As the last EMC World 2016 takes place at the Sands Expo & Convention Center in Las Vegas, Chad Sakac, president of VCE’s Converged Platform Division at EMC, provided “blunt and honest” feedback regarding his feelings about the merger.

“I love EMC, I love my job, I love my colleagues, I love partners and customers, so EMC World for me is almost like a homecoming,” he said. “Change is good. I’m excited with the latent opportunity in all that is going on, and frankly everyone I am talking to … describes themselves as optimistic.”

Sakac sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, for an interview about learning the new business and what Sakac sees as the future turnkey solutions for the enterprise.

Moral of the story is nerds will win

“The fun of doing something new that causes you to grow and expand in different ways is intrinsically fun,” Sakac said. He told theCUBE hosts that he was moving from a job where he was focused on technology to a role with some new “non-nerd” skills. He is learning more about the VCE business, which he said, “is going gangbusters … converged market share is up with an increase of 40 percent.”

“What is means at its core,” according to Sakac, “is customers are getting more clear or, I would say, smarter in what they do that is important, what they do that is not important. And building racking, stacking, sustaining, engineering and supporting infrastructure is now something we can do, and we do it to an unbelievably high degree of quality.” He noted that more and more customers are choosing to consume rather than build infrastructure.

Self-disrupter

How do you balance the EMC businesses?  Miniman asked Sakac about over-pivoting, and Sakac replied that it is necessary to over-pivot in this transitioning marketplace.

“If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone will eat your lunch,” he said, stating that the EMC culture and ultimately the Dell culture will have to be constantly trying to be disruptive to their core business or they will be missing the boat.

Turnkey IT as a Service

The next level for Sakac is turnkey IT as a Service. Currently, the company has done this for hundreds of customers, but he feels the next step is to curate IT for tens of thousands of businesses.

He pointed out that the matrix is complicated and customers want simplicity. “The biggest opportunity is simplification,” maintained Sakac. He recommended that customers should focus on their core business.

“Stop building and let me do that stuff,” he said. “It is more important to focus on the spaces that help to differentiate your business. Consume versus build is face-meltingly awesome!”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE