The shifts of digital transformation are being felt throughout the enterprise world, from the businesses making cloud migration decisions to the information technology partners working to rapidly meet new market needs.

As many enterprise support businesses struggle to survive amidst transformation, Dell Technologies Inc. appears to have found the key to continued growth through strategic partnerships and industry-shaking mergers with organizations such as EMC and VMware Inc., as well as by maintaining a focus on client infrastructure needs even amid stiff competition from cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services Inc..

“The thing that’s a little surprising to me is that we’ve seen growth out of Dell,” said Dave Vellante (@dvellante, pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “We haven’t seen a lot growth out of many enterprise infrastructure companies that are large and incumbents.”

Vellante and Stu Miniman (@stu, pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, sat down at the Dell Technologies World conference in Las Vegas to discuss the industry implications of Dell’s strategic pivots, as well as where the company plans to expand as cloud ambitions continue to dominate the computing market.

‘Disruptions are not binary’

A focus on its client side and leveraging of partners VMware and EMC has bolstered Dell through a period of waning market storage needs, according to Miniman. “VMware’s doing well integrating with the cloud,” he said. “One of the saving graces for EMC is they never bought a large services organization. Companies that have 100,000 services people are having to trim down.”

While there has been some consolidation and reduction since Dell and EMC came together, the partners are growing overall, with an estimated increase of $10 billion in net worth since the time of the merger. That growth has occurred primarily on the company’s client side, with an increase of about seven percent per year, according to Vellante, and through its servers and networking initiatives to the tune of about 20 percent per year.

“Half of their business is the client side,” Miniman said. “When they call out 21 consecutive quarters of growth, if half the business is growing, that’s good.”

VMware has provided a huge tailwind for Dell, as an increasing number of service providers and channel partners look to the company for guidance in migration. However, it’s unclear how long that boom will last, as enterprises may eventually turn to Amazon for their cloud experience.

“People get on Amazon and say, … ‘Maybe I don’t need to pay for my server virtualization anymore,’” Miniman noted. “Storage is on a bit of a decline overall.”

Workload migration processes across the market are estimated to take another five to 10 years before they are complete. That leaves Dell time to reclaim market share from competing incumbents, such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., and offset some of the revenue being lost to the cloud. In the meantime, the company is proving successful in providing the tools necessary for companies making the transition.

“Disruptions are not binary,” Vellante said. “Organizations can’t just take their data and stuff it into the public cloud. They’ve got to bring the cloud operating model to their data, to their business.”

Dell Technologies is working to integrate from the edge to the multicloud world, staking claim as a contender in the race for edge dominance, founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said at his keynote at Monday’s event. Dell appears to be balancing those ambitions with a streamlined, supportive approach that promotes the company’s reliability.

“The keynotes this morning no question had Michael’s fingerprint on them… sending a message that ‘we’re here to support your digital transformation; we are your infrastructure partner,’” Vellante said.

Here’s the complete video interview, and there will be much more cover of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE.

Photo: SiliconANGLE