Five years as a private company allowed Dell Technologies Inc. to scuba dive deep into questions about its future direction. It spent the time and considerable funds on research and development in hybrid computing infrastructure. Now, coming up for air and going public, it’s advocating for the edge-everywhere over the center-of-the-universe-cloud school of thought.

“I think the edge will be bigger than the cloud,” said Michael Dell (pictured), chief executive officer and chairman of Dell Technologies.

The boom at the edge is one of the reasons why infrastructure is very much alive in Dell’s portfolio. The new infrastructure, though, will look and smell a lot like cloud. Dell’s cash-flush acquisition VMware Inc. just struck a deal with partner Amazon Web Services Inc. to bring Amazon’s Relational Database Service on-premises.

VMware is starting to get mileage from its NSX virtualized networking, which is popping up in products that stretch the network from the core to the cloud and the edge. Instead of a giant cloud sucking up the world’s workloads, an increasingly decentralized information technology is developing, and this is why it’s a fine time to be an infrastructure dealer, Dell contended.

Dell spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They discussed the developing multicloud model, the edge boom and Dell EMC’s financial outlook. (* Disclosure below.)

More infra, more data, more money

Developments in the intelligent chip market and artificial intelligence are going to drive a boatload of compute to the edge, according to Dell.

“You think about everything becoming intelligent, the cost of making something intelligent going to zero, the cost of prediction in the form of AI and learning and inference going to zero, and how that refactors the economy and the explosion in data as a result: Oh my God — incredible opportunity for infrastructure,” Dell said. One big sign of that: British chipmaker ARM Holdings has already sold 120 billion connectable microprocessors, sensors and controllers.

Dell’s infrastructure sales aren’t shabby for a moment when so many assume the market’s on an interminable march to public cloud. He noted that in Dell’s latest quarter, net revenue was up 19 percent and data center revenue from its Infrastructure Solutions Group was up 25 percent. Dell EMC is also No. 1 in storage of all types as well as backup and data protection, according to Dell.

The sprawl of infrastructure across all of these core, cloud and edge environments has one simple objective, Dell said: All of the loci just collect more data. “With your data, you make better products and services,” he said, noting a virtuous cycle. “And when you make better products and services, you attract more customers and you get more data,”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s weeklong coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)