We are going to build the world's IT infrastructure: Michael Dell, CEO, Dell

Agility is now a hottest topic in town. For a large company like Dell, how do you make yourself agile and nimble and be in sync with the market demands?
The things that make you agile and fast are different depending on the size. If you are small, agile is different, if you are larger it’s different. I think agility in the end boils down to understanding what the customer wants and be able to offer it irrespective of what geography they come from. It is also about the global processes and the capabilities that give the needed flexibility for one to be agile.

Let me give you an example. I talked on stage about something called Pro Deploy. It’s a new service we are launching in about 160 countries. This is what one can call being agile - extending something to so many different countries despite the size and scale.

Does going private give you ample room for innovation and risk taking—such as the EMC deal?
Absolutely. In case if we were still public, it would have been extremely difficult to do this. Going private has given us enough headroom flexibility and agility to pursue what we want. Today we can do things without being obsessed with quarterly pressures or short-term impact.

How do you see cloud at this point of time?
In my view, the way forward is the hybrid cloud. We support most of the top cloud companies. With EMC and VMware coming in, it gives us great leverage in this space.

If you look at the general direction of the industry, everything is becoming software defined. Dell still has lots of hardware- so how are you going to balance out hardware and software?
Yes, software defined is a big thing, but having said that if there is software there has to be hardware. Things can move from tightly coupled to software defined but I think the need for hardware will not go away. In fact we have been at the forefront of the software defined movement and no other company has done more here than VMware.

Are you toying with a name change—what is the Dell- EMC combined entity going to be called?
The brands we have are powerful. We are not planning to change it or retire any one of them. At the moment we are working on some specifics and it will be announced at an
appropriate time.

On Innovation
I think for a large company to grow and innovate, there has to be both organic and inorganic innovation. More importantly one need to have an appetite for risk taking. Without risk taking, innovation cannot happen. The inorganic innovation has to be complimented with organic innovation as everything we cannot do on our own. Secondly, to foster the culture of innovation I think partnerships are vital—for instance, our partnerships with Microsoft and Intel and many others are examples to that. Finally we also need to look at how teams are arranged with in the organization.

For instance there has to be some semi-independent teams, which are not part of the larger organization teams but goes after critical and super important stuff. These teams need to be away from organizational complexities that might confuse them and stall innovation. We need to incubate new businesses within the organization.

Can you give a bit of background on the Dell-EMC deal and how it all started and till its closure?
I called Joe Tucci, the CEO of EMC, an year ago and talked about this deal. Later we entered into an NDA with EMC’s shareholders and over a period of year we did the due diligence and all other meetings, and it all fructified this October and it culminated into a deal.

What pushed you to acquire EMC?
Well EMC coming into Dell makes for a terrific combination and perfectly complements our existing competencies and offerings. Moreover, the extent of mutual benefits we will see in areas like hybrid cloud, security, mobile, software defined are breathtaking. As a bottom line the combination is a perfect recipe for digital transformation.

On VMware
VMware will remain as an independent company and we are not going to upset that in anyway. Most of VMware’s clients are competitors, but we do not intend to change any of the ecosystem nor the partner networks. It will continue to enjoy the same attention as in the past with EMC.