Future of work, multicloud, edge, AI and security are the key themes out of Dell Tech World
LAS VEGAS—Most major enterprises have, to degrees, settled on a multicloud strategy as the way forward. The next piece of this ongoing evolution is making workloads running in multiple public and on-premise clouds look, feel and operate like a single system. At the same time, IT buyers also need to take into account changing employee behavioral patterns, real-time data insight delivered by edge computing, the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in larger technology investment strategies, and making sure all of that has security embedded at every level. As such, these five themes guided the first keynote session at Dell Tech World hosted this year at the Mandalay Bay.
Dell Technologies Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell took the stage to the chorus of David Bowie’s Starman off the concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars—”There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds / There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’s told us not to blow it cause he knows it’s all worthwhile.” I digress. Dell’s introductory comments highlighted the firm’s record annual revenue of $102 billion reported in March, and called out how its resilient, secure and global supply chain has been instrumental in that success, and in the successes of its customers.
Following big picture commentary around the foundational role of tech in driving innovation, business value and “human progress,” Dell took on the “it” tech of the moment, generative AI. Looking ahead, and citing IDC research projecting more than 80% of edge servers will be used to run AI workloads by 2025, he called out the need for new network architectures and more processing power. He also discussed how business-specific, proprietary large language models will become increasingly important as enterprises contextualize their AI investments in terms of security and specialized use cases, e.g. a bank using AI to calculate credit risk or fraud detection rather than a bank, for some reason, using AI to generate poems or images.
“There will be significant proliferation of open- and closed-source large language models for general and specialized uses…The real opportunity is to re-imagine your organization and what you can become given the superpowers AI is unleashing,” Dell said. Describing himself as an optimist in terms of the potential negative impacts of broad AI adoption, he said, “Throughout human history we’ve successfully managed the risk of potentially existential technologies…Our measures of progress are bound to our innovations.”
Speaking following the keynote in a group Q&A with media and analysts, Dell called AI “a massive unlock of the power of data…I think this is as big or bigger than the internet, PCs, the smartphone…For us, it’s a very comprehensive kind of reimaging of our business.” Co-COO Jeff Clarke boiled down Dell Technologies’ approach to AI as four-fold: embed AI in products and link it to service capabilities; build things to help customers deploy AI; using AI internally; and fostering more AI know-how in its partner network. Recall back to Dell’s keynote comment around banks not needing the same types of large language models used by things like ChatGPT of MidJourney; “we think the world moves towards much more domain-specific and process-specific AI.”
Many of the day one product announcements speak to Dell Technologies’ focus on multicloud. Before getting into the how, let’s address the why of multicloud. “We’re having a moment of cloud reckoning given the macroeconomic environment,” Co-COO Chuck Whitten said following the keynotes. After early excitement about sweeping cost savings derived from moving workloads into the public cloud had been “disabused,” Whitten said that sparked a larger examination of how to optimize workloads, including which cloud they’re run in–public, on-prem, edge, colocation facility, etc…”If that’s the world I’m going to live in, who’s going to help me navigate that and make it all better together?…No one is going back to uni-cloud models.”
Dell bottomlined his company’s view on this part of the world: “Multicloud is the only answer. How do you do it by design? How do you make all these things begin to look like one system?”
At the event, Dell Technologies announced a massive expansion to its multicloud APEX portfolio with a focus on management simplification and more predictable cost structures. Specific updates include:
- Partnerships with Microsoft and Red Hat to extend those companies’ public cloud operating systems into on-prem cloud.
- Expansion of Dell APEX block and file storage features to public cloud environments.
- Dell APEX Navigator software for data mobility, storage and container management across multicloud environments.
- Dell APEX Compute for easy scaling of compute resources.
- PC-as-a-service which is essentially an enterprise subscription for the latest and greatest PCs and peripherals.
- And a collaboration with Databricks to connect on-prem stored Dell data storage to the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to simplify data access and analysis.
More on all of those announcements here.
With regard to the future of work, Dell executives described the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and changing workforce expectations as driving long-term change in how (and where) people work. In terms of how customers are approaching Dell, the consensus is there’s not going to be any sort of one-size-fits-all solution; individual corporate cultures will inform what the future of work looks like. Product announcements included the Latitude 9440—billed in an announcement as “perfect for an executive, consultant or salesperson,”—and the Latitude 7340 and 7440 Ultralights both starting at right around 1 kilogram in weight with a 16:10 display and 5MP camera. More here.
Edge…more on that tomorrow when the topic will be addressed in detail by Clarke during his keynote, and when relevant product announcements will go public. A teaser from Dell though—he sees most AI processing, over time, happening at the edge although that may take time to materialize. “But that’s the world we’re planning for.”
Security, again, more on that tomorrow. But Clarke told media and analysts, “We have an absolute responsibility to help our customers. There’s no division between infrastructure and security…The security industry in general has hundreds upon hundreds if not thousands of products…We think there’s a future architecture that is an enabler of how companies will secure going forward that’s a paradigm shift.”
Stay tuned for more from Dell Tech World.
