Dell’s in-process acquisition of EMC — what’s being touted as the biggest tech merger in history — has many speculating about what new direction the duo will take. Is the midmarket behemoth merging with EMC in order to appear more “cloudy” and innovative? Is EMC simply looking for more dollars to fuel its own operations?

Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing at EMC, said the company’s challenge now is to not lurch too far in either direction. “We’ve got to be very, very careful to not lose the magic of the Dell operational strength in the midmarket,” he told Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. “At the same time, we’ve got to not lose the magic of what EMC does in the enterprise.”

Burton said that pricing is an area where a balancing act might be most crucial. He said in his work with enterprises, pricing was simple: “It’s expensive or it’s free. They were the two prices. You can’t do that with a volume business,” he said.

Not cloud or nothing

Burton spoke about continuing EMC’s commitment to great customer service once they merge with Dell. Its best advice to customers, he said, is to just pick a place to modernize, and go from there. “If you can’t get your head around the cloud yet, that’s OK,” he said. “A no-regrets move is to look at your infrastructure and figure out where you can modernize.”

For example, he said, “If it’s based on disk today, make it flash. If you’re running predominately scale-up architectures, look at scale-out.” The point, he said, is, “There is a practical and pragmatic way to get to that cloud strategy.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE