Michael Dell, Dell Technologies | Dell Technologies World 2023

foreign welcome back to Dell Technologies World we're here this is day two and I'm super excited to have Michael Dell chairman CEO great to see you again thanks for coming on thecube always wonderful to spend time with you yeah great to be with you again Dave and thank you and the cube team for incredible coverage at Dell Technologies world and all the great work you do bringing the message out there and you know helping helping the world understand all the things that are going on here well this is year 14 of us really documenting back then it started at EMC World in 2010 in Boston we called it the chowda cube and now we documented you know Del Dell world back in 2012 was the first time we were there I want to talk a little bit about that but I mean it's the year of AI there's no doubt about it you guys have leaned right in I want to go back and it's a question that I asked you yesterday in sort of the private sessions of the waves of power right so it started with the PC the microprocessor based Evolution Revolution and then the internet and and so forth and go back to to the early 19 mid 1980s what did you see you and Jeff really and your team really affected that transformation was it the technology was it the consumers when you were in college making PCS what what informed you that that was the future well I think it's a combination of things but you know to me what was incredibly exciting was this idea that an individual could have their own computer right it sounds pretty obvious now but by the time it was sort of a breakthrough idea right and these things could be affordable and you know that's kind of what got me started as a you know uh when I was in seventh grade you know I was in a math class and we got access to a teletype terminal and I just became enthralled and kind of spent all my time geeking out you know with programming and software and computers and taking them apart and you know that's that's uh that's how I got started and then the internet comes along and people think oh it's going to disrupt everything and then you just took advantage of it you know with the direct model that it just was awesome you know we we started out as a company that sold directly to customers and actually most of them weren't consumers they were they were companies and uh when the you know we we you know we had catalogs we even had a catalog that you know came like on a diskette you know you like put it in yeah of course with the AOL you know yeah kind of like that and then the internet came along it's like oh my God we can put the catalog on this world wide web thing and people can like go online and see things and then they can click click to buy it's like totally you know blur everybody's mind that that could be something so we embraced that and obviously you know it took off in a big way and and uh you know the internet was the next big wave after the PC so what's interesting is that you saw a little bit of productivity boost in the 80s and in the 90s huge productivity Booth boost and then the internet as well with Cloud mobile and social probably because everybody was on their social media the internet the productivity dipped so now we come to AI so my question to you is how big is this is this like a lot of people think it's bigger than the previous waves do you agree with that and then I want to get into how Dell takes advantage I think it's as big as as you know as the PC you know the internet or the smartphone and the reason is it's just an enormous unlock of all this data that's been created we all know the the rate of data growth has only been accelerating but honestly you know how many organizations have actually been able to take advantage of their data in a very meaningful way not as many as would like to and so large language models I think are going to accelerate that great unlock and of course now you have the entire physical world becoming instrumented becoming intelligent today we talked about our native Edge platform and all the interesting things that are going on in advanced manufacturing and Retail and energy and Healthcare and transportation Logistics again uh you know data is at the center of everything that is interesting and important and data is the fuel for every Ai and machine learning advancement so let's talk about Dell's framework to take advantage of AI well both internally and for your customers you have a four-part framework uh Ain ai4 which is getting customers helping customers adopt AI inside Dell itself applying it to your business and then of the ecosystem Partnerships so you got like a four-pronged it's four vectors that you can attack AI I mean people don't think of you as an AI company but you're You're Building purpose-built servers for AI you've got Satya yesterday talked about the laptop as a you know sort of AI destination so explain how you take an advantage as an incumbent and potentially as a disrupter well first of all I think there is a perhaps misunderstanding that you know AI is just in uh you know chat GPT right and and that's pretty cool though and that is AI yeah super interesting stuff but of course you know Ai and machine learning are not necessarily new topics and you know for a long time we have had AI embedded in our systems and we've been doing you know thousands of projects inside our organization and helping our customers you know apply that technology and now you know customers are going to be able to apply their own proprietary data against these models and as Jeff mentioned earlier in his keynote you know natural linguist processing machine learning those have been around for a long time but I do think you know these these uh large language models are a big leap forward and that it's a it's a it's a big opportunity it was interesting to hear you on on TV this morning around CNBC and of course you know they have to ask the questions about you know are you going to lose jobs and and and and what about the dangers of AI and they're they're valid questions don't get me wrong but I want to go back to in 2012 you had us at Dell world the first time the cube ever came there Bill Clinton spoke and he said I remember vividly he said if the if the if the interest rates go back to the levels where they were when I was President we're going to be in big trouble well we're kind of there now there's the the U.S debt I think is 120 of GDP a lot of people concerned about that myself included but a lot of people feel like well it's probably going to go to 200 before it goes to 100. and a lot of people feel like AI could be because of the productivity Factor could be the lever that takes us to the next level what do you think about that I think you know if you if you sort of get out of the um anxiety of the moment right you know what's going on in Washington and you know the the next you know 30 days or whatever and you think about this in the context of what's really likely to happen in the next five years to 10 years and 20 years I think you're actually going to have a fantastic outcome for you know humankind right when it comes to productivity abundance Health Care education Etc and technology is going to be the big enabler that's my strong belief you know we have to protect against really bad outcomes and put the guardrails in place to ensure that those you know sort of uh Corner cases don't don't emerge but I have a very strong belief that technology is going to drive enormous progress and the economy is likely going to grow a lot faster because of these Technologies now will there be as there have been with any technology wave you know some some really good things happen and maybe some not so good things happen but mostly I think it'll be really good and you talk everybody talks about guard rails you know it's kind of a fuzzy term but it's pretty clear to me anyway the government's not going to figure anything out in the near term anyway maybe eventually they'll they'll catch up but so the industry has to self-regulate do you agree with that and what kinds of things are you doing to to make sure that your AI doesn't get into the wrong hands to make sure that it's responsible how do you what's the conversation like inside of Dell and within your ecosystem to to to to solve that yeah well first of all I do think there will be regulation it it to your point I think it'll be difficult to regulate because you're really regulating software right and and uh you know software can be sort of anywhere it's kind of hard to regulate but you could see controls over you know Advanced computing power and sort of who is able to get that and you know what is it being used for and that sort of thing and we'll certainly have lots of conversations with The Regulators about how best to do that in a constructive way but I think you know uh all organizations have a responsibility to Think Through you know uh what are the ethical uses of the technology how do we do this in a responsible way how do we do it securely and you know how how do we make sure it doesn't get in the wrong hands and then it's used for good purposes you're a living example of you know Dr Norman Vincent peel the power of positive thinking right and I think good things will happen you know Dave your life is much happier if you think positively it is it's just the way it is my mom drilled that into my head as kids and so it's so true you become what you think about as Earl Nightingale would say so I want to ask you about China I was catching up on my my Warren Buffett videos this weekend this is amazing he and Charlie up there for six hours and it's just you can't get enough of it right you got a really good question uh from what appeared to be somebody I think it was from Hong Kong asked him about the relationship in China and his response was and you're you're a you're an industry Ambassador you're a diplomat and positive thinker his response was a little let's start with some diplomacy instead of the vitriol so that's that's a starting point and and you know the old trading partner seldom wage war type of thing so at the same time it's probably hard to make money in laptops in China but it's a supply chain advantage that you have there um what are your thoughts on on China Dell's presence in China how do you see the future you know I think um so China remains a large market for us to sell our products right and it's actually our second largest market outside the United States still right and it is a large and generally growing economy having said that we've certainly heard from customers the desire for more resilient Supply chains and you know we've embraced that I think we're probably ahead of others in you know being able to to ensure that our supply chain is resilient but I don't I don't see a total decoupling I think you know there there are certainly uh you know partial decoupling and and and look uh you know this is not the maximizing strategy for the global economy but it is what it is and you know we don't get to make the rules we just you know deal with the circumstance that's out there and you know resiliency is what we built and you know I think our supply chain is is really built to last in that context whatever comes our way I want to switch gears a little bit talk about cyber what do you see as Dell's role in cyber security or not you're not building a new shiny toy to plug some hole that's not your strategy which I'm I'm glad but but what is your role how can you help the tech industry be more cyber conscious and be more safe it has to be embedded in and built in more than bolted on and zero trust is clearly the framework that technology you know I.T is has embraced in a big way so we're going to make that super easy for customers and as we talked about you know with our our you know initiative earlier today uh you know we're convening kind of the whole ecosystem of all the leading security companies in the world to integrate all that together and be able to deliver that in a you know seamless manner for customers so they don't have to go integrate it themselves customers are really confused about this but you know where do I invest what's too much what's too little how do I get all these things to work together and we think we can play a really big role in helping them address that the announcements you made around Apex and the edge you took I like the fact that you're taking product of projects and turning them into products that's that's that's exactly you what we do there's no there's no sort of you know uh let's just announce something and then not not deliver it well I mean I said in my open I mean IBM has struggled for years with that that may be getting better at it but I mean that's that's key you got to take your r d and get productivity out of it so I'm happy about that um I wanna you know I have great respect for Andy jassy he's been on thecube many many times and has been a friend of the cube but he he has this narrative that 90 of the workloads are still on-prem and a lot of Wall Street guys parrot that my numbers don't suggest that I mean I think it's more like 50 50 and my premise is the world is reaching sort of an equilibrium forget Telco for a second that it's sort of you know I'm not a repatriot necessarily but I do feel like there's more of a balance when you talk to customers and now you present things like Apex and you have that conversation you give them options with a cloud operating model across clouds out to the edge what I call super cloud what is the conversation like and do you feel like that premise of an equilibrium I know it's self-serving to say yes but do you have sort of any input and and insight as to where we are in that balance you know Jeff talked today about a common storage layer which is a really interesting you know technical concept and we're making that real with everything we're doing with Apex in the public cloud and on premise and ultimately you know every customer is reaching the conclusion that it's multi-cloud but what they don't want is a whole bunch of different societal things then they have to go manage all these various Stacks as completely disparate separate things so as I mentioned in my keynote you want all of these clouds and Edge systems to begin to look like one system and Dell Technologies is really uniquely positioned to be able to do that to your question about you know where the workloads I actually think you know when we have this conversation in four or five years we'll be talking a lot about the edge because a substantial portion of the growth will be in the edge it won't be in the public cloud or the colos are on-prem and so you know we we see that that as sort of the the big evolutionary path you know it's interesting too on that front is you walk around here your ecosystem is is evolving I see a lot of liquid cooling which is very cool because you got you know you've got a cool energy yeah well you know the these these AI processors you know require enormous amounts of power and you know uh it turns out with this boom in AI it's not a lot of data center capacity out there with the power capabilities and so lots of new requirements are popping up given given everything that's occurring we had a customer on last night we did the cube after dark and he had 500 000 cores right he said I'm not doing that in the cloud I've got broke so so you're seeing that the super can be the high performance Computing folks are really looking at doing a lot of that on-prem they sort of have to don't they yeah and and uh we we've we've already seen the demand signal come come in a pretty big way with products like the XC 9680 also the the smaller cousin the r760xa you know we've been building GPU servers for a long time and again a vast majority you know 80 90 percent of the servers at the edge will be for inferencing and that's going to require AI processors of a whole different variety probably not going to put eight h-100s in every retail location every Quick Serve restaurant Etc and of course there's also a vibrant ecosystem of of companies that are creating next generation processor architectures to be able to do all this AI processing you know in all the various environments where it needs to occur the other thing about the ecosystem I wanted to mention for the audience is you're also seeing expansion in things like Telco I was at mwc Mobile World Congress this year so you see folks like rakitan and others that are partnering in 5G private 5G Oran on the show floor so your ecosystem is really becoming much more diverse than sort of mainstream I.T yeah and if you look at the XR server family right with the xr8000 we've just built out this very broad set of capabilities to work with carriers to work with you know the entire Toco industry because you know 5G it's not about talking on the phone faster it's about data they're disaggregating their networks they're containerizing and virtualizing and of course they want a reliable trustworthy supplier you know to be able to back these things up and you know that's that's the capability we bring Michael I want to wrap it you're an investor as well uh with your family office and and you've always been a big supporter of founder-led startups and and so I'm in a couple of funds and and they're all excited the VCS are very excited because they think they can start companies which is probably true for way less money and they can get to an MVP much faster and of course you see in growth Capital dry up you know try to get series C but but what are you seeing there is it a legitimate premise that AI is going to allow you to get to an MVP much faster with with much less Capital uh is is that really actually playing out in the real world I I believe we're starting to see that and I think that will be one of the factors that drives the you know growth in the economy and again you know whenever you have waves of Technology you get this sort of uh explosion of of new businesses that wouldn't be possible before that was available right you know it happens every time you get one of these big waves and I think in the startup ecosystem the ability to sort of bootstrap companies and build build them much more easily you already see uh proliferation of companies that are using these tools as the enabler for their next Generation businesses those businesses couldn't have been created a year ago if you were with all your wisdom of Michael Dell and all your years of being in this industry and being a champion of tech if you were in your 20s again where would you be looking I don't want to ask you what kind of company you would you would start like kind of that is my question but how would you go about deciding where to put your your talents and your Energies well look I think you want to do something that's important and useful and is going to have a big impact and you know the area that I get pretty excited about is Healthcare and you know the impact that technology can have in the biosciences if you look at you know cancer research uh the the work that's going on in immunotherapy in gene editing and the creation of new RNA vaccines all these things are technology enabled and I think they're going to be enormous advances there and you know if I were you know 19 years old and my dorm room starting over again that would probably be the kind of thing I'd be attracted to amazing Michael it's great to have you on the cube Dell check world again our 14th year here documenting the transformation thanks so much great thank you so much Dave all right you're welcome okay keep it right here everybody Dave vellante be right back with Lisa Martin and the whole Cube team you were watching the cube at Dell tech World 2023 right back foreign

2023-05-28 20:43

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