When Dell Technologies Inc. agreed to buy EMC in October 2015 for $67 billion, it was the largest deal in tech history, large enough to give Dell’s own chief financial officer plenty of reasons to reach for the Maalox.

“Probably Michael was more optimistic about it than I was, to be honest,” said Tom Sweet (pictured), executive vice president and chief financial officer at Dell, recalling his conversations with founder Michael Dell at the time. “That’s a lot of money.”

The EMC deal included $49 billion worth of debt, another reason for indigestion, and it has led some industry analysts to question the strength of Dell’s valuation. Despite having more debt than the average company, it remains very manageable when considering the company’s current cash-flow position, according to Sweet.

“Just think about free cash flow coming out of the core, which is over $2.5 to 3.5 billion dollars,” Sweet said. “Over time we’ll demonstrate the value creation opportunity that exists here, and people will decide whether they want to invest in it and come along with us or not.”

Dell’s CFO spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Tech World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the value created through integration of the company’s various businesses and how tech trends will play in Dell’s favor (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Integration is the theme

In an interview this week, Michael Dell flatly stated that his company was not a conglomerate, despite its multiple businesses, such as VMware Inc., and over $90 billion in annual revenue. His argument was that the company has gone to great lengths to build innovation while integrating capabilities and solutions that customers want into a single framework.

“The levers we’re pulling right now are all of those,” Sweet said. “It’s an important theme that people need to understand about what we’re trying to do. I’m selling technology to a set of buyers that are consuming that technology in an integrated fashion, and that’s how we’re going to market.”

In February, the company issued its first quarterly earnings report since becoming publicly traded again last year. Dell reported operating income of $331 million for its fourth quarter, compared with a loss of $69 million in the same period for 2018.

“The technology trends are clearly headed our way,” Sweet said. “There’s data being created everywhere. You’ve got to store it, you’ve got to compute it if you want to get analytics and insight –, all of these things are lining up.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Tech World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither the sponsors of select segments of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE