While some speculate that Dell EMC wants to be the IBM of the cloud era, funneling far-flung piece parts to customers through a single channel, in fact the company is primed to explore as much as consolidate, according to Jeremy Burton (pictured), chief marketing officer of Dell EMC.

“I think when one part of the tech industry starts to consolidate, and you get maybe fewer vendors, another area opens up and you get this incredible ecosystem,” Burton said.

Right now the squeeze is on infrastructure, Burton told John Furrier (@furrier) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

“What we believe is, as infrastructure consolidates, it can sustain fewer players, so you’ve got to be the big player,” Burton said. Dell EMC aims to become that big player by acquiring as much of the infrastructure market as possible, which is still worth hundreds of billions of dollars, he said.

Cloud, IoT the new gold rush

This narrowing of the infrastructure market is far from lights-out for tech innovation labs, according to Burton. “I’d say IoT [Internet of Things], machine intelligence, cloud-native apps — that’s, like the next frontier. And those ecosystems are thriving as the prior ecosystem consolidates,” he said.

These technologies are synonymous with the much-touted “digital transformation,” which may be why so many are tacking that term onto their mission statements. Dell EMC itself is now in the business of transforming companies for the digital age, Burton stated.

“Everybody’s saying that, though. I mean that’s HPE’s [Hewlett-Packard Enterprise] pitch now too,” Gillin said, asking how Dell EMC is differentiating itself from the herd.

Dell EMC now has the Pivotal Software Inc./VMware Inc. cloud development platform to make the transformation happen in real life, Burton answered. “If you’re going to go build a cloud-native app with HPE, good luck. They don’t have any software,” he said.

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