This week theCUBE goes to Dell World 2015 with live coverage. Coming on the heels of last week’s blockbuster announcement of Dell’s intent to acquire EMC, including Pivotal and VMware, it will give SiliconANGLE Media Co-CEOs John Furrier and Dave Vellante and Wikibon Senior Analyst Stuart Miniman opportunities to ask senior Dell executives, including company founder and CEO Michael Dell, questions about Dell’s plans for the combined organization on live video.

Watch the coverage here and post your own questions for the SiliconAngle on-camera team to ask on the parallel CrowdChat.

Top 10

Vellante, who is co-founder and chief analyst at Wikibon.com, published two pieces of analysis in the wake of the announcement, analyzing what it will mean to different constituencies and raising several important, as yet unanswered, questions. In “Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Dell Buying EMC”, he breaks down the figures, including what shareholders will get if the purchase is completed, the purchase timing, the ROI, growth potential of the combined enterprise, and its probable impact on the EMC/Cisco partnership. With the Hewlett-Packard Co. breakup, the post-merger Dell will be the only major end-to-end systems vendor covering the full range of infrastructure from mobile devices to enterprise servers. This, Vellante writes, is important to enterprise customers, who can leverage large purchases to get maximum price.

Dell should have little problem paying off the debt it will incur from the purchase, which, Vellante writes, is very close to the combined annual acquisition budgets of the two companies. Dell will treat EMC’s core storage product suite as a cash cow, and customers should expect longer product cycles, increased maintenance and support costs, a narrower R&D focus on those products and possibly premium pricing. Internally, employees can expect salary cuts.

He raises one of the largest open questions coming from the merger: What happens to VMware Inc.? Dell could sell the asset, integrate it or some combination. Vellante offers no odds on which path Dell will take. “We believe what Dell does with VMware will determine the pace of ecosystem defection and/or loyalty and have meaningful impacts on the outcomes within enterprise IT.”

Customer and partner survival guide

In his second piece, the “Customer and Partner Survival Guide to Dell’s Acquisition of EMC”, Vellante looks at probable impacts on EMC’s sales channel partners as well as customers. Michael Dell was a pioneer in defenestration, revolutionizing the PC business by cutting out the middlemen and leveraging the then-infant Internet to sell direct to customers. That allowed him to undercut the prices of major PC players such as IBM and Compaq. Dell still follows that strategy for part of its business, and that raises serious questions about the future of EMC’s strong sales channel and its partner approach to the market.

Vellante does not expect Dell to dismantle the EMC sales channel post-purchase. However, he does expect the combined company to compete directly with it, selling full infrastructure stacks and converged systems directly to customers. Vellante warns partners that they will need strong value-add if they are to survive and suggests that partners may want to develop relationships with other hardware companies. This is a second major issue that the SiliconAngle Media team can explore on theCUBE.

EMC has always been famous for its strong customer support, and consequently customer loyalty. The acquisition creates an open question about whether Dell will continue to invest in providing that level of customer support. Dell has prospered as a low-cost provider of quality products, and Vellante expects it to streamline EMC’s operations after the purchase. That does not mean that customer support will be reduced, but it equally is no guarantee that it will be maintained. This is the third important open question that viewers can expect theCUBE’s team to raise.

Watch theCUBE today and tomorrow to learn more about where Dell is planning to go with EMC, and drop into the Dell World CrowdChat both to discuss these and other issues and to pose questions you would like answered. The interviewers do monitor CrowdChat and often ask questions posed there during interviews.

Photo courtesy Dell Corp.