While Dell Technologies Inc. continues preparing its internal organization for the incorporation of EMC’s assets, those departments engaged in technical development are eagerly anticipating new opportunities and acceleration to be enabled once the merger is completed.

At the Dell EMC World conference in Austin, TX, Chad Sakac, president of the Converged Platform Division at Dell Technologies, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about Dell’s efforts to change customer consumption habits, the Hyper Converged Infrastructure market and other developments.

Sakac was enthusiastic about the conference and its announcements, as well as the reaction by Dell’s customers, noting early on how they’re growing to embrace the idea of “don’t waste time, money and effort on the things that aren’t uniquely you.”

Sakac also provided some insights into the climate of his Converged Platform Division and how they’re attempting to restructure the delivery of services to customers. “We’re still a smaller, but increasingly important, part of the business,” he stated. “We are passionate to get customers to stop building things that they should instead consume.”

HCI struggles

The conversation also covered HCI and its growing role in Dell’s business. “In HCI, something that is fascinating … [is that] the value of the offer, a lot of it is software,” Sakac noted. He added later in the discussion that “the reality of it is … what they’ve done with AWS and software, they’re emulating hardware.”

But while HCI is drawing more focus from interested parties, it’s an avenue with notable obstacles, particularly for companies trying to retain some independence from partnerships. “Trying to be in that business without a wicked awesome … x86 server supply chain is really, really hard. … Trying to do that through an arms-length ODM deal is very hard,” Sakac acknowledged. “The HCI market is still early, nascent and growing. The main [challenge] to HCI is ‘business as usual.’”

With that challenge being such a large one, Sakac was grateful that Dell was allowing such experimentation and willingness to look at the reality of its research. “Culture is such a potent force, and we’re lucky to have a culture which is pragmatic.”

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