Michael Dell, Dell Technologies | Dell Technologies World 2019
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2019-04-30

Michael Dell, Dell Technologies, sits down with Dave Vellante & John Furrier at Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas, NV.

#DellTechWorld #theCUBE

https://siliconangle.com/2019/05/06/in-gambling-mecca-dells-founder-offers-evidence-that-big-bets-on-multicloud-ai-and-edge-will-pay-off-delltechworld-guestoftheweek/

In gambling mecca, Dell’s founder offers evidence that big bets on multicloud, AI and edge will pay off

There could probably have not been a more appropriate setting for Dell Technologies Inc.’s annual conference last week than Las Vegas.

The company’s founder and chief executive officer, Michael Dell (pictured), has spent most of his career making big bets on his firm’s future and the computing industry’s direction. Over 35 years, he has taken Dell public twice and made the largest acquisition in the history of the tech industry, buying EMC Corp. for $67 billion in 2015.

Now Dell is rolling the dice on technology’s future, which he envisions to be a multicloud world, with edge computing, 5G wireless connectivity and artificial intelligence poised to reshape the industry. Anyone care to bet against him?

“We’ve been able to restore the origins of the entrepreneurial dream and success, and reintroduce innovation and risk-taking into a $91 billion company growing at double digits last year,” Dell said. “We’ve got the infrastructure requirements, in terms of the network, the storage, compute, the buildout at the edge, and we’re super-well-positioned to go address all of that.”

Dell spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. They discussed VMware Inc.’s role in meeting workload demands across the enterprise, a 5G-fueled explosion in edge computing, how Dell’s various companies will foster deployment of AI, and tech’s potential to support important societal initiatives (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Michael Dell as its Guest of the Week.

Influence of VMware
Dell has refashioned his company into a number of distinct businesses. Along with Dell and Dell EMC, there’s Pivotal Software, RSA, Secureworks and Virtustream.

Yet if there is one critical element in the corporate portfolio, it is undoubtedly VMware, a company publicly traded in its own right and positioned at the heart of Dell’s strategic networking direction. Among the VMware-related announcements at Dell’s conference in Las Vegas were new automation features for hyperconverged appliance VxRail and a Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge solution bundled with VMware’s VeloCloud software.

Even the signature announcement during Dell Technologies World was centered around VMware. The company announced it would team up with Microsoft Corp. and place its infrastructure management software on the Azure cloud. For Michael Dell, it’s all about freeing workloads to move around.

“With the VMware Cloud Foundation, we have the ability to move these workloads simultaneously across all of the public clouds,” Dell said. “We have 4,200 partners out there and infrastructure on-premises built and tuned specifically for the VMware platform and empowered for the edge. All of this together is the Dell Technologies Cloud.”

5G will power the edge
Dell’s reference to the empowered edge is no idle comment. He believes that edge computing, powered by deployment of the new 5G wireless standard, will be a force to be reckoned with, and he’s laser-focused on positioning Dell to be ready to jump onto the surfboard when the wave rolls in.

The company recently signed an agreement with Orange S.A., one of the largest operators of mobile and internet services for 264 million customers in Europe and Africa, to develop a new edge platform and support the 5G needs of telecommunications operators.

Dell executives have been blunt about their expectations for the impact of 5G and the edge. Dell Technologies Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke told conference attendees that 25% of all data will soon be consumed at the edge through evolving 5G applications. Dell himself was even more expansive, flatly predicting in this interview that compute of data at the edge will be bigger than the public or private cloud.

“Maybe nobody is predicting that yet, but let’s come back in 10 years and see what it looks like,” Dell said.

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Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s three-day coverage of Dell Tech World 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither the sponsors of select segments of theCUBE’s event coverage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)