At Dell EMC World, Michael Dell lays out three steps modernize IT

It's been just over a year since Dell announced its plans to acquire EMC, and Michael Dell seems pretty pleased with the progress Dell Technologies has made since then.

"Go big or go home," he said, helping kick off the annual conference now known as Dell EMC World. "It turns out, no one went home."

Freed from the quarterly thinking that he says "plagues" public companies and armed with some of the biggest names in enterprise technology, Dell said his company is ready to help lead the digital transformation ahead.

And that transformation comes in three phases:

1) Data center modernization.
2) IT automation.
3) Transform IT to act more like a service provider

Not surprisingly, Dell has products and services (and often whole companies) focused on servicing each step, like VMware for automation and Virtustream for service provider transformation.

And that transformation is hitting companies across every industry.

"You go to bed as a software company, and wake up as a data & analytics company," said Dell. "It's the sunrise of a new era, a digital dawn." 

One of the features of that new dawn, of course, is the cloud, but Dell reiterated that it's not just one cloud, but an array of service providers and options for companies to take advantage of.

"The cloud is an operating model for IT, it's not a place," said Dell. "The public cloud has grown, and it will continue to grow, because it provides a fully automated, self-servicing model. But anyone with a cloud-first, cloud-only strategy ... will find themselves uncompetitive with predictable workloads."

Enter Pivotal, Vmware, and Virtustream, which work to make it easy to move workloads between AWS, Google, Azure, as well as on-premise.

"You will live in a multicloud world, and we will provide the software to help you manage through it," he said.