The big question on attendees’ minds at Dell EMC World in Las Vegas this week is: Can the company compete with Amazon.com Inc, Google Inc. and the like without its own bona fide public cloud?

If Michael Dell (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies Inc., is in a panic over this, he concealed it well in his interview with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Dell EMC World. (* Disclosure below.) 

“If you look at these large public cloud companies, what they’ve done is extrapolated the workload up to the application layer,” Dell said. This is what public cloud customers buy, and any company selling it can compete for those customers — it matters little whether they are pure-play cloud, Dell argued.

The cloud today can be likened to the internet 20 years ago, according to Dell. Back then companies might have been asked to lay out their internet strategy; they might have hired special internet teams. All that would be redundant now, because the internet is part of everything — and cloud is on a similar trajectory, he said.

Cloud is not a place, but a way of doing information technology, and as long as companies provides the tools, they are effectively cloud providers, Dell stated.

A concentration in applications

Dell EMC offers several acquisitions and platforms that allow customer to work at the application layer, Dell stated. It starts with breaking applications into types: traditional, mission-critical and cloud-native.

“With Pivotal, we’ve got kind of the tip of the spear of our cloud strategy as the platform to develop cloud-native apps,” he said. Pivotal users can leverage public cloud, but 80 percent of instances started on the platform wind up on-premise, according to Dell.

Pivotal also lets customers side-step public cloud lock-in, he said. In addition, VMware Inc., which alone is worth more than Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. in its entirety, still does a great job running traditional applications, Dell added.

“For those mission-critical apps like SAP, like Oracle, like Epic, you need a different level of performance and capability, and that’s where Virtustream [cloud management software] comes into play,” he stated.

Dell EMC’s broader goal is to provide a software-defined data center, enabled largely by VMware.

“I am particularly excited about NSX [VMware’s Network Virtualization and Security Platform],” Dell said, adding that full virtualization of the network and network functions open up huge opportunities.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE