As EMC World 2016 drew to a close this week, assessment of the event’s details quickly got underway, from picking through the announcements to analyzing why certain other announcements were absent from the presentations.

For John Furrier (@furrier), Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, a major part of that analysis was naturally centered around the ongoing path toward Dell’s acquisition of EMC and what the future would hold for the transformed companies once that merger finally concluded.

Dell-EMC forecasts

From Miniman’s perspective, the future of EMC under Dell wasn’t nearly as cut and dry as some analysts have predicted. “The EMC leadership is going to be in a lot of strong places, and EMC’s not going away,” he said. “And I wonder, if we look two years from now, how much that Dell portfolio looks like EMC, like Dell, how VMware plays,” Miniman said.

Vellante compared the Dell-EMC merger to the HP-Compaq merger, with expectations that both Dell and EMC as we know them will be going away with something new emerging in their place. And Miniman highlighted how he saw app ownership as a key feature in the modern tech market, something that could prove a major issue for both Dell and EMC due to their licensing arrangements.

Also on the table was how little mention of IoT developments there had been at the event, with Miniman noting that “IoT was talked about more at Dell World than it was here, from what I saw.”

Keeping growth going

Though Miniman also pointed to ScaleIO as “one of the growth engines that EMC has in the emerging technology group,” Vellante argued that “[The combined Dell and EMC] are not going to be able to organically innovate at the pace they need to.” Speed of growth was agreed to be a necessary piece of momentum for Dell-EMC, though some of the details of how the combined company would manage that were still vague at the end of the event.

Miniman added, “EMC’s done a great job of making sure that day-one experience is better than it was in the past,” but he also felt, “The thing we’re a little concerned about is to really take the benefits of what we call ‘true private cloud’ you need to simplify and automate operations, and I didn’t hear as much of that this week as I would like to.”

The path forward

Michael Dell’s “vision of how to transform Dell from a PC company into an enterprise powerhouse” is what Vellante sees as one of the biggest points at this time. But here too there are unclear strategies and rocky roads, as Vellante currently feels that the merged companies will not be a growth company.

“It’s going to be a long transformation to Michael Dell’s original vision,” Vellante said. Although he anticipates, “They will ultimately emerge as a public company with a great cash-flow story.”

By Miniman’s estimation of that growth potential, despite EMC doing very well in the storage market sector, it’s one that “is not in growth,” and is something that will hinder them in the days ahead.

“I don’t see how EMC’s going to go from a 33 percent marketshare player to a 50 or 60 percent marketshare player,” Vellante stated.

Furrier acknowledged the challenges but posed the possibility of Dell perhaps selling off its lucrative PC-selling side to fuel other developments, stating, “If you don’t eat your own, someone else will.”

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