&gt; We are not yet in a world where cloud &gt; local for the top 45% of Dell&#x27;s most profitable customers (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>&gt; 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>You&#x27;re kidding, right? Dell has <i>provided</i> the solutions for two of those three companies. The datacenter segment of their business is both successful and demolishing its only real competitor: a crumbling HP.<p>Dell&#x27;s able to build and deliver ridiculously energy efficient datacenters at scale, very quickly. And they do, for Microsoft, eBay, and a number of other companies.<p>Their competitive advantage on the hardware side is substantial. Controlling VMWare would catapult the software side of things very, very far forward. If they want to build a new cloud platform, they&#x27;ve got extremely strong fundamentals to launch it from. If not, well, they&#x27;ll probably power whoever does build it in some way (and profit handsomely).