Every business will be affected by the huge advancements in software and robots but the “rapid” revolution will nonetheless deliver enormous benefits for humanity, according to a report commissioned by Dell Technologies.

EMC Corp will start selling a package of storage, services, and VMware software to help customers set up cloud networks in their corporate data centres and easily shift them to the internet.

VMware is boosting its push into the $440bn (€333bn) data centre market long dominated by the likes of Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and IBM. 

In a cavernous convention centre in front of 12,000 people lit by lasers and with smoke machines billowing, a man in his mid-40s took to the stage playing a distorted guitar solo — it was EMC’s chief marketing officer Jeremy Burton.