LAS VEGAS – EMC CEO Joe Tucci all but announced his retirement at the EMC World 2016 conference. In front of a packed hall at the Venetian Ballroom Tucci told the audience of customers and channel partners that “this is not the end of something great, but the start of something greater.”
However, he also stated that in his career journey at EMC this could be his last EMC World and he thanked the many customers and channel partners who voted with their dollars to EMC over the years.
In a special 30-minute question and answer session with press and analysts Tucci was joined by Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell on stage to field questions.
The following is an edited transcript.
Michael Dell on the EMC channel program…
“The channel has already gone through the integration and now they are an important part of the Dell business. When we observed the two programs and placed them side-by-side; they looked very similar. So we are going to combine them and put them together. We’ll have one Dell EMC channel program and plan is to talk to the channel partners about it through out the weeks ahead. There is not like there are a whole lot of channel partners we do not have. Instead we would like to go deeper with this great partners. The IT of today and tomorrow you need a great set of partners.”
Joe Tucci on the EMC channel program…
“Customers who are going through their digital transformation journey… no matter how big the company is we can’t be successful without the channel partners. They have become so critical and both companies believe in that.”
Joe Tucci comparing the Industrial Revolution with the current Digital Revolution…
“We bear responsibility and I use the Industrial Revolution as an example. You always have a shift with needs and talents for jobs. Me and Michael are active with STEM education and I believe in retraining people today. You are going to get some displacement and as a society we need to do something about it. And, yes we do play a role. How do you educate the youth and retrain?”
Michael Dell on the skill sets of the future…
“There are going to be 21 Century skills and we are going to help people get those skills to stay relevant. Its going to be a different society and we’ll be taking on these changes at different rates. The ingredients of the technology; they do not care if you are ready for it now or not. It does present some difficult challenges that we have to deal with starting with the wheel and going forward it has started jobs and ended jobs. Technology does not really look at it if people are ready for it.”
Michael Dell on federation or assimilation…
“I learned from Joe’s (Tucci) success in technology acquisitions. What EMC has done for growth organically and inorganically there is tremendous model there. The degree of innovation depends on the nature of the business and so you want to integrate tightly and with others it might be best not do that. There are no one size fits all. We will use best fits kind of model.”
Michael Dell on if the Dell and EMC technology portfolio is complimentary or is there overlap…
In storage EMC is a giant and Dell is not a giant in storage. When you look at VNX and the new Unity offering with Dell Compellant its more of sever attachment with storage play. This plays more on the lower end of the market and Unity is in the middle on up. When we looked at these business we wanted to keep both because they do not overlap. All the other areas are completely new and we do not play in. In the broadest sense there are many complimentary areas. Joe and I worked together in the Dell EMC alliance and Dell servers work on EMC platforms; about 26 of them.”
Michael Dell on the IT of tomorrow and where the weak spots might be…
“I have a few ideas there but I’m not going to tell you. Do you remember the figure of $2.7 trillion being spent on traditional IT and the size of the entire IT market is just over $3 trillion and we are a few percentage points of that? And, there’s only 10 other companies on the planet that are in the single digits’ percentage of that. This industry is expansive. Intelligence is being embedded into everything.”
