The recent news that Dell will acquire EMC has major implications not only for the two industry leaders, but for the storage industry overall.

Alan Atkinson, VP and GM of Dell Storage, whose company has a longstanding relationship with EMC, sees the acquisition as another sign that compute and storage are coming together.

“When you think about bringing Dell’s server franchise together with the combined storage portfolio of Dell and EMC, it’s really a formidable combination,” Atkinson told Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World 2016. “Not many, if any, companies have EMC’s set of tools.”

The melding of compute and storage is one of the most important trends taking place today, Atkinson said.

“If you look at how cloud and managed services providers are architecting, as well as software-defined storage companies and others, it all comes down to compute and storage coming closer together,” he said. “It’s a different way of thinking about the problem. There is a need to get closer to compute because latency is becoming more of an issue. And as we move more to solid state and flash, it becomes more important that we get closer to compute.”

The interrelationship of compute and storage, and Dell and EMC, will no doubt mean greater value for enterprise customers. “There is an ease of use, time to value part of the equation that’s louder than it’s ever been,” Atkinson said. “This is a natural synergy.”

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