Running a large technology company means the amount of data and related products represented will grow to exponential means, spanning public and private clouds, from the data center to the edge of the network. Such has been the case for Dell Technologies Inc., a conglomerate of storage, server networking, and cloud management products. After pulling off the tech industry’s largest merger to near-immediate success, Dell’s family of EMC, VMware Inc., and other groups have a few lessons to share in harmonizing product portfolios.

“Over the last few years, ‘Better Together’ has been a focus of ours, especially as we’ve come together as one, large company,” said Sam Grocott (pictured) senior vice president of product marketing at Dell EMC. “I would say we lived in the same neighborhood, and now we live in the same house.”

Grocott spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@Stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. The trio discussed Dell’s evolving messaging as their product portfolio consolidates around cloud solutions, as well as where this new focus will take them (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

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

Miniman: There’s a lot of simplification going on, and this year it feels like there’s a massive infusion of cloud. Dell Tech is still a massive portfolio, but take us through the ways you’re putting all this together.

Now we’ve powered up the data protection with PowerProtect, and we’ll continue to power up the original portfolio — PowerSwitch is now on. And we will continue to power up the rest of the portfolio. You’re definitely onto something; there is a trend here with multiple points on that trendline. You should be excited to know there’s a lot more to come there too.

Vellante: When people talk about large portfolios, they always talk about integration and large threads and architecture that bring them together. From a messaging standpoint, what are some of those threads that you’re weaving through the portfolio?

Grocott: One of the unique opportunities we have with such a broad portfolio is we want to make sure we have a very strong, hard-hitting product messaging. Of course, you’ve got the typical storage and data protection server messaging — the talk about key customer dynamics and trends that are going on at the individual product level.

What’s newer this year, and what you’ll see more of as we go forward is we’re now taking that product approach and going vertical. We’re talking about solutions, workloads and applications. The big opportunity we have — and you saw that with the introduction of the Dell Technologies Cloud and Unified Workspace — we’re now telling a broader solution story that includes many products within Dell EMC and many products across the Dell Technologies family, which provide more business outcomes and solutions outcomes for our customers.

Vellante: Today, there seems to be a conscious effort to really drive integration across the portfolio using VMware as the linchpin. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Grocott: Dave, you’re dead on. The VMware virtual Cloud Foundation suite is the linchpin in the operating hub for our hybrid cloud strategy, sitting on top of our infrastructure. But if you look at other solutions, maybe there’s another member of this extended family that should be the pointer, should be the lead of kind of the charge into a specific workload or use case. We’ll evaluate those on a case-by-case basis.

I think the important thing is the strategy stops and starts from the top with Pat Gelsinger and Jeff Boudreau, really working with both the VMware and Dell EMC teams. It is super clear the prioritization, focus and alignment to go build these combined solutions together. We may not have had that alignment in the past. If you look back historically, we probably didn’t execute as well or as fast as we wanted. We are now operating in absolute alignment. We’re in synchronization on the strategy, which makes it really easy for the teams to operate. Whether it’s a marketing team or an engineering team or a services team, we are absolutely in lockstep.

Vellante: I’m fascinated by this. Why, what’s changed? What has Dell brought to this culture to catalyze that?

Photo: SiliconANGLE