Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell (pictured) opened the vendor’s annual conference on Monday May 22 by talking about the transformative power of artificial intelligence.
“AI, just like the PC and the internet and the smartphone before it, will transform industries and the way we live and work,” he said during the opening keynote of Dell Technologies World 2023 in Last Vegas.
Acknowledging that AI poses risks, Dell nevertheless expressed optimism the technology will have an overall positive impact. “Throughout human history, we’ve successfully managed the risk of potentially existential technologies, and throughout human history, technology innovation has driven human progress.”
During the keynote, Dell shared a video conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who stressed the importance of AI, likening it to the PC. Like the PC, AI is changing how we work. “Whether you’re writing code or you’re writing a document or triaging email or designing something,” AI acts as a co-pilot that improves flow and creativity while removing “the drudgery of the work,” Nadella said.
Enabling Hybrid Environments
Dell and other company executives discussed the vendor’s role in leveraging technology to continue driving human progress. Central to that role is the enablement of hybrid, multicloud environments.
To that end, the company introduced a major expansion of its Dell APEX cloud services. New APEX offerings “give customers the freedom to choose where, how, and when they run their workloads, whether it be public cloud, on-prem, edge, and beyond, driven solely by the needs of their business,” Dell said.
Partners such as Microsoft are key to this strategy. A new offering, Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure combines “Dell’s innovation and operational excellence” with Microsoft technologies to fill an important customer need, Nadella said. “What customers really want is the seamlessness of the edge and the public cloud coming together.”
In addition to Microsoft, the vendor announced new APEX offerings in collaboration with Red Hat, VMware, and Amazon AWS.
With these collaborations, Dell is providing ground-to-cloud capabilities, which entails extending storage capabilities to public clouds, as well as cloud-to-ground capabilities, which means bringing the cloud experience to on-premise IT, said Chuck Whitten, Dell’s co-COO.
And to manage it all, “you need air traffic control,” which Dell provides with consolidated deployment, monitoring, and management across the hybrid environment, as well as the enablement of data mobility, Whitten said.
New APEX Offerings
The new APEX offerings include a Red Hat collaboration that provides a unified approach to running containers and virtual machines side by side, natively within Kubernettes, for various workloads, including AI/ML and analytics, across hybrid environments.
A new VMware service gives organizations the option of deploying vSphere on “highly scalable, high-performance Dell software-defined storage.”
Dell is extending the cloud experience to PCs and servers with APEX management capabilities in data centers, edge environments, and colocation centers, and through Dell APEX PC-as-a-Service (PCaaS). The latter is designed to simplify IT and add cost predictability to technology implementations.
Dell also is partnering with Databricks to enable organizations to extract insights from data wherever it resides—on premise, the cloud, or the edge.
PEDRO PEREIRA is a New Hampshire-based freelance writer who has covered the IT channel for two decades.
