analyze connected dots. Great analysis from Stu and Dave. I think that there's going to be some great action. And our eighth year of theCUBE will be at Dell World. Dell EMC World, of course. We have a lot of shows coming up. So, if I may, going to make one last comment. So we've been sort of being critical, which is good. I like being critical of CUBE. I will say this Dell acquisition of EMC, in my opinion, was inevitable. It's the only way in which this company, EMC, can survive. It gives Dell the injection of enterprise end-to-end that it needs. And it's the only way they can compete with this onslaught of Amazon. And that's why HPE is such an interesting competitor. Because essentially HPE has the same strategy, be that arms dealer with essentially no cloud. And they passed on the EMC deal. And they passed on the EMC deal. Be interesting to see if that was a mistake, right? And so, to me, this is a good move. They will be able to survive and be profitable at much lower margins than we're used to in this industry because of the Dell supply chain. So, good things ahead. But much of the same from a growth standpoint. Great, Nirvana. We had two CUBEs here at EMC World, double barrel shotgun of CUBE kind of. We're modernizing our CUBE, got new cameras. Modernize is a theme here at EMC World, of course. New crew. I want to say thanks to the crew out there. Thanks to everyone back at the ranch, the live bloggers. Kristen, Cheryl, the entire team. And of course the folks here. Great job, guys. Well done. John. Jeff Frick. Okay, we're going to sign off. This is the end of EMC World. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. Looking back at the history of Dell,