With the technology industry’s largest merger comes the potential for culture clash, but Dell Technologies Inc. is leveraging the variety of skills from its family of companies to solve more than just enterprise-computing conundrums. As one of the world’s most ethical companies, Dell is hoping to respond to real-world human needs using its vast resources and cutting-edge technologies.

“We are putting a very firm stake in the ground that we believe technology is overall a force for positive change in the world,” said Allison Dew (pictured), executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Dell Technologies Inc.

Dew recently spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Tech World event in Las Vegas. They discussed technology integration, artificial intelligence, the relationship between media and technology, and how Dew’s early professional experiences shape the way she approaches her work (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: The business performance of Dell is strong. Leadership across all categories … and an integrated approach with the products and the relationship with VMware paying off big-time. Azure News, Microsoft integrating in, so a lot of great product leadership, business results — things are booming at Dell Technologies.

Dew: When you think about the journey for us, in particular, over the last three years since starting the EMC combination and all of the things that are written about technology integrations of this scale and scope, and you look at what the team’s together have successfully done — the business performance, the share growth across categories, and as of today the true end-to-end solutions that we’re announcing in partnership with VMware and SecureWorks — I think it’s a pretty impressive result.

Most integrations are focused on ‘don’t break anything,’ and not only did we not break anything, we’ve kept the trust of our customers and continue to grow the customer base. Now we’re really focused on how we bring to life the solutions that solve our customers’ biggest IT problems.

Furrier: What’s your strategy as you have to market Dell Technology on the portfolio of capabilities? I can only imagine it’s challenging.

Dew: We believe very firmly that we’re going to see the continued growth of a hybrid cloud/multicloud world, and it’s not one thing or the other. In fact, when you look at all of the research around the economics of doing one or the other, it all becomes workload dependent. That conversation may not be as interesting a headline, but it’s the truth. That’s why we’re so excited about the announcements … with VMware and Microsoft.

We’re really talking about a multicloud hybrid cloud world, and across all of the solutions that we announced this morning, what we’re really focused on is, “How do we make it simpler for our customers? How do we make it simpler to manage and deploy PCs? How do we make it simpler to manage and deploy your cloud environment?”

Furrier: A lot of journalists are looking for stories to put tech in a bad spot. There’s a lot of tech for good, but a lot of people can’t point to one thing and say, “That’s an example of tech for good.” Talk about that dynamic, because this is changing how you market and how people consume.

Dew: There’s a lot of work that we need to do in order to maintain media fairness. Then there’s a conversation about technology that we’re not talking about — everything that we’re doing in terms of medicine, indexing the human genome, and addressing deafness. There are these really big technology problems that we’re really leaning into, and yet we’re either talking about Amazon drone delivery or what Facebook is doing. We need to talk about those topics, but let’s talk about where technology is really struggling and address real problems.

Vellante: I have a personal question. You started out your career with East Asian studies. You speak multiple languages. I wonder how that affected your career in terms of getting into this business.

Dew: I loved foreign languages, so I studied Japanese and French. And that led me to going to Japan, and I started working in this small Japanese ad agency. I was the only non-Japanese person in that company, and of course I learned some functional things in terms of the art of advertising, but what I actually learned was how to survive in an environment that was so different to mine.

Ironically, that decision that I made to study Japanese is one of the things that sets the course of my life, because I’ve always been in international jobs. It’s also one of the reasons when we talk about technology and education and AI, I have a somewhat controversial opinion, which is of course we need to support STEM and of course I want to see more women in STEM. At the same time, I want to see us focus our children on critical-thinking skills, and that’s because, until I went to business school, I was a liberal arts major born and bred. That’s not the pat answer that you expect from somebody in my job, which is it’s all about STEM. It’s about stem and more.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Tech World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither the sponsors of select segments of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE