Bigger is not always better in tech, as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. realized when it began breaking off chunks of the company to hone its value proposition. The now-merged Dell EMC titan appears to be too-much-of-a-good-thing too, but could VMware Inc. superglue the pieces into a salable whole?

“Without VMware, it’s a really tough story to sell to C-suites on transformation. It’s just a bunch of infrastructure, a bunch of parts that really, by themselves, don’t add value,” said Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) (pictured, center) and guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during a conversation with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) (pictured, right) and David Floyer (@dfloyer) (pictured, left) on day two of Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada.
(* Disclosure below.)

If VMware can pull all those parts together and make them sing, this could provide customers with both choice and cohesion, Floyer stated. That happens to be the winning combo for hybrid cloud, which is becoming the dominant model at enterprises, he added.

“You need commonality between the cloud and on-premise and, in the future to a large extent, for IoT  [Internet of Things] on the edge as well. And that commonality is provided here with VMware,” Floyer explained, adding that VMware’s storage file systems vSAN and ScaleIO also assist with this.

As strong a draw as VMware’s mobility to the edge may be, Dell EMC has far from mastered IoT, Floyer said.

“A huge amount of the IoT is on ARM processes, so they need to more strongly embrace ARM processes, really understand not just the IT part of it, but the OT [Operational Technology] part of it. I didn’t see much evidence today that they really understood what OT was about,” Floyer said. Dell EMC has not demonstrated operational expertise at the conference so far, he stated.

Multi-cloud schmulti cloud?

Dell EMC’s hybrid-cloud strategy versus its so-called multi-cloud strategy needs clarification, according to Furrier.

“Hybrid cloud? No debate from me. I think that’s very relevant, end-to-end, more ‘where’s the code base?’ simplicity across the different platforms. Multi-cloud, though? It’s a fantasy,” Furrier said.

While it’s true that multi-cloud is rare, if present at all, today, the proliferation of Software as-a-Service applications and their clouds will eventually make multi-cloud a reality, Floyer concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell EMC World. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE