It’s tech conference season in the post-isolation economy, and there was little evidence of the pandemic in Las Vegas this week as thousands of participants attended the first in-person Dell Technologies World since 2019.

The event marked Dell’s first annual conference since spinning off VMware Inc., and a new chapter for Dell’s race to the edge. Dell APEX is central to this vision of an intelligence connected future, and keeping close ties with VMware supports Dell’s blossoming services portfolio.

“I’m impressed with their constant reinvention of the company, and the news hits all the cards,” said industry analyst John Furrier during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at the end of day one at the Dell Technologies World event.

Furrier was joined by theCUBE analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin to shed light on current news, including a slew of APEX announcements and a “masterful” partnership with cloud data warehousing innovator Snowflake Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Make new friends, but keep the old

Spinning off VMware is a positive move for Dell, according to all three analysts. As well as the financial boost of wiping the VMware associated debt from its balance sheet, Dell will continue to benefit from the trust it has built with the VMware ecosystem, according to Vellante.

“They now have that muscle memory in place where they’ve earned that trust, and I think that will continue on. It was actually quite brilliant the way they’ve orchestrated that,” he said.

Ushering in a new era of collaboration, this week’s big news was Dell’s partnership with Snowflake. It’s a masterful move, but one that brings an element of risk, according to Furrier.

“Snowflake can’t do what Dell Technologies does on-premises with storage, and Dell can’t do what Snowflake’s doing,” he said, describing how the partnership brings mutual short-term and medium-term benefits. But, the danger lies in Snowflake ultimately stealing the game away from Dell, or vice-versa.

“Whoever can develop the higher-level services in the cloud will ultimately be the winner,” Furrier said.

Dell’s APEX as-a-service portfolio also made the headlines on day one.

“APEX is the discussion,” said Vellante, noting that the topic had dominated sessions intended to be focused on other themes. But while Dell is working hard on scaling engineers and optimizing the channel model for its APEX cloud services, things aren’t quite where they need to be.

“I would say at this point you don’t quite have product market fit, and I think they’d admit that,” Vellante said.

Dell’s vision of building an abstraction layer points to supercloud

One major trend that jumped out for Furrier during the day one sessions was “headless cloud.” “Everyone that’s building digital transformation apps has to be their own SaaS,” he said.

Common in ecommerce, the practice is going to spread into enterprises allowing them to “have their cake and eat it too” by taking advantage of managed services where they don’t have expertise, according to Furrier.

Dell operations executives Chuck Whitten and Jeff Clarke talked about the vision of building an abstraction layer on top of the clouds that connects on-premises data centers across clouds, out to the edge, and hides the underlying complexity with managed services, Vellante pointed out. This matches a concept that Vellante has been focused on recently: the rise of the supercloud.

“That’s their vision,” he said. “It’s aspirational today, but that really is supercloud.”

Dell is successfully reinventing itself and is positioned with “all the piece parts” to compete in today’s complex cloud market, according to Furrier.

“I think Dell is going to continue to maintain itself in the front lines as a data center, enterprise, now cloud-edge player,” he said.

Here’s the complete episode, part of ongoing coverage, live from Dell Technologies World 2022 by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE