Name: Sean O'Connor, Dell Technologies
Uploaded: 2026-09-29T17:40:00.000Z
Duration: 11 min

Clips
More from Dell Technologies AI Leadership Symposium 2026

Sean O'Connor

Regional Manager ENT West, Large Enterprise & Acquisition

Dell Technologies

play_circle_outline Dell Tech Symposium: Sovereign AI and Startups, Partner Ecosystem, POC to Production, Data Monetization, Security and Governance

play_circle_outline Scaling Startups with Dell: Kubernetes Embedded Control Planes for AI Factory GPU Racks

play_circle_outline Data centers reframed as distributed AI systems across clouds, edges, factories

16:06

12:59

10:43

Info

Sean O'Connor, Dell Technologies

Sean O'Connor

Regional Manager ENT West, Large Enterprise & Acquisition Dell Technologies

John Furrier

>> Hi, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here in San Jose for Dell Symposium in the Bay Area. This is an event where Dell does, really targeted conversations around the environment. Here it's entrepreneurship, it's startups, it's fast, rapidly growing AI-native companies, as well as the big hyperscalers. This is Silicon Valley. Of course, they got New York coming up in October as well. That's a lot of financial services. Again, you get the idea. We're with Sean O'Connor, who is the regional manager in the West, handles all the relationships with all the innovators. Sean, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on.

Sean O'Connor

>> As I said, John, I'm a huge fan. I love the program. I love you. And it's all the truth.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, I love Dell too. I love you. And we're going to be fast friends because I remember I was in a meeting at Dell. There was a big debate about What do you call this large-scale system? I won't say the other name because it's an internal name for Dell, but I'm like, and the AI factory kicked off because Jensen just said it on stream, you got to call it AI factory. I don't care if the other name, if you run with that, it's simple. Look at what's happened in the past 2 years. A lot of big bets. One, cloud growth, new kind of clouds, Neo Clouds or AI infrastructure clouds are going to happen. But the era of large-scale systems is rack-based. Those panned out. And then the open question is, what do you run on these things? Well, guess what? You run the software that runs on the GPUs and now the systems, the memory, everything that's been reworked. That bet paid off. Dell's business performance, product performance off the charts up this year. I think on the stock, 260% since I last checked. Good call on the Dell side. So I'm loving the Dell. And of course, you guys sponsored our AI Factory Series, took a chance. So shout out to Dell and Michael and the team for that. AI Factory is the hottest series. This event here speaks to that. It's AI Factory, but it has a twist with Sovereign AI. Explain the event here, what you're looking to do.

Sean O'Connor

>> Yes, thanks. So we've been doing these for quite some time now, and obviously we've been evangelizing the artificial intelligence space, machine learning for many, many years. If you talk to Jeffrey W. Clarke, he'll tell you we've been doing it for over 10 years. We've really done a good job, I feel like, in focusing on customers' initial steps in getting into this technology. Today's session is really going to focus on the folks that have committed to the proof of concepts and now need to take it to the next step, i.e., launch it in production. What do you do with the data? How do you monetize the data? How do you leverage the data? What else can you do with the data? And we've got a great group of folks here today that are going to really talk about a lot of ideas and share real-world experience on where customers are doing that today.

John Furrier

>> I want you to explain the West Coast, Silicon Valley territory on the West Coast. A lot of innovation is a lot different than your classic commercial East Coast. Of course, they're investing. I think JPMorgan Chase's budget is $10 trillion, $10 billion a year. Now, they're a big firm, but out here a lot of the early decisions are made. I remember Ihab and John Roese and I talking a few years ago, pre-LLM craze. You guys had early signals. There's a lot of partnerships here, a lot of opportunity. You guys do deals. Explain the dynamic of the market here that you serve.

Sean O'Connor

>> Yeah, it's a great question. You and I were talking beforehand. I'm born and raised here in Silicon Valley. I've had a chance to work all over the country and in other parts of the world. Silicon Valley is interesting because everybody here wants to build versus buy, right? So as you start moving towards the Midwest and out towards the East, it becomes a little bit easier of a conversation to position and sell a fully built solution or a packaged solution. Out here, and what we've been dealing with, at least in my professional career, is people like to build this stuff themselves. And they're very, very sharp and they're very, very savvy when it comes to technology. Because 90% of the companies that are building this stuff are already executing out here and they're already having those conversations.

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

Sean O'Connor

>> And

John Furrier

>> so—And they need a partner on the build side too.

Sean O'Connor

>> That's where I was going to go with this, John. And so what Dell Technologies does now is we understand that. We understand that we're dealing with a very sophisticated client base and now we want to understand what's going to work within their environment, within their methodologies. And so we come in and we start talking about consultative services. A lot of customers out here, they reject those consultative services. But if we start to have those conversations and demystify and take away the consultative services conversation, it becomes a conversation. And that's where we start to see things getting done.

John Furrier

>> it's very challenging. And, just trying to think if I wasa head of sales or running a commercial business, okay, how are we doing on the numbers in Silicon Valley? I'm sure you're doing well because they're building and buying. But you also got kind of a corporate development angle here too, because you also get access to the ecosystem here and it's very collaborative, as you know. And so you got a mix of kind of a long game.

Sean O'Connor

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> And partnerships.

Sean O'Connor

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> On the commercial side.

Sean O'Connor

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> How does that— because if you're going to be measured by the straight scoreboard, maybe New York does better on the numbers, more concentration, or maybe not.

Sean O'Connor

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So how— I'm just saying that I'm not sure what the exact numbers are, but the concept, though, is that the ecosystem is a big part of your business.

Sean O'Connor

>> Completely, 1000%. And for us, that notion of ecosystem is starting to change. So today we're here with Intel, we're here with SHI, we're here with Microsoft. But that ecosystem also now is starting to bleed into private equity and venture capital. It does help very much that we've got Dell Tech Capital's headquarters right here off of Sand Hill Boulevard. And that collaboration's been extending and flourishing over the last several years, as you can probably imagine. And so when we start talking about the Hugging Face's, the software developers, things like this, that becomes an advantage to us because A, the geography, and B, it's who the customers are also talking to. And so now we're able to formulate these type of relationships and these alliances so that we're all focused on one thing. How do you exceed the customer's expectations?

John Furrier

>> one of my observations, Sean, I want to get your thoughts on because it does relate to the commercial practice too, is that when you look at the cloud growth, and this is going to come up in my talk here, the cloud era had certain characteristics, the AI era has different ones. There were partnership deals, I won't call them Barney deals, an old term, but they were kind of deals, hey, we're going to go to market together or we'll put you in our solution packages. They're rooted more in the technology. And as you guys get closer to the semiconductor layer, because you are, you deal with NVIDIA, you do your OEM of their chips, you're building the factories. Okay, you're shipping racks that are essentially, you're not standing anything up, they already stood up. So you're just turning them on, right? So we hear this with CoreWeave all the time. we don't really stand up anything anymore. We get a system from Dell and we turn it on. That's 6 hours, not 6 months or 6 days or 6 weeks. This is a new dynamic. And I talked to one customer partner. They were in the cloud native space. They joined the Dell for Startups. They went from talking about a partnership to actually being embedded as the control plane component on the Kubernetes piece. Now, Kubernetes is in the NVIDIA reference architecture.

Sean O'Connor

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> So, okay, so I can't ignore that. Here they were doing some business. They had some decent revenue. They do a deal with Dell. Their entire business changed. They're looking at $100 million run rate. And you would have thought, maybe that would have been the best they could do. And they're just getting started. So the role of the ecosystem has changed. Share that perspective and how that translates into your role.

Sean O'Connor

>> It's very, very critical. And I would be remiss if I didn't say thank you to Michael Dell and Jeff Clarke 42 years ago when this whole thing started. You know, a lot of us in sales and sales leadership, we are experiencing the benefits of those long-term relationships. And it's not just with NVIDIA, it's not just with AMD and Intel, it's with all the other players that are out there that are coming up today. Right. It's TSMC, it's Samsung, it's Marvell, it's Micron. The list goes on and on. And so that obviously helps us in the field when we're talking to customers. It gives us some credence as we're having those conversations. But then you touched on something else that I'd like to hit on as well. When we talk about ecosystem, Elon just posted on X, I think this morning, that power is going to be the next frontier for these factories that they're trying to build. Well, he's talking about that they've been getting so good and so quick on rolling out these racks. They're having some help with some of the partnerships on doing that stuff. And therefore, when we get brought into those types of projects, we're rolling out 350 racks within 2 weeks. We are also dealing with those partnerships as well. And there's a lot of new partnerships that are coming up and they're coming up to speed very, very fast. And so that bodes well for the customer at the end of the day, because ultimately that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to exceed their expectations.

John Furrier

>> The data center is the computer. The computer factory is an intelligence-producing system. We might not even call it data centers anymore. It's just going to be, racks and racks of Systems talking to each other, big centers, edges, all connected. This sounds familiar. Sounds like distributed computing.

Sean O'Connor

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> We've seen that movie before.

Sean O'Connor

>> We have.

John Furrier

>> But not at that scale.

Sean O'Connor

>> That's right. And I think, when Michael says this is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, in terms of what we're dealing with now with AI, we're just scratching the surface. you can see now what companies are already rolling out, with the advent of AGI and some of these other things that are absolutely phenomenal. I'm sure you saw yesterday what Mark Zuckerberg and his team announced on stage. Just some amazing, amazing developments in a short amount of time. And I think that's going to continue, right?

John Furrier

>> The top of the stack is going to be systems that need intelligence. Intelligence tied into the system seems to be clear, and sovereignty is a big topic here. Sean, thanks for coming on.

Sean O'Connor

>> Security. You got to secure the whole deal, right?

John Furrier

>> It's all hyperconverging

Sean O'Connor

>> together.That's

John Furrier

>> right.Great to have you on. Appreciate it. Good to see you.

Sean O'Connor

>> right.Huge fan, by the way. Huge

John Furrier

>> fan.All right. theCUBE is doing its part here. We are in San Jose at Dell Technologies Symposium. This is where the future is being built. There's a sea change even in the semiconductor area, starting to see it translate into the AI factories. These are factories of intelligence. They're industrial systems, not just the data center. They're producing the tokens that are needed for the software. We'll be back after this short break.

Sean O'Connor, Dell Technologies

John Furrier

Sean O'Connor

>> As I said, John, I'm a huge fan. I love the program. I love you. And it's all the truth.

John Furrier

Sean O'Connor

John Furrier

Sean O'Connor

John Furrier

>> Yeah.

Sean O'Connor

>> And

John Furrier

>> so—And they need a partner on the build side too.

Sean O'Connor

John Furrier

Sean O'Connor

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> And partnerships.

Sean O'Connor

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> On the commercial side.

Sean O'Connor

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> How does that— because if you're going to be measured by the straight scoreboard, maybe New York does better on the numbers, more concentration, or maybe not.

Sean O'Connor

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So how— I'm just saying that I'm not sure what the exact numbers are, but the concept, though, is that the ecosystem is a big part of your business.

Sean O'Connor

John Furrier

Sean O'Connor

>> That's right.

John Furrier

Sean O'Connor

John Furrier

Sean O'Connor

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> We've seen that movie before.

Sean O'Connor

>> We have.

John Furrier

>> But not at that scale.

Sean O'Connor

John Furrier

>> The top of the stack is going to be systems that need intelligence. Intelligence tied into the system seems to be clear, and sovereignty is a big topic here. Sean, thanks for coming on.

Sean O'Connor

>> Security. You got to secure the whole deal, right?

John Furrier

>> It's all hyperconverging

Sean O'Connor

>> together.That's

John Furrier

>> right.Great to have you on. Appreciate it. Good to see you.

Sean O'Connor

>> right.Huge fan, by the way. Huge

John Furrier