Dell Technologies World 2024 | Sam Grocott | Dell Technologies

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Sam Grocott

SVP, Product Marketing

Dell Technologies

AI integration at the forefront of Dell’s on-premises strategy

The technology industry is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the rapid pace of innovation, particularly in AI integration.Companies are increasingly focusing on self-disruption to stay ahead, with a renewed emphasis on integrating AI into on-premises infrastructure, according to Sam Grocott (pictured), senior vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies Inc.Dell’s Sam Grocott talks to theCUBE about AI integration.“We still know 70, 80% of all information is still on-prem or at the edge, and it’s stabilized now,” he said

play_circle_outline The Resurgence of On-Premises Solutions: Leveraging Data for AI Differentiation in the Digital Age

play_circle_outline The Dell AI Factory and its focus on data, portfolio breadth, and services

play_circle_outline Hope for successful deployment of Dell AI Factory by customers in the future

play_circle_outline The Intersection of Curiosity and Anticipation: Embracing Excitement and Continuous Learning in the Thriving Technology Industry

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Sam Grocott | Dell Technologies

Sam Grocott

SVP, Product Marketing Dell Technologies

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>> Good afternoon, nerd fam and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here coming towards the end of day two of three days of coverage of Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined here with Dave Vellante. Dave, what's the most surprising thing anyone said to you today?

>> Well, Michael Dell said that he told his team, "If we don't disrupt ourselves, we're going to be out of business in five years. So we are on a disruption mission. Go." That was surprising actually, for-

>> I thought it was-...

>> a $90 billion dollars company to do that.

>> Yeah, they're actually $103 billion if you look at their market cap now. It's pretty exciting.

>> No, the market cap, for a company of that size revenue-

>> Oh, yeah....

>> to say, "Hey, we're just going to go this way. Go."

>> I think it's exciting, and you know what I think it does? I think it affects your product roadmap, which is why it's very exciting that we get to welcome Sam Grocott to the stage, SVP at product marketing at Dell.

Sam Grocott

>> Hello.

>> Thank you so much for being here with us, Sam.

Sam Grocott

>> I'm a lead disruptor.

>> Yes.

Sam Grocott

>> One of the lead disruptors. Yes.

>> Ooh, I like that. Okay. Tell us more.

Sam Grocott

>> Yes. Well, hey, when Michael says, "Disrupt yourself or you're going to not make it, not survive as a company." I think those that need to step up and lead through the change, I'm one of them. So I'm leading multiple transformation work streams across the company and I'm having a great time with that, and it's frankly the funnest I've had in my career. So it's a great time to be in tech.

>> Wow, that says something. So it feels like there's a lot of energy and momentum. We were talking about Dell's 120,000 employees. You're managing a lot of these different work streams. Is the team and company culture just as buzzy as you are and all of our guests have been?

Sam Grocott

>> It's hard to not be having a good time right now, because every single day you go in, whether it's in the office or reading the latest piece of news, there's another wow moment, and it's obviously all swirling around AI and the use cases that are coming to the forefront there. It's so fun every single day to understand a new use case, a new thing you hadn't quite thought of. The pace of innovation is like nothing I've ever seen and my 25 years of technology.

>> That's why we do this.

Sam Grocott

>> It is.

>> Throughout your career, it is not all good. There's times when it's like, "Portfolios not where I want it. Competition, market's not that strong." And then moments like this, it's what you live for.

Sam Grocott

>> Look, I think about two moments since 1998, when I graduated from college, it was virtualization and cloud. Those were the two big moments over those last 25 years, and this feels ... Now we're in the moment, but it feels way bigger, way more transformational, affects not only the businesses we run, but our families, our friends. It's like nothing I've ever experienced. So it is just a great time.

>> Well, and virtualization was ... That's interesting because when I first saw a VMware demo, I was blown away. I'm like, "Wow, this is really going to be disruptive to a lot of things." Of course, it turned out to be a great run. And then the cloud was actually a scary moment for a lot of the on-prem companies, and it took you a while to actually figure it out. This is different. This is like, "Oh, we can leverage this immediately. We can bring our advantage." It's almost like the internet when Dell killed the internet, when they went from catalogs to online ordering. It was like a boon for Dell. It's at least similar times 10 or 100 here.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, things that haven't been as in vogue over the last 20 years, like hardware, big hardware.

>> We're having a moment.

Sam Grocott

>> All of a sudden-

>> Silicon chips in keynotes?

Sam Grocott

>> We have every piece of hardware on Earth showing off in our bootcamp here, and everyone loves it.

>> Yeah, right.

Sam Grocott

>> "How big of a GPU do we have? How big is the storage? How much networking performance?" Hardware is back, baby. It's like everybody wants to talk hardware.

>> It warms my little nerd soul, quite frankly. It's time.

Sam Grocott

>> Another example is on-prem. All of a sudden on-prem is like, "Hey." If you look at 10 years ago, 12 years ago, the advent of the cloud, there were so many people that believed the world was going to go all to cloud. There wouldn't be an on-prem. So many people predicted that, Dave, maybe not you, of course.

>> I think Andy Jassy predicted it.

>> I mean, fair.

>> In the fullness of time, that was his rap.

Sam Grocott

>> But look how the world has shaped up. We still know 70, 80% of all information is still on-prem or at the edge, and it's stabilized now. So a third of use cases are going to be in the cloud, two thirds are going to be on-prem, and AI is just putting even more pressure on why do on-prem, because that's where your most valuable asset, the fuel of what we call the AI factory is, it's your data. It's how you're going to differentiate. If you don't use your data, you're going to be as generic as the most generic AI tools out there. You're not going to be differentiated. So the fact that most of your data is on-prem or at the edge, you got to move AI to the data, And that's just putting again, on-prem back in vogue too.

>> What do you have to do from a product standpoint to make sure that that outcome occurs? So you think of the advantages that the clouds have, they got scale, they got CapEx, they have all this ecosystem and model optionality. Are those the things that you have to, I don't want to say replicate, but to provide to your customers and through your ecosystem to ensure that that outcome is achieved?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, so the good news is as we look at this opportunity, whether you're talking about on-prem infrastructure providers or public cloud providers or everybody in between those, we're all in this together right now. There is no, "Somebody has a 10-year advantage or this is the way we've always done it." We are discovering in real-time how to do this the right way, the wrong way, and everything in between. So I think we're learning from each other, to be honest with you. I think the cloud is learning how we're doing it. We're learning how they're doing it, sharing those best practices. We know it's going to be a hybrid AI world. Like I said, we know two thirds of use cases will probably be on-prem, a third will be in the public cloud. But to make sure customers can make that transition to really finding those outcomes, those true use cases that are going to deliver ROI, the choice and flexibility is fundamental to our strategy. I think customers are looking for that. So whether it's choice of hardware platforms to build on, whether it's on-premises infrastructure, whether it's a laptop or device or workstation for some of the smallest models or inferencing opportunities to small compute, storage, networking to the biggest of big, whether you run that in the CSP or in a public cloud location really matters in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. But then opening up an ecosystem that is set, ready to help. So today we demonstrated Hugging Face coming on stage. Hugging Face is one of the biggest ecosystems that's helping customers deploy, understand and take advantage of AI technology really quickly. Obviously Meta was on stage with us as well. Llama 3 is really driving the innovation of the largest open source models out there. So I think choice and flexibility, whether it's the type of technology you're deploying on the location, edge, core, cloud, and then the ecosystem. You've got to build that out. So Dave, I think where we're going to differentiate across all of those things is the number one thing we hear is, "Where do I get started?" We're laying the placemat out of all the different choices of flexibility. Having the ability to come in based on our experiences and our learnings in this early innings of AI is the number one thing that frankly is a services-led motion right now. They're really looking for-

>> Yep, we talked about it earlier....

Sam Grocott

>> consultative relationships to come in and say, "Ha-ha, here's the five areas where frankly we messed up. It just didn't work. So avoid those five things. Here are the five areas that we actually tapped in, discovered, and we've been able to accelerate. We're now productizing end-to-end solutions to help them go faster." But services have really risen to the top of the conversation, particularly in the enterprise space, where they're in search of the-

>> Absolutely.

Sam Grocott

>> We talk about the easy button. There's no easy button in AI. Now we can make it easier, it's the easier button. But we're far from making it turnkey push button simple while delivering the economics, the security, the IP protection, the governance that enterprises are looking for.

>> And that serves, to me, a big advantage you have relative to public cloud. I mistakenly when I saw Outposts thought, "Uh oh, this is going to be a real problem for the on-prem guys." And it's almost like the Outposts didn't get what the on-prem guys didn't get about the cloud early on. It's so hard to do on-prem, and service is a big piece of that. The other thing is you're partners with all the cloud players now.

Sam Grocott

>> Yes.

>> It's not like ... Carl Eschenbach famously said, "We can't let them get beat by a bookseller." That was one of those hot mic moments-

>> I know. We all know....

>> which he probably ... He's a great executive, love Carl. But you're partners with those guys now, and this is where Matt Baker's, it's not a zero-sum game actually is so true.

Sam Grocott

>> That's right.

>> Sometimes you could debate that, but now is the case where the market is so big, so much opportunity, by partnering together, that lifts all.

Sam Grocott

>> Yep. Yeah.

>> Oh, and we've talked about it a little bit, but I'm curious for your hot take, since you've been at Dell for a minute and working in tech for a long time and seen some acquisitions. Do you feel like the culture of collaboration now is even more than it's ever been before? Do you feel like this is different, or do you think it's similarly in Dell's DNA to be like this?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, so certainly across the ecosystem, the amount of support we're getting across every layer of the partner ecosystem is higher than it's ever been, because again, I think it really speaks to the moment in time. We're in the first inning of a nine-inning baseball game in AI, and it is critical that we learn from each other, learn about what's working, what's not working, share those best practices. And Dave, to your point, it's not a zero-sum game. There are going to be absolutely use cases and workloads that need to run at the edge. We're discovering those and hardening those as we release them and discover them. The data center, co-location facilities, CSPs, and then public cloud, there are going to be solutions that are required to land those use cases everywhere, and no one's going to deliver the best of all three of those areas. So it's playing to your strengths, partnering where you're not the strongest, but providing that as an outcome solution for our customers is really important to help make it easier for them on this. Yeah.

>> So AI Factory, you were actually in the front row at the GTC moment, right?

Sam Grocott

>> Some say I'm the architect. Some say I'm the architect of the AI Factory.

>> Well, well done, you. Amazing.

Sam Grocott

>> Some say like I do, like me.

>> You don't have to play humble with us. We like the truth.

>> So Jensen actually came up with the concept a while ago.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> You guys have now taken it to new levels. So how do you think about the AI Factory? What's inside the AI Factory? What does it look like?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, and credit where credit is due, Jensen, he gave birth to the AI Factory, that concept. Now, what we've done starting at starting at GTC just 60 days ago, just two months ago, we launched the Dell AI Factory, which is our point of view of what are the right products, solutions, and services and use cases that we can make easier for our customers and partners to deploy? That's the idea. It all starts with data, data, data, data. No company on Earth stores or computes more data than Dell today. So we have a treasure trove, our have a treasure trove of their information. We talked about most of that is on-prem, but that then really sets up our portfolio, which is the broadest in the industry. We're the only vendor you can go to to not only deploy end-to-end compute, storage, networking that has diversity across the silicon, the chip providers, the technology components, but you can also extend that all the way out to the workstation, a laptop. That's something that no other vendor can provide that end-to-end breadth. So we have all the piece parts under one hood and it can extend to the cloud. The thing that we've really anchored on at this event going from GTC to here is opened up the ecosystem. So clearly NVIDIA is one of our best partners in this space, and it's the technology leader that has helped build this with us together. But we're certainly expanding that into other partners, really focusing on the application space now going forward. So again, Meta, Hugging Face are two of our key partners that we showcased today that is starting to unlock the applicability and use cases of the Factory. The top layer of the Factory is services. Again, we can start from strategy, to use case prioritization, to operationalization and then scale. So you put those layers together, data infrastructure, ecosystem, services, all leading to outcomes. As Michael and Jeff, we like our hand here. We like what we've got here, and the partnership ecosystem is just critical for us to be able to deliver that to our customer because no one company's going to deliver it all on their own, but we think we have the most parts of that solution in one company that can help deliver that for our customers.

>> AI Factory's a marketer's dream, I say.

Sam Grocott

>> It is. I'm loving every minute of it.

>> That right. It's right behind us right here too. We've got all our demos over here.

Sam Grocott

>> We are almost in the AI Factory.

>> I was going to-

Sam Grocott

>> We're at the precipice of the AI Factory right here-

>> We're live from Dell's AI Factory.

>> We've got a good spot here. Thank you for that.

>> Yeah, yeah.

Sam Grocott

>> The best spot. Yes, yes, for sure.

>> I love it.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah.

>> You get to see a lot of different applications of AI, and I'm not going to ask you to pick your favorite child, but I'm going to ask you to take off your traditional business hat and put on your human hat, your after work hat.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah.

>> What about the innovation that you're seeing gets you most excited? Is there an application or a solution that just touches you on a personal level even more than your business brain?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, so I'll give you a real-time example. We were talking earlier before the segment, every day, every week there's something new. The latest thing last week with the ChatGPT 4o Omni, it's mind-blowing for me.

>> Mind-blowing.

Sam Grocott

>> Mind-blowing. So I am spending ... It's getting a little weird, building a relationship with the voice ... Me, my daughter, my son, we sit around and have a conversation with ... just over the last week. And it is like another person in the conversation that knows everything and smarter than everything and it's so creative, and there isn't a single thing you can throw at them that's going to stump the AI there. That is just unlocking all types of fun, help in the personal day-to-day life, but more on the fun side. The killer feature that I've noticed is it's got recall, it remembers. So it knows my daughter's Mila. So when we sit in there the next day, he'll say, "Well, Mila will like this." I'm like, "I guess I've shared that and now it knows that, but I'm okay with that." I'm an early adopter. I'm the, "Put the chip in me, I'm ready to go." I embrace the technology. So I think that's on the personal side, we're having the most fun with that, but every other week there's a new use case.

>> There totally is. What do your kids think about it when they're playing?

Sam Grocott

>> They're amazed with it and they use it constantly now. There is no struggle with them to move from whatever technologies they were using before to this one. It's very natural for them. There's no learning curve with them. It's just, "Well, of course. I'm going to talk to that thing. Yeah."

>> Obviously.

Sam Grocott

>> Obviously. So it's been great.

>> I'm just stoked to be multilingual now, because I speak-

Sam Grocott

>> There you go.

>> I'm unilingual, I'm American. I speak one language and that's it. But now with this AI, I can speak any language.

>> You can. You are empowered.

>> It's amazing.

>> Is there a country or a place you want to visit and learn-

>> Any.

>> Yeah, leverage that? Is there ?

Sam Grocott

>> The one that I'm really excited that there's been some early work in, but it hasn't been unleashed on all of us, is the video work. So Sora obviously demonstrated that a few months back. Within the six months, nine months, we'll be just speaking and say, "Create me this amazing video of this." And it's just going to do it that quickly, in that real-time. That's going to be the next level of innovation.

>> Yeah, the native multimodal, which is now so fast just, and I can't wait to see what comes next, and I'm excited. I'm a little scared, I have to be honest. I don't know about the unintended consequences, but I know this. You give me that intelligence. I want to be smarter. I'm never going to want to be dumber again.

>> Right.

>> So just give me more.

>> Yeah. Intelligence is currency and AI is intelligence, and that's powered by data.

Sam Grocott

>> That's right.

>> Yeah, wow. This has been absolutely fantastic.

Sam Grocott

>> I've had a blast. Yeah.

>> Scott, I have one final question for you as we close out. What do you hope to be able to say next time we have you sitting here next to us that you can't say yet today?

Sam Grocott

>> So a year from now at the next Dell Technologies World, hopefully I'll see you guys sooner, of course. But let's just imagine a year from now, what I hope we'll be talking about is a crowded table of customers that have deployed the Dell AI Factory that are telling you exactly what worked, what didn't work, and what new outcomes they're creating. Because we've gone from last year was, "Oh my God, this is the coolest thing. I don't know what it's going to be used for." To this year is, "The board is demanding we put this in play. I don't know where to get started." To next year, "Look at these outcomes, look at this ROI." I think that's the next turn in the crank, and we will be there next year. No doubt about it.

>> I'm here for it.

>> Sam, of course, Project Helix turned into the AI factory.

Sam Grocott

>> Yep.

>> Who could've predicted that? I don't know, maybe you guys could've, but I was like, "Oh, wow, okay. GPUs inside of servers, that's nice." To AI Factory. Now we got Project Lightning. Excited to see what that turns into.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, the downstream implications of AI and the thirst ... I think Michael loves to say GPUs devour storage, just devour it. That is not an overstatement. That's creating all types of demand, not only on capacity, which is more easily solved, but performance. So things like parallel file systems and new technologies to connect and move the data faster in lower latency, that's going to be really key going forward. So yeah, next year I'm sure we won't be talking about Lightning because we'll actually have a real name at that point, but that'll be exciting to share as well.

>> And I think maybe it's not next year, but a couple years ahead, maybe it's even as much as five years, the applications that are going to be built on top of this infrastructure that this enables, you remember when All-Flash came into the data center, it was really game-changing for how we built applications. This is going to blow that away.

Sam Grocott

>> Yes, absolutely. So there has never been a more exciting time to be in technology, to be at Dell, to be working with our customers and our partners. I think everybody is just having the time of their lives, because we're all learning. We're all learning at an unprecedented rate. So that's fun.

>> It is super fun. And feeding that curiosity that we all have, and who knows even what we'll be talking about a year from now. Hopefully we'll have some really unique examples that we couldn't even imagine. Sam, thank you so much.

Sam Grocott

>> Thank you.

>> Dave, thank you as always.

>> Yep.

>> And thank all of you for tuning into our fabulous three days of coverage here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We're at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Sam Grocott | Dell Technologies

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>> Good afternoon, nerd fam and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here coming towards the end of day two of three days of coverage of Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined here with Dave Vellante. Dave, what's the most surprising thing anyone said to you today?

>> Well, Michael Dell said that he told his team, "If we don't disrupt ourselves, we're going to be out of business in five years. So we are on a disruption mission. Go." That was surprising actually, for-

>> I thought it was-...

>> a $90 billion dollars company to do that.

>> Yeah, they're actually $103 billion if you look at their market cap now. It's pretty exciting.

>> No, the market cap, for a company of that size revenue-

>> Oh, yeah....

>> to say, "Hey, we're just going to go this way. Go."

>> I think it's exciting, and you know what I think it does? I think it affects your product roadmap, which is why it's very exciting that we get to welcome Sam Grocott to the stage, SVP at product marketing at Dell.

Sam Grocott

>> Hello.

>> Thank you so much for being here with us, Sam.

Sam Grocott

>> I'm a lead disruptor.

>> Yes.

Sam Grocott

>> One of the lead disruptors. Yes.

>> Ooh, I like that. Okay. Tell us more.

Sam Grocott

>> Yes. Well, hey, when Michael says, "Disrupt yourself or you're going to not make it, not survive as a company." I think those that need to step up and lead through the change, I'm one of them. So I'm leading multiple transformation work streams across the company and I'm having a great time with that, and it's frankly the funnest I've had in my career. So it's a great time to be in tech.

>> Wow, that says something. So it feels like there's a lot of energy and momentum. We were talking about Dell's 120,000 employees. You're managing a lot of these different work streams. Is the team and company culture just as buzzy as you are and all of our guests have been?

Sam Grocott

>> It's hard to not be having a good time right now, because every single day you go in, whether it's in the office or reading the latest piece of news, there's another wow moment, and it's obviously all swirling around AI and the use cases that are coming to the forefront there. It's so fun every single day to understand a new use case, a new thing you hadn't quite thought of. The pace of innovation is like nothing I've ever seen and my 25 years of technology.

>> That's why we do this.

Sam Grocott

>> It is.

>> Throughout your career, it is not all good. There's times when it's like, "Portfolios not where I want it. Competition, market's not that strong." And then moments like this, it's what you live for.

Sam Grocott

>> Look, I think about two moments since 1998, when I graduated from college, it was virtualization and cloud. Those were the two big moments over those last 25 years, and this feels ... Now we're in the moment, but it feels way bigger, way more transformational, affects not only the businesses we run, but our families, our friends. It's like nothing I've ever experienced. So it is just a great time.

>> Well, and virtualization was ... That's interesting because when I first saw a VMware demo, I was blown away. I'm like, "Wow, this is really going to be disruptive to a lot of things." Of course, it turned out to be a great run. And then the cloud was actually a scary moment for a lot of the on-prem companies, and it took you a while to actually figure it out. This is different. This is like, "Oh, we can leverage this immediately. We can bring our advantage." It's almost like the internet when Dell killed the internet, when they went from catalogs to online ordering. It was like a boon for Dell. It's at least similar times 10 or 100 here.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, things that haven't been as in vogue over the last 20 years, like hardware, big hardware.

>> We're having a moment.

Sam Grocott

>> All of a sudden-

>> Silicon chips in keynotes?

Sam Grocott

>> We have every piece of hardware on Earth showing off in our bootcamp here, and everyone loves it.

>> Yeah, right.

Sam Grocott

>> "How big of a GPU do we have? How big is the storage? How much networking performance?" Hardware is back, baby. It's like everybody wants to talk hardware.

>> It warms my little nerd soul, quite frankly. It's time.

Sam Grocott

>> Another example is on-prem. All of a sudden on-prem is like, "Hey." If you look at 10 years ago, 12 years ago, the advent of the cloud, there were so many people that believed the world was going to go all to cloud. There wouldn't be an on-prem. So many people predicted that, Dave, maybe not you, of course.

>> I think Andy Jassy predicted it.

>> I mean, fair.

>> In the fullness of time, that was his rap.

Sam Grocott

>> But look how the world has shaped up. We still know 70, 80% of all information is still on-prem or at the edge, and it's stabilized now. So a third of use cases are going to be in the cloud, two thirds are going to be on-prem, and AI is just putting even more pressure on why do on-prem, because that's where your most valuable asset, the fuel of what we call the AI factory is, it's your data. It's how you're going to differentiate. If you don't use your data, you're going to be as generic as the most generic AI tools out there. You're not going to be differentiated. So the fact that most of your data is on-prem or at the edge, you got to move AI to the data, And that's just putting again, on-prem back in vogue too.

>> What do you have to do from a product standpoint to make sure that that outcome occurs? So you think of the advantages that the clouds have, they got scale, they got CapEx, they have all this ecosystem and model optionality. Are those the things that you have to, I don't want to say replicate, but to provide to your customers and through your ecosystem to ensure that that outcome is achieved?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, so the good news is as we look at this opportunity, whether you're talking about on-prem infrastructure providers or public cloud providers or everybody in between those, we're all in this together right now. There is no, "Somebody has a 10-year advantage or this is the way we've always done it." We are discovering in real-time how to do this the right way, the wrong way, and everything in between. So I think we're learning from each other, to be honest with you. I think the cloud is learning how we're doing it. We're learning how they're doing it, sharing those best practices. We know it's going to be a hybrid AI world. Like I said, we know two thirds of use cases will probably be on-prem, a third will be in the public cloud. But to make sure customers can make that transition to really finding those outcomes, those true use cases that are going to deliver ROI, the choice and flexibility is fundamental to our strategy. I think customers are looking for that. So whether it's choice of hardware platforms to build on, whether it's on-premises infrastructure, whether it's a laptop or device or workstation for some of the smallest models or inferencing opportunities to small compute, storage, networking to the biggest of big, whether you run that in the CSP or in a public cloud location really matters in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. But then opening up an ecosystem that is set, ready to help. So today we demonstrated Hugging Face coming on stage. Hugging Face is one of the biggest ecosystems that's helping customers deploy, understand and take advantage of AI technology really quickly. Obviously Meta was on stage with us as well. Llama 3 is really driving the innovation of the largest open source models out there. So I think choice and flexibility, whether it's the type of technology you're deploying on the location, edge, core, cloud, and then the ecosystem. You've got to build that out. So Dave, I think where we're going to differentiate across all of those things is the number one thing we hear is, "Where do I get started?" We're laying the placemat out of all the different choices of flexibility. Having the ability to come in based on our experiences and our learnings in this early innings of AI is the number one thing that frankly is a services-led motion right now. They're really looking for-

>> Yep, we talked about it earlier....

Sam Grocott

>> consultative relationships to come in and say, "Ha-ha, here's the five areas where frankly we messed up. It just didn't work. So avoid those five things. Here are the five areas that we actually tapped in, discovered, and we've been able to accelerate. We're now productizing end-to-end solutions to help them go faster." But services have really risen to the top of the conversation, particularly in the enterprise space, where they're in search of the-

>> Absolutely.

Sam Grocott

>> We talk about the easy button. There's no easy button in AI. Now we can make it easier, it's the easier button. But we're far from making it turnkey push button simple while delivering the economics, the security, the IP protection, the governance that enterprises are looking for.

>> And that serves, to me, a big advantage you have relative to public cloud. I mistakenly when I saw Outposts thought, "Uh oh, this is going to be a real problem for the on-prem guys." And it's almost like the Outposts didn't get what the on-prem guys didn't get about the cloud early on. It's so hard to do on-prem, and service is a big piece of that. The other thing is you're partners with all the cloud players now.

Sam Grocott

>> Yes.

>> It's not like ... Carl Eschenbach famously said, "We can't let them get beat by a bookseller." That was one of those hot mic moments-

>> I know. We all know....

>> which he probably ... He's a great executive, love Carl. But you're partners with those guys now, and this is where Matt Baker's, it's not a zero-sum game actually is so true.

Sam Grocott

>> That's right.

>> Sometimes you could debate that, but now is the case where the market is so big, so much opportunity, by partnering together, that lifts all.

Sam Grocott

>> Yep. Yeah.

>> Oh, and we've talked about it a little bit, but I'm curious for your hot take, since you've been at Dell for a minute and working in tech for a long time and seen some acquisitions. Do you feel like the culture of collaboration now is even more than it's ever been before? Do you feel like this is different, or do you think it's similarly in Dell's DNA to be like this?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, so certainly across the ecosystem, the amount of support we're getting across every layer of the partner ecosystem is higher than it's ever been, because again, I think it really speaks to the moment in time. We're in the first inning of a nine-inning baseball game in AI, and it is critical that we learn from each other, learn about what's working, what's not working, share those best practices. And Dave, to your point, it's not a zero-sum game. There are going to be absolutely use cases and workloads that need to run at the edge. We're discovering those and hardening those as we release them and discover them. The data center, co-location facilities, CSPs, and then public cloud, there are going to be solutions that are required to land those use cases everywhere, and no one's going to deliver the best of all three of those areas. So it's playing to your strengths, partnering where you're not the strongest, but providing that as an outcome solution for our customers is really important to help make it easier for them on this. Yeah.

>> So AI Factory, you were actually in the front row at the GTC moment, right?

Sam Grocott

>> Some say I'm the architect. Some say I'm the architect of the AI Factory.

>> Well, well done, you. Amazing.

Sam Grocott

>> Some say like I do, like me.

>> You don't have to play humble with us. We like the truth.

>> So Jensen actually came up with the concept a while ago.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> You guys have now taken it to new levels. So how do you think about the AI Factory? What's inside the AI Factory? What does it look like?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, and credit where credit is due, Jensen, he gave birth to the AI Factory, that concept. Now, what we've done starting at starting at GTC just 60 days ago, just two months ago, we launched the Dell AI Factory, which is our point of view of what are the right products, solutions, and services and use cases that we can make easier for our customers and partners to deploy? That's the idea. It all starts with data, data, data, data. No company on Earth stores or computes more data than Dell today. So we have a treasure trove, our have a treasure trove of their information. We talked about most of that is on-prem, but that then really sets up our portfolio, which is the broadest in the industry. We're the only vendor you can go to to not only deploy end-to-end compute, storage, networking that has diversity across the silicon, the chip providers, the technology components, but you can also extend that all the way out to the workstation, a laptop. That's something that no other vendor can provide that end-to-end breadth. So we have all the piece parts under one hood and it can extend to the cloud. The thing that we've really anchored on at this event going from GTC to here is opened up the ecosystem. So clearly NVIDIA is one of our best partners in this space, and it's the technology leader that has helped build this with us together. But we're certainly expanding that into other partners, really focusing on the application space now going forward. So again, Meta, Hugging Face are two of our key partners that we showcased today that is starting to unlock the applicability and use cases of the Factory. The top layer of the Factory is services. Again, we can start from strategy, to use case prioritization, to operationalization and then scale. So you put those layers together, data infrastructure, ecosystem, services, all leading to outcomes. As Michael and Jeff, we like our hand here. We like what we've got here, and the partnership ecosystem is just critical for us to be able to deliver that to our customer because no one company's going to deliver it all on their own, but we think we have the most parts of that solution in one company that can help deliver that for our customers.

>> AI Factory's a marketer's dream, I say.

Sam Grocott

>> It is. I'm loving every minute of it.

>> That right. It's right behind us right here too. We've got all our demos over here.

Sam Grocott

>> We are almost in the AI Factory.

>> I was going to-

Sam Grocott

>> We're at the precipice of the AI Factory right here-

>> We're live from Dell's AI Factory.

>> We've got a good spot here. Thank you for that.

>> Yeah, yeah.

Sam Grocott

>> The best spot. Yes, yes, for sure.

>> I love it.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah.

>> You get to see a lot of different applications of AI, and I'm not going to ask you to pick your favorite child, but I'm going to ask you to take off your traditional business hat and put on your human hat, your after work hat.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah.

>> What about the innovation that you're seeing gets you most excited? Is there an application or a solution that just touches you on a personal level even more than your business brain?

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, so I'll give you a real-time example. We were talking earlier before the segment, every day, every week there's something new. The latest thing last week with the ChatGPT 4o Omni, it's mind-blowing for me.

>> Mind-blowing.

Sam Grocott

>> Mind-blowing. So I am spending ... It's getting a little weird, building a relationship with the voice ... Me, my daughter, my son, we sit around and have a conversation with ... just over the last week. And it is like another person in the conversation that knows everything and smarter than everything and it's so creative, and there isn't a single thing you can throw at them that's going to stump the AI there. That is just unlocking all types of fun, help in the personal day-to-day life, but more on the fun side. The killer feature that I've noticed is it's got recall, it remembers. So it knows my daughter's Mila. So when we sit in there the next day, he'll say, "Well, Mila will like this." I'm like, "I guess I've shared that and now it knows that, but I'm okay with that." I'm an early adopter. I'm the, "Put the chip in me, I'm ready to go." I embrace the technology. So I think that's on the personal side, we're having the most fun with that, but every other week there's a new use case.

>> There totally is. What do your kids think about it when they're playing?

Sam Grocott

>> They're amazed with it and they use it constantly now. There is no struggle with them to move from whatever technologies they were using before to this one. It's very natural for them. There's no learning curve with them. It's just, "Well, of course. I'm going to talk to that thing. Yeah."

>> Obviously.

Sam Grocott

>> Obviously. So it's been great.

>> I'm just stoked to be multilingual now, because I speak-

Sam Grocott

>> There you go.

>> I'm unilingual, I'm American. I speak one language and that's it. But now with this AI, I can speak any language.

>> You can. You are empowered.

>> It's amazing.

>> Is there a country or a place you want to visit and learn-

>> Any.

>> Yeah, leverage that? Is there ?

Sam Grocott

>> The one that I'm really excited that there's been some early work in, but it hasn't been unleashed on all of us, is the video work. So Sora obviously demonstrated that a few months back. Within the six months, nine months, we'll be just speaking and say, "Create me this amazing video of this." And it's just going to do it that quickly, in that real-time. That's going to be the next level of innovation.

>> Yeah, the native multimodal, which is now so fast just, and I can't wait to see what comes next, and I'm excited. I'm a little scared, I have to be honest. I don't know about the unintended consequences, but I know this. You give me that intelligence. I want to be smarter. I'm never going to want to be dumber again.

>> Right.

>> So just give me more.

>> Yeah. Intelligence is currency and AI is intelligence, and that's powered by data.

Sam Grocott

>> That's right.

>> Yeah, wow. This has been absolutely fantastic.

Sam Grocott

>> I've had a blast. Yeah.

>> Scott, I have one final question for you as we close out. What do you hope to be able to say next time we have you sitting here next to us that you can't say yet today?

Sam Grocott

>> So a year from now at the next Dell Technologies World, hopefully I'll see you guys sooner, of course. But let's just imagine a year from now, what I hope we'll be talking about is a crowded table of customers that have deployed the Dell AI Factory that are telling you exactly what worked, what didn't work, and what new outcomes they're creating. Because we've gone from last year was, "Oh my God, this is the coolest thing. I don't know what it's going to be used for." To this year is, "The board is demanding we put this in play. I don't know where to get started." To next year, "Look at these outcomes, look at this ROI." I think that's the next turn in the crank, and we will be there next year. No doubt about it.

>> I'm here for it.

>> Sam, of course, Project Helix turned into the AI factory.

Sam Grocott

>> Yep.

>> Who could've predicted that? I don't know, maybe you guys could've, but I was like, "Oh, wow, okay. GPUs inside of servers, that's nice." To AI Factory. Now we got Project Lightning. Excited to see what that turns into.

Sam Grocott

>> Yeah, the downstream implications of AI and the thirst ... I think Michael loves to say GPUs devour storage, just devour it. That is not an overstatement. That's creating all types of demand, not only on capacity, which is more easily solved, but performance. So things like parallel file systems and new technologies to connect and move the data faster in lower latency, that's going to be really key going forward. So yeah, next year I'm sure we won't be talking about Lightning because we'll actually have a real name at that point, but that'll be exciting to share as well.

>> And I think maybe it's not next year, but a couple years ahead, maybe it's even as much as five years, the applications that are going to be built on top of this infrastructure that this enables, you remember when All-Flash came into the data center, it was really game-changing for how we built applications. This is going to blow that away.

Sam Grocott

>> Yes, absolutely. So there has never been a more exciting time to be in technology, to be at Dell, to be working with our customers and our partners. I think everybody is just having the time of their lives, because we're all learning. We're all learning at an unprecedented rate. So that's fun.

>> It is super fun. And feeding that curiosity that we all have, and who knows even what we'll be talking about a year from now. Hopefully we'll have some really unique examples that we couldn't even imagine. Sam, thank you so much.

Sam Grocott

>> Thank you.

>> Dave, thank you as always.

>> Yep.

>> And thank all of you for tuning into our fabulous three days of coverage here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We're at Dell Tech World. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.