Over Labor Day weekend, the Dell Technologies Championship golf tournament in Boston made headlines as Tiger Woods played in contention throughout the event. Faced with a chance to close within two shots of the lead midway through Monday’s final round, Woods left a putt right on the edge of the cup and failed to win. That Woods left his ball on the edge in Dell Technologies Inc.’s own tournament was only fitting, because that’s exactly where Michael Dell believes the future of the information technology industry resides.

Dell Technologies’ founder and chief executive officer (pictured) has made a career out of challenging conventional wisdom. With $1,000 and a few friends in his college dorm, Dell founded his company in 1984 based on the then-unique concept of selling computers directly to consumers and swiftly built it into a mega, billion-dollar business.

In 2015, Dell announced the acquisition of EMC Corp. for $67 billion, the largest deal in technology history. It was a curious move, given that Dell itself had a valuation of only $25 billion at the time.

Included in the deal three years ago was VMware Inc., and that firm’s continued strong earnings have played a key role in Dell Technologies’ successful financial performance outlined in second-quarter results released Thursday. It’s an instructive lesson that sometimes the best moves are not the most obvious ones.

“I’ve made my life of doing stuff that maybe wasn’t quite obvious to everyone,” Dell said. “I remember when we announced in 2015, everyone was like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ Now it seems like a really good idea.”

Dell spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during last week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They discussed the future of edge computing, recent news from VMworld involving a partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., company branding, plans to go public, and VMware’s continued innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

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

Edge boom is coming

If nearly 35 years in the technology business has taught Dell anything, it is the value in being able to predict where the fast-moving industry is going. And Dell believes that the next boom will be in edge computing.

His view of the edge as the next gold rush was supported by many of the major announcements from last month’s VMworld event. Among the news released by VMware in August was the introduction of Project Dimension, a hyperconverged appliance to target data centers and edge locations, powered by the VMware Cloud Foundation bundle.

VMware also took the wraps off a new version of its Pulse IoT Center software, which manages connected devices. These two recent announcements figure strongly in an evolving edge strategy, since microprocessor sales point toward a tsunami of connected devices, according to Dell.

Arm Holdings, a British multinational semiconductor supplier, had sold 120 billion microprocessors and controllers, Dell noted. “That’s already sold; this isn’t the next five years or 10 years,” Dell said. “Most of the 120 billion [microprocessors] aren’t connected, but they are going to be.”

Two-way street for infrastructure

A major piece of news coming from VMworld last week was the announcement that VMware Cloud would now be available on Amazon Web Services and that the Amazon Relational Database Service would be supported by VMware. The significance of the news was that it could pave the way for information technology organizations to more easily migrate databases to either AWS or VMware Cloud.

The creation of what was essentially a “two-way street” provided the strongest evidence yet that a multicloud infrastructure model would be the current direction of the enterprise market, where customers desired the best of both cloud and on-premises options. This is precisely the trend that Dell thought would play out with the acquisition of EMC in 2015, and he has seen that reflected in Dell Technologies’ own business results.

“If the server and networking business is growing 41 percent, everything can’t be going to the big three public clouds,” Dell said. “Cloud is an operating model, not just a place.”

A light touch for branding

Although Dell Technologies unveiled a rebranding of the new company approximately nine months after the merger, it has not spent an inordinate amount of money on building a new image. It took Dell Technologies nearly 18 months to release a new advertising campaign after the big merger and the company has preferred to let that message carry it well into this year.

The campaign, based on the tagline “Let’s Make It Real,” focused on customer solutions to address the world of digital transformation. It’s part of a “light touch” branding approach, according to Dell.

“People are understanding what we’re doing, they understand what Dell Technologies signifies more and more, and the brand is resonating well,” Dell explained. “If you’ve got a business that’s close to $90 billion and it’s growing at 17 to 19 percent, you don’t sit around a say, ‘Let’s change a bunch of stuff.’”

Going public again

In July, Dell Technologies announced plans to go public again, after taking a five-year hiatus from the stock market. But the move is complicated by a number of factors, including the fact that the EMC merger was accompanied by significant debt and it included ownership of VMware, which was, and remains, a publicly traded company.

Asked about the move to become publicly traded again, Dell pointed out that his firm had been disclosing information as though it was already on the stock market. He also said that additional information would likely be forthcoming at the company’s investor day scheduled for later this month.

“We make all of the public filings, it’s out there and available,” Dell said. “What I see is no change in how we’re operating and our strategy, our relationship with our customers and partners, and VMware’s independence.”

That independence has allowed VMware to emerge as a key player in enterprise information technology, and Dell’s vision of the edge as a major factor in future growth will depend heavily on the company’s ability to keep its innovation sharp and well-capitalized. It’s not a worry for an industry veteran like Dell who is now in his fourth decade as a household name.

“The level of innovation that is coming from VMware is really profound,” Dell said. “It’s the highest it’s ever been … until next year.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE