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Meet Michael Dell's New

Tech Behemoth
by Barb Darrow

@gigabarb

SEPTEMBER 7, 2016, 10:15 AM EDT

Photograph by Getty Images

Heres what Dell has to say about his companys next big
opportunity.

It took almost a year and an estimated $63 billion to accomplish, but Dell Technologies is officially
launching on Wednesday. This tech giant brings together Dells existing hardware business with EMCs
various subsidiaries, including VMware ( VMW 2.17% ), Pivotal, and Virtustream.
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In an
with Fortune before the press event on Wednesday, the combined companys
chief
interview
Fortune.com
executive Michael Dell reiterated the importance of fielding the right technology and doing so as a private
companythus minus shareholder pressures.

We want to innovate on behalf of customers, and that is a challenge for many public companies
particularly if they dont have the right portfolio, says Dell. Whats unique about Dell, EMC,
Virtustream, Pivotal, Secureworks, RSA, etc. is well pull together the best capabilities and were private so
we can do that on a longer term time horizon. Other companies are out there selling off pieces and are in
some form of distress one way or another.

He did not mention any of the usual names. In the past he would probably have specified IBM and HPE,
both big Dell Inc. competitors, but now, as uber boss of a company that includes VMware, he must be
more circumspect. IBM and HPE, after all, are big VMware partners.

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The combined Dell Technologies will not compete headon with giant public cloud provider Amazon Web
Services ( AMZN -0.05% ) and Microsoft Azure( MSFT -0.40% ), but focus on building out the
Virtustream business as an enterpriseclass cloud for large missioncritical applications, such as those
from SAP ( SAP -1.41% ).

The new company also intends to push Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which runs on Amazon Web Services,
Microsoft Azure, Google ( GOOG -0.64% ) Cloud Platform and VMware vSphere, as a way for customers
to put their corporate workloads across a variety of onpremises data centers and private and public
clouds.

With Pivotal we have Cloud Foundry which is a tremendous cloud operating system that many of the
largest companies in the world are using to build out their cloud strategies, car companies, industrial
giants like GE, he adds.

Cloud Foundry will remain platform independent. Its a good way for customers to avoid public cloud

Cloud Foundry will remain platform independent. Its a good way for customers to avoid public cloud
lockin, Dell says.

AWS pioneered the public cloud market of amassing huge stockpiles of servers, storage, and networking
that it rents to customerseffectively forcing legacy hardware and software players to reevaluate their
business models.
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Last fall, AWS chief executive Andy Jassy said those older companieswhich Jassy did not name but
presumably would include IBM ( IBM -1.63% ) and HPE ( HPE -3.21% ) as well as Dell and EMC
were more focused on reengineering their financials by either selling off businesses or merging them,
while AWS remained focused on delivering more features and services.

For more on the EMC deal, watch:

Thats a contention that Jeremy Burton, who is Dell Technologies chief marketing officer, swatted down.

Anyone whos looked at our portfolio over the past three years, Id defy them to find a storage
infrastructure company thats brought more to market,Burton tells Fortune. In softwaredefined storage,
it was all organic development. We also have the fastestgrowing flash array ever.

EMCs strength, in particular, is that its storage is used throughout the Fortune 500 and beyond. All of
those companies will be looking for an enterpriseclass cloud, and Dell Technologies plans to use
Virtustream plus VMware to get that to them.

Of course, Oracle ( ORCL

-1.28% ), Microsoft, and others are also targeting those companies with their

own corporate worldfocused clouds.

Interestingly, Dell, which makes its own inexpensive white box servers, sells those boxes into major
cloud providers.

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This story will be updated during the companys conference call.