To start off the second day of the first Dell EMC World conference, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, examined details from the event so far, focusing on Dell Technologies Inc.’s post-merger changes, the data-center business at large and how it can deal with Amazon’s increasing influence in enterprise IT.

An early point of discussion was the content of CEO Michael Dell’s presentation, which highlighted an overarching business vision above and beyond the company’s individual products, though new product releases were given their own time on stage.

Also noted from this presentation was the importance for Dell to work with individual clients and the company’s plans to meet customer needs, which both hosts felt to be a promising direction for Dell to follow.

The AWS effect

The data center business was the next big item under consideration, and it was here that the role of Amazon, both as a competitor and partner to Dell, drew detailed analysis from Miniman and Vellante. As Miniman noted, Amazon’s expanding and shifting interests over the past decade make it difficult to confidently predict where its next big investments will be.

While Amazon Web Services has undoubtedly been a game changer for the online retailer’s expanding enterprise portfolio,  Amazon’s attachment to its data center business may be more accurately linked to just the key components of its infrastructure offerings rather than the whole package, burdened with data center upkeep. “Even Amazon doesn’t want to be in the data center business itself; it’s about the services they offer,” Miniman stated.

And while Amazon has been doing well with AWS, the potential for competitors to get into the same business continues to be a high hurdle, followed by the difficulties of maintaining those services. “There’s very few companies in the world that are really good at making data centers; everyone else should get out of it,” Miniman said. He later said, “Much of what vendors are doing today is not what they need to have expertise on.”

Future challenges

“Generally speaking, as organizations move toward … being data-driven, they can’t afford to do undifferentiated heavy lifting,” Vellante said, drawing the conversation into analysis of how the cloud market and its services would continue to mature, as well as the impacts that would be seen as customers and business reacted.

“We’re seeing a lot more mission-critical ending up in the public cloud space,” Miniman noted, with the growing comfort of regular enterprises to use these services being a notable factor in the sustained growth of adoption.

But while “Amazon is committed to running any application … at any scale in the cloud,” as Vellante pointed out, the future for even the most prominent of cloud service providers is one with a high degree of unpredictability to it. As the effects of Dell and EMC’s merger begin to be felt, the new Dell vision for the industry will no doubt have a large influence on how that future is shaped.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE