In IT, there are old names and new names. The new, cloud-native players excite customers with cutting-edge technology and Everything-as-a-Service philosophy of convenience. Yet the older names still inspire trust in reputation. However, the greater scale and variety of software-led infrastructure seems to be giving the newer companies most of the momentum right now.

Which brings us to the interesting question of Dell’s acquisition of EMC. What happens when a legacy company with a lot of debt merges with a forward-leaning innovator with a penchant for acquiring startups? Dave Vellante (@dvellante), Stu Miniman (@stu), Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, started day two of EMC World by discussing this and other topics.

According to Gracely, Dell and EMC have a choice. They could invest capital into developing software up the stack, becoming more relevant in cloud and emerging technology. Or, according to Gracely, “Does that cash go back into retiring debt and trying to make this less leveraged? If they go that way, which their accountants would love, they’re in big trouble,” he said.

The new software-led world

“They’ve all got different approaches to dealing with the Amazon effect,” said Vellante, referring to pressure on IT providers to keep up with the wildly growing, software-led infrastructure providers. He mentioned IBM’s acquisition of The Weather Company and its natural language processing software, Watson, as ways it is keeping up with the demands for great software up the stack.

All of theCUBE hosts agreed that the big question for Dell-EMC is: How are they going to compete in this new world and still manage their debt?

“And it’s a question that’s going to be answered pretty quickly too,” said Burris.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE