It’s hard to believe that it’s been just one year since the last Dell Technologies World event, given the innovation and breadth of tech sector announcements that have happened in the interim.
Generative AI, which has come to dominate conversations across markets, had only been in the limelight for six months at the time of last year’s event. Now, with a clearer view of the possibilities of the technology – but also the continued anxieties of many businesses when it comes to AI adoption – Dell Technologies is in a prime position to make the most of the AI boom through concrete commitments.
There’s also lots to look forward to with Dell’s hardware and infrastructure, as the firm continues its years-long collaboration with Nvidia. With these hopes in mind, I’ve pulled together some of my top hopes and expectations ahead of Dell Technologies World 2024.
1. Doubling down on Apex expansions
Dell Apex, the company’s anything as a service (XaaS) platform, has gone from strength to strength in recent years and continues to be a cornerstone product for the company around which its many services orbit.
At Dell Technologies World 2023, the firm unveiled its largest-ever expansion of Apex and in my conversations with Dell executives it was clear that the company sees incredible value for its customers in the Apex multi-cloud approach.
One of the key tenets of Dell Technologies World 2023 was ‘multi-cloud by design’, especially in the context of firms looking to continue modernization efforts or embrace the benefits of AI.
It’s reasonable to assume that Dell will seek to continue on this trajectory at its 2024 event, with additional support for customers looking to harness the benefits of multi-cloud. I’d specifically be looking for Dell to take this further by expanding the connections it made with public cloud providers in 2023 through Apex Cloud Platforms.
This service aims to help customers with DevOps and modernization efforts across hybrid cloud environments in partnership with Microsoft Azure, Red Hat's OpenShift platform for Kubernetes, and VMware.
When it comes to platform oversight, there’s also potential for Dell to inject more AI into the Apex platform in the form of an AI copilot or assistant similar to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Agents. It may be early days for this yet, but depending on the maturity of a customer’s data, the conversational capabilities of generative AI could make multi-cloud oversight easier.
2. AI infrastructure with strong Nvidia backing
Anyone who attends a tech conference these days can expect to be peppered with AI announcements and jokes. In the Dell Technologies World 2023 keynote, audiences were given the running gag of ‘ChatDTW’, a riff on ChatGPT, as a comedic backing to the more serious announcements made around AI.
Dell’s relationship with Nvidia has been integral to its wider AI approach. The Firm partnered with Nvidia for on prem generative AI, with Dell providing optimized hardware such as its PowerEdge XE9680 powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs and Nvidia including pre-trained models and frameworks.
In July, two months after Dell Technologies World 2023, Dell Validated Designs for Generative AI with Nvidia and in October 2023, Dell added model tuning features to Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with Nvidia via a new Model Customization strand.
It’s already clear that Nvidia will play a similarly big role at this year’s event with Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia, scheduled to make an appearance during the day-one keynote
At Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in March, Dell announced a new service known as Dell AI Factory with Nvidia and further news on this will almost certainly form the backbone for Dell’s AI news at the event.
Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is an end-to-end solution for AI adoption and deployment, rooted in Dell’s compute, storage, and services offerings alongside Nvidia’s infrastructure and networking fabric.
There’s plenty of scope for Dell to provide greater assurances for its customers looking to implement AI here, from those questioning how to deploy open source AI models to businesses assessing the pros and cons of chatbots for customer service.
I’d be surprised if, in direct connection with this, we didn’t hear more about Dell’s modern data lakehouse solution. First announced in its September 2023 partnership with Starburst, this aims to help customers federate their data in preparation for AI and machine learning (ML) as well as more easily leverage insights through big data analytics.
Last year John Roese, president and global CTO at Dell Technologies, told ITPro that customers were still grappling with getting their data in the right place and understanding that unstructured data is better for large language model (LLM) training.
The day-two keynote, typically reserved for the nuts-and-bolts explanations of the event’s biggest announcements and further detail on more developer-focused news, is titled ‘Making AI Real’.
Throughout the one-hour session, audience members can expect to hear from representatives at Hugging Face, Microsoft, Meta, and McLaren Racing with an aim to “showcase powerful new technologies to make the promise of AI a reality for you and your business”.
Do I detect an attempt to assuage lingering industry suspicion here? In January, we heard that 83% of UK businesses don’t plan to use AI in the short-term and C-suites continue to weigh up the various reasons to be excited or worried about AI, the expected ROI of generative AI, and a fear of missing out on the technology.
With its AI infrastructure and pipeline for AI deployment already more fleshed out than this time last year, Dell can use the day-two keynote to champion concrete examples of its customers more easily embracing the technology.
3. Key security and edge updates
One of my final and potentially less likely hopes for Dell Technologies World 2024 is a detailed update on ‘Project Fort Zero’, the firm’s proposal for an end-to-end zero trust system that could
There’s been little word on the project since then, though Dell did state at the time that it was part of a multi-year security approach. If the US Department of Defense (DoD) does validate the project soon, it could be a powerful boon for firms in sensitive industries looking for a platform that comes with specific security guarantees.
Dell has real pedigree when it comes to edge computing solutions, with its multi-cloud Dell NativeEdge platform having been hyped last year as a solution for firms aiming to expand their edge operations with centralized oversight.
Last year, much was made of the potential of deploying AI at the edge for low-latency operations and in the year since we’ve seen small models such as the 8B parameter Llama 3 or Google’s Gemma models demonstrating the value of smaller models. An announcement that brings NativeEdge together with these lighter, more easily deployed models could make all the difference in fields such as smart manufacturing.
Rory Bathgate will be covering Dell Technologies World 2024 between 20 and 24 May. Stay up-to-date with live coverage of all the announcements and more on ITPro.
