Folks,<p>We are not yet in a world where cloud &gt; local for the top 45% of Dell&#x27;s <i>most profitable customers</i> (think big, very big). And if we ever get there, I don&#x27;t think they will be looking to Dell&#x2F;VM for a solution.<p>Those &quot;whales&quot; are going to want a more integrated solution, so Amazon, Google, and Msft will take their cloud services one step further--further away than Dell&#x2F;VM will ever be able to take it: dedicated fiber for their largest customers. How? Any of these three can lour their existing client base as bait and cut a deal with the Verizon and ATTs of the world for bulk (dedicated) bandwidth purchases. And if they don&#x27;t have enough existing clients (Azure) they can post a cash-bond guaranteeing revenues to the telecom (just like msft did with the record companies to sell music in Win8).<p>At any rate, when your borrowing cost is exponential, and you have no cloud business to speak of, you won&#x27;t be able to take your services to that next level. I may end up eating my words here, but this is too little too late for Dell--the beginning of the end if you will.<p>This is not financial engineering, but rather Silverlake and EMC denying reality, or at least postponing it until they can each cash out.