As Joe Tucci, current CEO and president of EMC, prepares to exit stage left from the company after 15 years of growth, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, Inc., took center stage at EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas to tell the world what the new Dell Technologies will look like post-merger.

Dell joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the customer, the competition and the mission-critical focus for EMC moving into the future.

Excited about the future

When asked what excites him about the future, Dell said, “What’s going on is you have essentially an ability to make anything intelligent for almost no cost. So the cost of embedding intelligence is dropping very rapidly … so going from billions to hundreds of billions of connective things [creates] a challenge for everyone in an organization.”

Dell went on to say: “How do you use that information to get to real time, to change your business and provide a better product and service? We are just at the very beginning of that, so that is an enormous change factor. We are privileged to be a part of it.”

Brokering the deal

Dell talked about how EMC and Dell have worked together in the past. Early in 2000, Dell and EMC had an alliance at that time and they considered a deal. But it never happened.

“As we looked at the evolution of our company, the most recent activity really started back … in the fall of 2014,” Dell explained. “And I called Joe and I said, ‘Hey, we should talk about this again and revisit it.’”

Dell continued to relate how they went through significant explorations, sharing strategies, plans and how it could work. “The original notion that these two companies together were very complementary and would make an absolute powerhouse turned out to be true,” Dell said.

Technology, business and winning

Responding to a question about what he loves, Dell proclaimed: “I’d say that technology is always kind of my first love. I’m a geek, right? I get excited about the impact that it has on our customers, and I love business … and I love winning; it’s fun.”

Dell also talked about what he is learning now, and he acknowledged an interest in Pivotal [Pivotal Software, Inc.] and all the interesting things going on at the app layer.

Future focus

There are a few areas of focus for Dell in the future, including a focus on customer and team member satisfaction, keeping the product innovation pipeline on full tilt, and relative market share.

The big message is that the company is driving customer-focused innovation.

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