There could probably have not been a more appropriate setting for Dell Technologies Inc.’s annual conference last week than Las Vegas.

The company’s founder and chief executive officer, Michael Dell (pictured), has spent most of his career making big bets on his firm’s future and the computing industry’s direction. Over 35 years, he has taken Dell public twice and made the largest acquisition in the history of the tech industry, buying EMC Corp. for $67 billion in 2015.

Now Dell is rolling the dice on technology’s future, which he envisions to be a multicloud world, with edge computing, 5G wireless connectivity and artificial intelligence poised to reshape the industry. Anyone care to bet against him?

“We’ve been able to restore the origins of the entrepreneurial dream and success, and reintroduce innovation and risk-taking into a $91 billion company growing at double digits last year,” Dell said. “We’ve got the infrastructure requirements, in terms of the network, the storage, compute, the buildout at the edge, and we’re super-well-positioned to go address all of that.”

Dell spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. They discussed VMware Inc.’s role in meeting workload demands across the enterprise, a 5G-fueled explosion in edge computing, how Dell’s various companies will foster deployment of AI, and tech’s potential to support important societal initiatives (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Influence of VMware

Dell has refashioned his company into a number of distinct businesses. Along with Dell and Dell EMC, there’s Pivotal Software, RSA, Secureworks and Virtustream.

Yet if there is one critical element in the corporate portfolio, it is undoubtedly VMware, a company publicly traded in its own right and positioned at the heart of Dell’s strategic networking direction. Among the VMware-related announcements at Dell’s conference in Las Vegas were new automation features for hyperconverged appliance VxRail and a Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge solution bundled with VMware’s VeloCloud software.

Even the signature announcement during Dell Technologies World was centered around VMware. The company announced it would team up with Microsoft Corp. and place its infrastructure management software on the Azure cloud. For Michael Dell, it’s all about freeing workloads to move around.

“With the VMware Cloud Foundation, we have the ability to move these workloads simultaneously across all of the public clouds,” Dell said. “We have 4,200 partners out there and infrastructure on-premises built and tuned specifically for the VMware platform and empowered for the edge. All of this together is the Dell Technologies Cloud.”

5G will power the edge

Dell’s reference to the empowered edge is no idle comment. He believes that edge computing, powered by deployment of the new 5G wireless standard, will be a force to be reckoned with, and he’s laser-focused on positioning Dell to be ready to jump onto the surfboard when the wave rolls in.

The company recently signed an agreement with Orange S.A., one of the largest operators of mobile and internet services for 264 million customers in Europe and Africa, to develop a new edge platform and support the 5G needs of telecommunications operators.

Dell executives have been blunt about their expectations for the impact of 5G and the edge. Dell Technologies Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke told conference attendees that 25% of all data will soon be consumed at the edge through evolving 5G applications. Dell himself was even more expansive, flatly predicting in this interview that compute of data at the edge will be bigger than the public or private cloud.

“Maybe nobody is predicting that yet, but let’s come back in 10 years and see what it looks like,” Dell said.

An AI renaissance

With data as the central focus, its use by Dell and other major tech players will be key moving forward and will involve development of AI to manage it. In November, Dell appeared at a company event and likened AI to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and dawn of the Renaissance.

“We are now standing at the cusp of another renaissance with the advent of AI, broadly referred to as the digital transformation,” said Dell during the event last year.

The company will be counting heavily on several of its distinct businesses to deliver on the promise of AI. Last fall, Dell Boomi added 20 terabytes of anonymous metadata to its platform and incorporated intelligence into the user experience.

Dell’s strategic AI focus can also be found in Pivotal, which recently extended its GreenPlum analytics database with enterprise use cases spanning AI.

“We’re working on how we build a data platform, bringing together all of our capabilities,” Dell said. “This is all going to be super important as we enter this AI-enabled age of the future.”

Tech for good

Some observers of the tech world believe entering the AI age is a good thing; some are not so sure. The tech industry has faced a growing barrage of criticism in recent months around the dangers of AI and concerns about the use of personal data to train machine learning models.

Dell’s founder may have foreseen public sentiment turning against tech earlier than most. In 2013, well before the tech industry found itself on the hot seat, Dell launched its Legacy of Good Plan, a series of initiatives spread over seven years involving transparency in the supply chain, environmental responsibility, and addressing social issues in communities around the world.

The company publishes the three-year performance results of those initiatives on its website, reporting on progress within the company using metrics that cover a wide range of issues, including diversity and protection of identity.

“Yes, tech can be used for bad, but the vast majority of it is used for good by people that have good in their hearts,” Dell said. “It’s actually changing lives in very positive ways.”

Dell’s company made plenty of news at its annual conference in Las Vegas, yet it will get another shot when VMware holds its major event at the end of the summer. The VMware conference has moved this year from Las Vegas to San Francisco, and although Michael Dell was reluctant to offer any hints about what may be announced, it’s safe to assume that more big bets are coming.

“VMworld is coming in August, and there will be lots more,” Dell said. “It’s just going to get more interesting.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s three-day coverage of Dell Tech World 2019. (* 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