“There’s this explosion of innovation that’s going on,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “I’ve called it the four superpowers; cloud, mobility, AI, and IoT. These are just causing so many new companies, investment of capital, major new IPOs that are going on. I think with each sort of wave of these innovative cycles there’s an explosion of new companies, but then there’s also a consolidation of existing companies.”

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, and Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, discuss the explosion of innovation that is going on in tech in an interview on CNBC:

There’s This Explosion of Innovation, Says VMware CEO

There’s this explosion of innovation that’s going on. I’ve called it the four superpowers; cloud, mobility, AI, and IOT. These are just causing so many new companies, investment of capital, major new IPOs that are going on. I think with each sort of wave of these innovative cycles there’s an explosion of new companies, but then there’s also a consolidation of existing companies. All of the layers start to reform. Up here you’ve got a whole new set of them emerging in many of these areas and in the existing areas there is some level of consolidation. I do believe there will be some because fundamentally at the infrastructure layer I believe customers want fewer more strategic vendors.

As I talk to CIOs I say my job is every one of your engineers is looking down the stack at infrastructure I want to enable you to have them look up to the application and business differentiating services. We’re increasingly going to automate, standardized, and cloud deliver those infrastructure layers so you don’t have to do it. We’re doing it for you in an automated AI standardized way so every one of your resources gets to look up to create business differentiating services. So yes I believe both of those will be true consolidation and explosion of innovation.

Customers Don’t Want to be Systems Integrators, Says Michael Dell

Well, certainly the combination of Dell, EMC, VMware, and Pivotal was the biggest ones (consolidations) yet to date. That was a pretty big one and last year we added more than $11 billion in revenue so that was some additional industry consolidation there for you. I think customers to Pat’s point have told us very clearly they don’t want to be systems integrators anymore. They’re looking for fewer partners. Bringing together a broad set of capabilities across the infrastructure, security, client devices, the cloud, digital transformation, enabling all those capabilities for customers. They’d much rather work with one leading company than 20 or 30 smaller ones.