Last year’s historic Dell EMC merger left countless questions in its wake. How best to combine product lines? What about customers of both industry giants? How could the newly formed computing provider balance the needs of existing customers? And how could Dell EMC present a united front to those customers, smoothing over the knowledge transfer that must occur?

“I need to say, I’m living the dream at this moment,” said Pierluca Chiodelli, vice president of product management and customer operations at Dell EMC. He said there are few times in one’s life when you get to experience true transformation, but that’s what the merger has done for him. He is enjoying the increased scale and capabilities of the combined company.

Chiodelli and Craig Bernero, senior vice president and general manager of midrange and entry storage solutions at Dell EMC, joined Paul Gillin (@pgillin) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. In addition to discussing how the merger has affected them, they also discussed some of the new products being introduced. (* Disclosure below.)

Smart monitoring and storage solutions for midrange

Bernero was prompted to write a blog post entitled “1 2 Punch Drives Midrange Storage,” addressing how the Dell and EMC merger would affect midrange storage portfolio products.

“The biggest question I’d get from customers was, ‘Which product are you going to choose?’ And our point was, ‘Both; both products [SC and Unity].’ The power of the portfolio, you don’t need to choose [just] one,” Bernero said.

One of the areas that hasn’t been amplified much, but Bernero said what they’re raving about in the showroom area is Cloud IQ, built with open-source Cloud Foundry software. It provides preemptive and proactive monitoring and promotes a new idea of autonomous, self-aware storage.

“We have compatibility between Unity, SC and Cloud IQ, as that ‘one pane of glass,’ not as an element manager, but more to take that value to a whole new level,” Bernero stated.

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