(NOTE: This story was originally posted to CRN.com June 27.)

Expectations Exceeded

In the 10 months since Dell Technologies completed its landmark $58 billion acquisition of EMC, partners and customers have warmed up to it better than Chairman and CEO Michael Dell expected.

The deal has also surpassed his expectations for growth, he said in an interview with CRN. Dell said he has "seen tremendous validation of the strategy we put in place," as customers and partners turn to Dell Technologies and its family of companies – Dell EMC, VMware, Pivotal, Virtustream, RSA and others, when they consider which vendors they'll place their bets with in the future.

Customers, Dell said, are aggressively digitizing their businesses, and partners have an opportunity to take advantage of that move as long as they stay ahead of the curve. "The companies that thrive are the ones that learn how to add value in the new relevant things," he said.

Still, the market's move to the cloud isn't tidy, and Dell is committed to supplying a "multi-cloud world" where businesses keep almost all their data on premises and assign the rest to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, managed services providers, and the public cloud, which Dell said has proven expensive and "is trying to create a lock-in" in many cases.