Dell CEO and Chairman Michael Dell said on a conference call Monday morning that the combined Dell and EMC would continue to work with other companies in the IT ecosystem.

Dell, MSD partners, Silver Lake, and Temasek announced a $67 billion deal for EMC this morning; it would be the largest technology deal in history.  Dell would acquire EMC’s 88 percent stake in VMware, but VMware would continue to be a publicly traded company.

Michael Dell was asked during today’s conference call if Dell-EMC would have more lock-in exclusivity with VMware for virtualization on its converged infrastructure. He pointed to partnerships with Microsoft, Red Hat, and Oracle as proof of Dell’s willingness to partner, and said those alliances would continue.

Dell also singled out EMC and VMware’s work with Cisco on the VCE joint venture as evidence of collaboration within the industry, although some believe that relationship has been rocky.

“My view is that Dell has a philosophy of choice so that it will continue to provide a variety of software options that run on Dell servers — whether it be VMware as a hypervisor/cloud platform, or OpenStack (based on Linux and KVM), or anything else that comes,” wrote Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Dan Conde in an email to SDxCentral this morning.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said that from “the VMware perspective obviously we see subsequent leverage, but we likewise feel we have a strong partnership with HP, with Lenovo, and others in the industry.” As VMware continues to operate as a publicly traded company, its federation will continue to be important, but it would seem as though Dell would have first dibs in some instances.

Just because Michael Dell and EMC CEO and Chairman Joe Tucci say that VMware will continue on its own, that doesn’t rule out Dell selling a stake in it, to raise cash after the deal. But Dell did say in the conference call that his company is planning on increasing its stake in VMware.

In the short term, Conde doesn’t see Dell spinning off VMware either.

• Asked if the combined company would have too many CEOs, Michael Dell said EMC’s David Goldman and VMware’s Gelsinger “both have a bright future in the combined companies.” Michael Dell would remain chairman and CEO after the acquisition, however. (Tucci will remain as EMC's CEO until the closing.)

• In a similar vein, Michael Dell was asked several times if there would be any layoffs. Dell said that while there were some cost synergies “I think there are some other companies that are better at reducing headcount than we are,” a not-so-veiled reference to HP’s recent layoffs. Dell has added 2,000 new employees to its sales staff during the past six months for a total of more than 20,000.

• Dell expects the acquisition of EMC to be completed between May and October of next year. The new company will operate out of three primary hubs in Austin, Silicon Valley and Boston.

• Dell said he expects to pay down the debt on the deal during the 18 to 24 months after the closing, which was similar to what happened when he and Silver Lake took Dell private two years ago.