There’s no such thing as a perfect cloud. While business as a whole is taking its first steps into the cloud, each company must find the specific clouds that serve its needs. Recently merged industry giant Dell EMC has taken a long look at how businesses use clouds. Although every company is different, Dell EMC has discovered some common trends, according to Chad Sakac (pictured), president of converged platforms and solutions at Dell EMC.

“Cloud is much more about an operating model than a place, and people have started to internalize that it’s about changing the way that they operate their business — both for some of their traditional apps, as well as how they build cloud-native apps,” Sakac said while speaking with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio.

Sakac shared a table with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris) at today’s VMworld 2017 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Together, they talked about the cloud, data gravity and the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Unique cloud needs, common digital threads

People are now understanding how cloud can change their business operations. This change extends not just to cloud-native systems, but also to their traditional applications, Sakac explained. Because of this, a hybrid cloud model is emerging that bridges the many clouds, and legacy systems, that businesses run.

While cloud means something different to every business, the common thread is that digital transformation starts with cloud-native applications. These applications then define their place in the cloud ecosystem based on data gravity, according to Sakac. That is, data gravitates to public or private clouds or stays inside the building given a company’s particular needs and uses for that information.

Dell EMC has considered these common threads and come up with a vision of the future. It believes customers will consume cloud platforms based on specific services and location relative to data and compute. Companies will need new tools to manage such arrangements, Sakac pointed out.

“Any technologies that bind multiple platforms together are incredibly compelling,” he said.

Then, there’s the edge, the far ends of the network where phones and sensors do their work. Edge devices need to process data locally, because the amount of data they collect is too much to ship and process in a central location. Dell EMC envisions a new world of clouds at the edge, and it plans to manage and secure them, Saka concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Dell EMC have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE