Business is booming for public clouds, but 65 percent of workloads still live in corporate data centers. Dell Technologies Inc. wants to traverse both worlds by providing a multicloud solution. Can it, and its customers, have it all — or is it spreading itself too thin?

“Cloud’s not a place; cloud’s a way of doing [information technology],” said Michael Dell (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies. Cloud becomes a verb when companies choose freely among on-premises infrastructure, private and public clouds and move among them with agility, Dell said during a live interview at the VMworld conference today in Las Vegas.

“The answer isn’t public or private; it’s both,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

In this hybrid or multicloud environment, mobility is paramount, he Dell said. Customers ought to worry less about destinations and more about the vehicle that drives workloads to them, in Dell’s view. In Dell EMC’s portfolio, this vehicle is VMware Inc., which Dell has called the “crown jewel” of the company. “The capabilities that VMware has are absolutely incredibly valuable to connect to all of the public clouds and to integrate the on-premise infrastructure,” he said.  “You can do cloud on-premise very efficiently.”

Weighing the price and payoff of choice

There are some cloud purists who have none of this. “Anybody that tells you, ‘Oh well, we have a hybrid system’ is telling you they have a least-common-denominator system, because these things are so different,” said David Hseih, senior vice president of marketing at Qubole Inc., who spoke to theCUBE earlier this year.

So a hybrid compatible system with virtual machines may not offer the same continuous integration and continuous deployment levels as a cloud-native system. But could the tradeoff in choice and flexibility be worth it? That “lowest common denominator’ may still be a net gain.

“There is a right place for any particular workload,” Dell said. “This idea of everything to the public cloud — that’s not really very likely to happen.”

Dell EMC is nonetheless beefing up its cloud strategy with the VMware-Amazon Web Services Inc. partnership and a new deal with Google Cloud Platform. VMware and Dell EMC’s Pivotal Software Inc. also just joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. VMware and Pivotal announced integration with Kubernetes container orchestration management.

The complete video interview is below, and there’s more coverage of VMworld 2017 on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware nor Dell Technologies has editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE