Over the years, Dell (now Dell Technologies Inc.) has grown from a small computer manufacturing company based in a dorm room into one of the leading technology companies in the world. The timeless guiding principle for the company and its founder is the cornerstone of Dell Technology’s success: maintaining a customer-centric focus. Leading the company through a changing market, a privatization process, and the recent massive and questionable merger with EMC, now Dell and his newly reorganized company are poised to lead clients through the digital transformation.

On May 3, a Facebook post that commemorated the company’s 33 years in business and $1 trillion dollars in revenue, shows a younger Michael Dell (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies, embracing the company’s unwavering commitment to bring technology directly to the end-user.

John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, interviewed Dell during Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Dell spoke about the future and what Dell Technologies and its family of acquired companies are doing to help business customers evolve during the digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Michael Dell as its Guest of the Week.

‘It’s been fun; it’s been exciting, interesting and thrill of a lifetime. … It’s been understanding the technology and then finding the intersection between the customer’s challenges and the technology to create the solution,” Dell said. “… But I actually think the next 33 years will be much, much more exciting, so I couldn’t be more excited about the future.”

M&A creates a stronger company

In 2013, Dell brought his company back to a private entity to become bolder and to take risks. The acquisition of EMC, VMware Inc. and Pivotal Software Inc. created Dell Technologies, which Dell said is “a different kind of company.” The combination of Dell and EMC is much stronger than either company is on its own, according to Dell. Customers’ reaction to the merger has been positive, he added.

“So when I step back and look at the future of our industry and what’s happening with digital transformation, and then all the assets and capabilities we have now, again, I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities ahead,” Dell stated.

During his Dell EMC World keynote, Dell told the audience that hybrid cloud and cloud is just a way of doing information technology. He relates it to the experiences in the industry 20 years ago when the internet was new technology that businesses had to integrate into their IT vision.

“The internet is part of everything. The Internet is a way of doing IT, and cloud really is the same thing. If you look at these large public cloud companies, what they’ve done is extrapolated the workload up to the application layer.” he explained. “And that’s what we’re doing with Pivotal. That’s what we’re doing with the software-defined data center. That’s what we’re doing with converged and hyper-converged infrastructure. And that’s why all those things are white-hot in terms of growth and customer options.”

Dell went on to discuss the growth strategy for this existing market by outlining the functions for the three acquired companies. He said that Pivotal is the key to the company’s cloud strategy. Noting that it will be the platform to develop cloud-native apps, the operating system for the Internet of Things, and the digital transformation for many of the largest companies in the world and that Virtustream Inc. offers Dell Technologies a mission-critical public cloud for super-high-performing intensive workloads.

“VMware is driving the software-defined data center. And what VMware has done in virtualization, obviously, is unparalleled, taking that into the network and storage. VMware’s got incredible momentum. When we put all this together with the consolidation that’s going on in the existing several-hundred-billion-dollar client and data-center business, the combination together, we’re very well-positioned to grow,” Dell said.

For Dell, the excitement lies in how customers are engaging in the digital transformation. He believes that the work that VMware is doing with the software-defined data center, NSX (a network virtualization and security platform) and by collaborating with Pivotal on converged and hyper-converged is transformative. He also recognizes the advancements in data and machine learning.

“Super exciting time, and if you’re not excited now, you’re totally asleep, or you’re dead,” Dell said.

During Dell EMC World’s inaugural launch, there has not been much talk about artificial intelligence, and Dell considers the technology is still evolving, only now the level of improvement and advancement in the processing power is making the technology move at a more rapid pace.

“The learning that’s going on in these systems is tremendous. And, again, when you have hundreds of billions of nodes, and all this data, and an increase in processing power, it is really a Cambrian explosion. We do think of it as the fourth Industrial Revolution. To me that is incredibly exciting,” he said.

What impresses Dell is how some customers use Dell Technologies to fundamentally change the way they develop applications inside their own businesses. He mentioned how one customer employed 1,500 developers to create a thousand applications with only four operations people using Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry.

“That is the nirvana state that many of our customers seek to obtain, and we certainly want to help them get there,” Dell 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