Dell Technologies’ top executives today framed hybrid cloud as a tired architecture that’s being left behind in pursuit of multicloud frameworks.

Enterprises “have understood the benefits of cloud, but they’ve also understood that it’s not one cloud or another, it’s actually multiple clouds that they want to benefit from. And it’s not even the public cloud or the private cloud, it’s really both,” Dell Technologies Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said today during a keynote at Dell Technologies Summit Unplugged.

This multicloud world, which Dell is reorienting multiple business units around, requires consistent infrastructure, operations, and access to the best of every cloud service, he said. “multicloud is clearly the next phase of cloud,” and enormous growth at the edge further emphasizes the need for multicloud architecture, Michael Dell added. 

Vice Chairman and co-COO Jeff Clarke underlined that point. “This conversation of public and private is long gone, hybrid is, I think, long gone. It really is about multi cloud,” he said. “Oftentimes we get caught up in the number of clouds but if you look at the future architectures of data processing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, they are completely dependent by the need to access multiple clouds.”

Dell executives also reiterated that amid its push to expand into new segments, it will continue to structure those pursuits around its core businesses and strengths. “We have a strategic philosophy that we're not going to randomly wander into places where we don't have a right to win. And our right to win is built on our customer relationships, the trust we build in our core, as well as the strategic advantages,” co-COO Chuck Whitten said during the event. 

“The good news for us is that much of the growth in IT is built on the foundation now of our core business. You can't have AI or smart cities, you can't have a telecom revolution, you can't have a data revolution, unless you have modern compute, storage, and modern IT platforms,” he added. “So in many ways winning on our core business, gives us a right to go disrupt adjacent markets and build new growth markets for the company.”

The dawn of the edge-computing age also emboldens Dell’s belief that distributed computing will become even more distributed and the company is determined to simplify those complex frameworks for enterprises, Michael Dell explained. 

“We don't want to be naive about it. It is a challenge, particularly when you think about what's going on at the edge,” a technology that ultimately touches every company on the planet, he said.

“The edge is the real physical world and all those things are becoming intelligent, and there’s a real risk that is a complexity nightmare because you effectively have created an enormous number of silos,” Michael Dell said, adding that the company is striving to get in front of those problems. 

Increased complexity in IT — with more data, locations, and use cases at play — is a foregone conclusion, Clarke added. As the shift from centralized computing to a distributed computing edge continues, latency, deterministic response times, massive scale, data automation, orchestration, management, and storage will be top IT priorities, he said. 

Clarke also made it clear that Dell intends to maintain a complementary approach to its working relationship with VMware following the spinoff scheduled for next month. 

“If you look at the framework of software technologies that lend themselves to the VMware side of the equation and the software technologies that would lend themselves to our side of the equation, it's about how do we collaborate and make that ecosystem work. We are not going to duplicate what VMware does,” he said. 

Dell does, however, intend to develop data-layer abstraction tools and services. “Given that we store a lot of the world’s mission-critical data, we’re the world leader in external storage, we’re the world leader in backup, we sort of have permission to build an abstracted data layer over our assets to help customers,” Clarke explained. 

Moreover to that point, as Dell increasingly targets the telecom industry, it “won’t be replicating” the software or services currently available from VMware, Red Hat, Wind River, and others, according to Clarke. 

“You will see us continue to move into more higher value software on top of our products that are traditional core platforms,” he concluded. “It is unquestioned in our mind when we think about the types of capabilities that we build, and quite honestly where the vast majority of our engineers spend their time is building software, this continuous delivery is another example of how we do that. That's a re-architecture of how we build platforms in the future.”