Dell Technologies World 2024 | Day 3 AnalystANGLE

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Bob Laliberte

Principal Analyst

theCUBE Research

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World

Dell Technologies Inc. devoted much of its annual conference in Las Vegas this month to defining its artificial intelligence strategy. Through announcements and various executive presentations, the company highlighted a set of networking and infrastructure solutions designed to capitalize on the technology tsunami that has become AI.What that picture looks like now and how it could propel Dell forward was a central focus for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as Dell executives, partners and industry analysts offered their insights into how AI is shaping the enterprise computing future during Dell Technologies World 2024

Is Dell Technologies getting AI right? Live analysis from theCUBE

This week’s discussions at Dell Technologies World highlighted several key trends and innovations shaping the tech industry. From advancements in AI and sustainability to the importance of networking and infrastructure, the event underscored the rapid evolution and integration of new technologies in enterprise solutions.Dell’s strategy, particularly with its AI Factory and multicloud solutions, positions it to lead in this transformative era.TheCUBE analysts discuss top news from Dell Technologies World, including advancements in AI integration, sustainability and robust networking

play_circle_outline Focus on AI, AI factory, and capturing the AI upgrade cycle

play_circle_outline The Crucial Role of Hardware in the AI Transformation: Exploring Dell's Partnerships and Ecosystem

play_circle_outline Dell Tech World: Unveiling Successes, AI Revolution, and Inspiring Feedback

play_circle_outline Consumer impact of AI in edge devices and hardware innovation

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Day 3 AnalystANGLE

Bob Laliberte

Principal Analyst theCUBE Research

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>> Good morning Dell fans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here on day three of Dell Tech World. It has been an absolutely stunning power-packed week. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE. Very delighted to be joined this morning with John Furrier and Bob Laliberte. Bob, we've had a really awesome week.

Bob Laliberte

>> It's been a great week. Absolutely. A lot of great information coming out of Dell Tech World this year.

>> I know. I'm so glad we got to work together this week. And John, wow, you've had a super busy week too. I'm curious, since we haven't had a chance to dig into your perspective enough this week, what's your opinion on all the announcements and everything that's been going on with Dell?

>> Well, first of all, yesterday's lineup was action-packed. You and Dave did a crushing job on the interviews. Michael Dell, all the top executives and then partners are here too. So I think my perspective on Dell is that they got it right with the AI factory, and that's co-opted a little bit from Jensen Wong NVIDIA, which he's cool with because he was here on stage, and that's a good position to set the tone for the next generation, and Dell wants to capture that upgrade cycle is coming. With AI, you've got clustered systems at the servers, so servers are changing, the PCs are changing, the devices are changing. So everything in the network will be connected to some sort of AI system and the hardware matters. And so I think Dell recognizes that. And we're in a market right now. You're seeing leadership changes at AWS to product-led CEOs. We are in a product-led market right now because AI doesn't solve pain points. It's net new benefits. So you're starting to see people thinking, wow, we got to get our product act together. So Dell is shoring up their product as is other companies. So it will be a race to the winner's circle for whose got the better product. And the AI factory just resonates and everything about what they're doing around that is a solid strategy. So now they've just got to execute. And everything in between. We had Broadcom, I'm talking about chip packaging, making things smaller, faster, cheaper, energy efficient, sustainable data centers. Everything is coming back down to more horsepower and that's going to be what powers the AI generation.

>> Well, it certainly is, and I think it's actually the most hardware we've had on the desk, at least since I've been at theCUBE. We had multiple chips. We were even talking about turning them into my earrings last night at the end of the day. It's pretty fun. The hardware nerd in me has been very delighted, and it's nice to see not just the advancements in the hardware and in the nerdy stuff that I personally enjoy so much, but also the emphasis on sustainability across the board. And not just making sure that we're lowering power consumption on some of these intense compute activities because of saving money, but also saving our planet. And you hear a lot of that threaded through what Dell's saying. Bob, you've had a lot of really interesting analyst meetings. Give us the scoop. What's some of the inside baseball you've learned?

Bob Laliberte

>> Well, yeah, obviously there's been a lot, as John had talked about with the AI factory and helping organizations transform data to information across multiple different tiers, if you will. So a lot of people when they think about the AI factory are thinking about large data centers. But we also have seen announcements here about AI PCs. So it's really about extending that capability across an entire enterprise, from core data that they're getting out all the way down to making employees more productive and so forth. One of the things that I'm most impressed with, and I'm so happy to see because I cover networking, has been the emphasis on the role of networking in these environments and in particular the backend environments as well. So it's been great to see on main stage Dell Keynotes, them actually talking about networking in more than a passing phrase. And so it's a great acknowledgement and it also highlights the importance of that connectivity in these backend systems and the need for them to be really high-performance, low latency, non-blocking, all that kind of stuff, which is really going to be incredibly important to drive these models and certainly in the training stage, but then later for inference.

>> It's interesting, the stuff like networking, storage, servers, all the chips, Savannah, we've been supercomputing again coming up that matters now because what's going on is that the market is at the top of the stack is about chatbots converting to agents. You're seeing on those apps kind of slowly figuring out the data strategy. So it's like public data with the large LLMs and foundation models. That's all cool, but most of the enterprise don't have AI. So that market's waiting for the infrastructure to get its act together. So you're seeing all the action right now i networking servers and data. And then as Dell has this Apex multi-cloud solution. So you got two things going together, stitched together multi-cloud environments, so multiple environments as well as the hardware. And again, Dell, what they're doing right is that they go into their old playbook. Back in the old days you partnered with Microsoft Wintel, Windows and Intel was their partners. Now that world is Cloud, NVIDIA, Broadcom, everybody, AMD. So you got all those partnerships, so they have to ride on something. So that software component in the ecosystem is going to be key, but all the action right now is happening here at the lower levels because the apps are waiting. And as Michael Dell said on stage, GPUs devour storage. What he's talking about is storage now is more important. So it's going to be about a year, I think. Bob, I think I'd love to get your take on the networking impact, but about a year, where are we on that journey because we're waiting for the infrastructure to get better?

Bob Laliberte

>> Well, it's a great question, and I think the interesting part of what you were talking about, it is definitely product-led and you're seeing organizations putting together solutions, validated designs. One of the things that we can overlook in this transition is the fact that a lot of the enterprises today don't have the skill sets to pull this together. So Dell by through their own internal transformation towards AI is building up and having the expertise to be able to share that with their customers to be able to accelerate that journey. So I think in a lot of this, you had mentioned sustainability and power, things as simple as being able to go in and do an assessment to understand how much available power you have for your AI environments. Being able to look at some of the new chip technology that's coming out that Dell's making available to save power from one side so they can leverage it for AI. But obviously this is going to be a transformation. It's going to take some time, but there's opportunities I think, to accelerate that. And that's what we're seeing with that concept of the AI factory.

>> I think so, and I think a lot of customers, they're looking for an end-to-end solution. They're looking for an ecosystem, not just a single piece of this. And Dell's done a great job not only of making their own hardware, but of bringing in the right players. We're talking about, I mean, Morgan Stanley literally just named them last week, the partner to play with if you're getting into AI, which is a pretty bold statement. I mean, the market's responded very well to that. So I think it's been really cool to have the conversations that we've had across the C-suite too, not just with Michael Dell, but we also talked to their CFO. And the enthusiasm and confidence from everyone at Dell was remarkable. And I mean, obviously they're talking to us, they want to make a story sound good, but it wasn't just that, I mean, I was really struck, but there's a sense with some people of feeling overwhelmed or a little nervous about the AI revolution, you really feel across the organization that everyone's all in so stoked and that they've been waiting for this moment for quite a while

>> I can't wait to bust Dave's chops because I heard him on the camera saying, I'm kind of scared of AI. I'm like, what? Come on, Dave, lean into it. Don't be afraid. It's interesting because I think there is definitely some announcements that are kind of check boxes, all the co-pilot stuff, like, okay, everyone's got the co-pilot. But I think to your point, Dell's confident because they've got the playbook down. They've done this before. I mean, everything about what they're doing right now is in their wheelhouse. Servers are being reconfigured. You got the notes here from the guest today, more all-flash file storage, Snapdragon plus chips, data protection, powered by Broadcom, Tomahawk, F5 chip set. This is nerd central with chips and building hardware. I mean, this is what Dell does. So I think people are excited because they get to engineer new systems, and I think that takes it from the old Dell to the new Dell. So we're seeing companies transform from the old self to the new self. And that's again, changes at the top at a lot of companies because you don't want to be on the wrong side of history. We've been saying this on theCUBE all the time, Savannah, the wave's coming and you're starting to see the line, old way and new way, and that's what's happening. That's not going to be around anymore. Data backup and recovery, that's cyber resilience now. Okay. Whole nother way to do it. So Dell's getting it right, I got to say.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, they're absolutely doing a lot to encourage organizations to get started now and providing the solutions and the vehicles for them to do that. And I think a lot of their... For the conversations that's come out, you've been talking about it, is also about what are the use cases going to be. So there's been a lot of cool use cases shared anything from things we've heard in the medical field to even if it's language translation for video meetings and calls, if you're dealing with-

>> Or the city of Amarillo, the chatbot that they've created for their residents and their citizens to be able to pay their water bill or get information or learn about stuff going on in their neighborhood and interact with the local government.

Bob Laliberte

>> In virtually any language.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean they mentioned that in one middle school alone, they speak 67 different languages, which is intense. And I can imagine the level of inclusion that we're able to gain in Dell and the city of Amarillo, which was a great guest on the show, are able to create and foster through doing that.

>> Yeah. Savannah, I want to ask you a question. I was getting the stories out on Silicon Angle yesterday. I was watching some of the broadcast, A little bit jealous that you and Dave got the great interviews with Sam Brokaw, Jeff Boudreaux, Travis and Ehab. What was your takeaway? Because it looked like the vibe was really strong on that set. What was the tone? What was Sam talking about? What was the key points and how did Ehab do, by the way? I want to know what his story was.

>> I mean, Ehab's been on the show many times. You know what a great guest he is.

>> Of course.

>> He was absolutely fantastic. Sam was an outstanding guest as well. One of the things that was common through each one of those conversations was the full product portfolio having a moment. What's interesting is Dell made announcements across the board, like we said, I mean everything from five new AI PCs to chips to partnerships, to the whole shebang. And so it was cool. I mean, I have to say, I don't know that we've interviewed folks or companies at their event like this at such a moment when they've had literally just reported their best quarter in the history of the business, which is wild. And you could just feel it. Everyone's so proud. One of the things that one of them said yesterday was that it was like having their kids on stage, watching everyone talk about it in those keynotes. So I think it's a real moment of realization for Dell where they can see that their hard work and a very big potentially kind of risky bet was made. And throughout, actually another theme in that, was how Dell looked at sat down and they all had a conversation, Michael and himself leading it and said, what's the company that's going to disrupt us? Let's go build that company. And I think that they've done a bit of that and really made themselves relevant again in a conversation of cool tech that they weren't necessarily a part of.

>> Savannah, that's a great point. It's very entrepreneurial kind of mindset. People are excited and confident, as you said, but also from a job perspective, it's like they can cut their teeth into something new that's definitely going to be obvious. So it's like AI as obvious... The generative AI specifically is obvious as the internet was, okay, it's going to be big. We don't know what's going to happen yet. So it's evolving in front of our eyes. So I think if you're an employee somewhere, you're like, "Hey, boss, can I cut my teeth into this?"

>> So on that note, something I thought was really interesting. So Dell has 125,000 employees, 60,000 of those employees are in the services business, which I did not know. I did not know 50% of their staff is helping their customers implement, which is fascinating. But beyond that, Dell is rolling out right now an internal program, an educational program looking at I believe 36 different use cases, five different types of AI applications, multiple models. And that's across the organization, so that everyone collectively, no matter your role in the org, can up-skill and be on the exact same page. And I thought that was actually really cool. I mean, I almost wanted to ask them secretly to send me that curriculum, that packet. I want to get on the Dell AI page. I mean, I guess perhaps we have sitting here on this week. But it's nice to see. They always eat their own dog food as we say, but they're also really up-skilling and educating their team as well as the industry as we jump into the deep.

>> So Sam was asked, what's Project Lightning coming about? Because he's proud of his new product that he launched, but then you guys peppered him on Project Lightning, which I didn't get what that was. Do you know anything about Project Lightning file storage?

Bob Laliberte

>> No, I don't.

>> I think it's a project that doesn't have a name yet.

Bob Laliberte

>> That's the parallel file system coming out sometime in the future.

>> I think so. I think it's one of those things there, but you can see they got stuff in the pipeline.

>> Oh yeah, you can tell there's definitely a lot in the pipeline. This was just the beginning, I think both for Dell as well as for some of these partnerships that we're hearing from. I think there's a lot of hardware to come and a lot of thinking around modular designs. I mean, the other thing that they mentioned too is their innovation cycle has been reduced. They used to be putting out computers as an example every two to three years. Now they're doing it in nine months.

>> Savannah, I want to ask you to put your analyst hat on for a second because you covered devices aggressively, you know the consumer market really well. At the end of the day, you hear about Snapdragon, that's essentially Qualcomm, right?

>> Yeah, .

>> So when we were at MWC, devices are going to be a very key part of the equation in the network. So device end-to-end is going to be big. What's your take on the market right now as you zoom out through the Savannah lens of, okay, knowing the consumer market's very vast, these guys are going to end up serving that market because the consumerization of IT has happened. Face it. That's the done deal. So what's your take of it? Are we there yet? You see it getting accelerating faster? I mean, NVIDIA talks about accelerated computing. That's more back office, but what's the consumer impact to all this?

>> Well, it's a great question. And the consumer impact is going to be at the edge. It's going to be in our edge devices, in our laptops, in our cell phones. That's where most of the planet will engage with this technology. And I would say we're close. I would say we're not there yet. I would say they just announced these first five laptops with AI in them. We are starting to see even creators and entrepreneurs making hardware around AI, but it's still very bumbly and clunky I think at this stage. Maybe not that. I mean, I haven't touched Dell's new devices, not assuming that about them. But in terms of where we're at in consumer space, so I would say consumers are excited, but right now the vast majority of people are still just interacting with AI via software in a chat format, in a ChatGPT format. So I look forward to when people are getting to learn. The hyper-customization is where it's going to get super interesting. And I think the first devices that really do have an enhanced experience, like when we got our first iPhone and when you got your first PC, I think whatever that stock is going to go through the roof. That's going to be a really interesting moment for us. And I'm not sure it'll look the same as these current devices that we have now.

>> And Michael Dell's point on stage, to your point earlier is that the pie is big and it's going to get bigger. What they don't know is what the new entrance is going to look like, a new brand, new startup. So it's not about who's in the ecosystem now. So share and don't worry about what people are doing, work together. You don't know what's coming. The new competition could disrupt things because generative AI flips the script.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, it does. And it's also, it's driving that innovation cycle so much faster, and that's only expanded by having those ecosystem partners combined to that and collaborate. We've heard a lot of that this week when we talk to people. It's been, well, no, we're collaborating with Dell. No, our engineers are working very closely with them. So a lot of these ecosystems, they're not just on paper, they're actually in the trenches engineering relationships that are helping to drive technology and helping to accelerate that innovation cycle.

>> Yeah, absolutely. What's your favorite thing to use generative AI for? Last question for everyone this morning.

Bob Laliberte

>> Oh, wow. That's a great question.

>> So far obviously.

Bob Laliberte

>> Right now, honestly, one of the most things is doing a lot of writing. I love using Grammarly. So having grammar checker that come in and be able to just say, hey, here's a utility. It's been a great productivity enhancer for me.

>> To me, it's all about the Copilot model of assisting me in whatever I'm doing. ChatGPT, I had been playing with the new stuff mainly because I love the multimodal, but from a utility standpoint, clearly brainstorming and framing stuff for me. So if I want to look at say, furniture layout, I'd just say type in description of the room and it gives you some ideas to framing up a research report, and I give it some basic parameters so I control the data and maybe kind of shape that. And of course the Grammarly things like that is good, but I think it is just really good at things I just want quick answers for. And I find I'm using it more than Google Search because what I want from is the search.

>> That's a big conversation right now.

>> Discovery of ChatGPT gives me different answers than Google, like how do I decorate the room? Or what's a good game to play with 28-year-olds, right? My kids. So it gives you ideas.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, I was at an event a couple of weeks ago, Marcus Nesbill from Extreme Networks, and he said, "Query is the new search."

>> Yeah.

>> I mean, my fantasy is coming up about agents. I can't wait to see how that works because when you actually have tasks that it does for you, that's where I think the market's exciting when the agents actually are real. And I just don't think the agents are real yet. The co-pilots are really more help with the grammar, help with the PowerPoint. That's why Microsoft I think is crushing it. They have a software estate with office and teams and whatnot. So I think they do well. I think Dell will probably match for the PC. So support, those kinds of low-hanging fruit use cases. But then it gets interesting when you can connect in your workflow, like my productivity.

>> It's kind of like your cheeky assistant.

>> Yeah.

>> Also to me, what I really like about generative AI and when we're talking about making images or using Dolly or something like that, is I feel like I get to press print on my brain, Which is a dangerous thing. I realize saying out loud, but it's a function I always wanted. Sometimes you're visualizing something, and I was looking at it, so supercomputing, they actually have a art competition for the show where you can enter with art that's made either using a supercomputer or using AI. So I was messing around because I'd like to enter the contest, and it was really fun. It was visualizing all of the women who have been in computer history and the way that Dolly does it versus how my brain would do it are completely different. It's a totally different axis, and it's really kind fascinating to open your mind to more than just what you had in your brain, but also what it looks like, actually visualizing emotions for me. So what does grief look like? What does hope look like? And it's cool. It's a fun time to be alive in technology. And I'm grateful.

>> I mean, if you feed a good data like your brain or your ideas, it works it. If you ask a generic question, it doesn't really do very well because it's kind of vanilla results.

Bob Laliberte

>> I'm kind of looking forward to that point when you can leverage Gen AI to create simulated data and traffic flow for a digital twin of your technology environment. So when you're thinking about we want to make changes, we want to add, we want to expand, being able to leverage that synthetically generated traffic from a Gen AI to be able to test and really flush out that system, I think is going to be really cool as well.

>> I think we're not too far from that. I think that's going to be sooner rather than later. I love it. Well, we have another fantastic day here. I'm excited to share the day with both of you. Bob, thank you for being here all week. You've done a fantastic job. John, always a pleasure to have your insights, get your takes, exciting time for all the partners, and thank all of you for tuning in to our three days of coverage here from fabulous 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.

Day 3 AnalystANGLE

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>> Good morning Dell fans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here on day three of Dell Tech World. It has been an absolutely stunning power-packed week. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE. Very delighted to be joined this morning with John Furrier and Bob Laliberte. Bob, we've had a really awesome week.

Bob Laliberte

>> It's been a great week. Absolutely. A lot of great information coming out of Dell Tech World this year.

>> I know. I'm so glad we got to work together this week. And John, wow, you've had a super busy week too. I'm curious, since we haven't had a chance to dig into your perspective enough this week, what's your opinion on all the announcements and everything that's been going on with Dell?

>> Well, first of all, yesterday's lineup was action-packed. You and Dave did a crushing job on the interviews. Michael Dell, all the top executives and then partners are here too. So I think my perspective on Dell is that they got it right with the AI factory, and that's co-opted a little bit from Jensen Wong NVIDIA, which he's cool with because he was here on stage, and that's a good position to set the tone for the next generation, and Dell wants to capture that upgrade cycle is coming. With AI, you've got clustered systems at the servers, so servers are changing, the PCs are changing, the devices are changing. So everything in the network will be connected to some sort of AI system and the hardware matters. And so I think Dell recognizes that. And we're in a market right now. You're seeing leadership changes at AWS to product-led CEOs. We are in a product-led market right now because AI doesn't solve pain points. It's net new benefits. So you're starting to see people thinking, wow, we got to get our product act together. So Dell is shoring up their product as is other companies. So it will be a race to the winner's circle for whose got the better product. And the AI factory just resonates and everything about what they're doing around that is a solid strategy. So now they've just got to execute. And everything in between. We had Broadcom, I'm talking about chip packaging, making things smaller, faster, cheaper, energy efficient, sustainable data centers. Everything is coming back down to more horsepower and that's going to be what powers the AI generation.

>> Well, it certainly is, and I think it's actually the most hardware we've had on the desk, at least since I've been at theCUBE. We had multiple chips. We were even talking about turning them into my earrings last night at the end of the day. It's pretty fun. The hardware nerd in me has been very delighted, and it's nice to see not just the advancements in the hardware and in the nerdy stuff that I personally enjoy so much, but also the emphasis on sustainability across the board. And not just making sure that we're lowering power consumption on some of these intense compute activities because of saving money, but also saving our planet. And you hear a lot of that threaded through what Dell's saying. Bob, you've had a lot of really interesting analyst meetings. Give us the scoop. What's some of the inside baseball you've learned?

Bob Laliberte

>> Well, yeah, obviously there's been a lot, as John had talked about with the AI factory and helping organizations transform data to information across multiple different tiers, if you will. So a lot of people when they think about the AI factory are thinking about large data centers. But we also have seen announcements here about AI PCs. So it's really about extending that capability across an entire enterprise, from core data that they're getting out all the way down to making employees more productive and so forth. One of the things that I'm most impressed with, and I'm so happy to see because I cover networking, has been the emphasis on the role of networking in these environments and in particular the backend environments as well. So it's been great to see on main stage Dell Keynotes, them actually talking about networking in more than a passing phrase. And so it's a great acknowledgement and it also highlights the importance of that connectivity in these backend systems and the need for them to be really high-performance, low latency, non-blocking, all that kind of stuff, which is really going to be incredibly important to drive these models and certainly in the training stage, but then later for inference.

>> It's interesting, the stuff like networking, storage, servers, all the chips, Savannah, we've been supercomputing again coming up that matters now because what's going on is that the market is at the top of the stack is about chatbots converting to agents. You're seeing on those apps kind of slowly figuring out the data strategy. So it's like public data with the large LLMs and foundation models. That's all cool, but most of the enterprise don't have AI. So that market's waiting for the infrastructure to get its act together. So you're seeing all the action right now i networking servers and data. And then as Dell has this Apex multi-cloud solution. So you got two things going together, stitched together multi-cloud environments, so multiple environments as well as the hardware. And again, Dell, what they're doing right is that they go into their old playbook. Back in the old days you partnered with Microsoft Wintel, Windows and Intel was their partners. Now that world is Cloud, NVIDIA, Broadcom, everybody, AMD. So you got all those partnerships, so they have to ride on something. So that software component in the ecosystem is going to be key, but all the action right now is happening here at the lower levels because the apps are waiting. And as Michael Dell said on stage, GPUs devour storage. What he's talking about is storage now is more important. So it's going to be about a year, I think. Bob, I think I'd love to get your take on the networking impact, but about a year, where are we on that journey because we're waiting for the infrastructure to get better?

Bob Laliberte

>> Well, it's a great question, and I think the interesting part of what you were talking about, it is definitely product-led and you're seeing organizations putting together solutions, validated designs. One of the things that we can overlook in this transition is the fact that a lot of the enterprises today don't have the skill sets to pull this together. So Dell by through their own internal transformation towards AI is building up and having the expertise to be able to share that with their customers to be able to accelerate that journey. So I think in a lot of this, you had mentioned sustainability and power, things as simple as being able to go in and do an assessment to understand how much available power you have for your AI environments. Being able to look at some of the new chip technology that's coming out that Dell's making available to save power from one side so they can leverage it for AI. But obviously this is going to be a transformation. It's going to take some time, but there's opportunities I think, to accelerate that. And that's what we're seeing with that concept of the AI factory.

>> I think so, and I think a lot of customers, they're looking for an end-to-end solution. They're looking for an ecosystem, not just a single piece of this. And Dell's done a great job not only of making their own hardware, but of bringing in the right players. We're talking about, I mean, Morgan Stanley literally just named them last week, the partner to play with if you're getting into AI, which is a pretty bold statement. I mean, the market's responded very well to that. So I think it's been really cool to have the conversations that we've had across the C-suite too, not just with Michael Dell, but we also talked to their CFO. And the enthusiasm and confidence from everyone at Dell was remarkable. And I mean, obviously they're talking to us, they want to make a story sound good, but it wasn't just that, I mean, I was really struck, but there's a sense with some people of feeling overwhelmed or a little nervous about the AI revolution, you really feel across the organization that everyone's all in so stoked and that they've been waiting for this moment for quite a while

>> I can't wait to bust Dave's chops because I heard him on the camera saying, I'm kind of scared of AI. I'm like, what? Come on, Dave, lean into it. Don't be afraid. It's interesting because I think there is definitely some announcements that are kind of check boxes, all the co-pilot stuff, like, okay, everyone's got the co-pilot. But I think to your point, Dell's confident because they've got the playbook down. They've done this before. I mean, everything about what they're doing right now is in their wheelhouse. Servers are being reconfigured. You got the notes here from the guest today, more all-flash file storage, Snapdragon plus chips, data protection, powered by Broadcom, Tomahawk, F5 chip set. This is nerd central with chips and building hardware. I mean, this is what Dell does. So I think people are excited because they get to engineer new systems, and I think that takes it from the old Dell to the new Dell. So we're seeing companies transform from the old self to the new self. And that's again, changes at the top at a lot of companies because you don't want to be on the wrong side of history. We've been saying this on theCUBE all the time, Savannah, the wave's coming and you're starting to see the line, old way and new way, and that's what's happening. That's not going to be around anymore. Data backup and recovery, that's cyber resilience now. Okay. Whole nother way to do it. So Dell's getting it right, I got to say.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, they're absolutely doing a lot to encourage organizations to get started now and providing the solutions and the vehicles for them to do that. And I think a lot of their... For the conversations that's come out, you've been talking about it, is also about what are the use cases going to be. So there's been a lot of cool use cases shared anything from things we've heard in the medical field to even if it's language translation for video meetings and calls, if you're dealing with-

>> Or the city of Amarillo, the chatbot that they've created for their residents and their citizens to be able to pay their water bill or get information or learn about stuff going on in their neighborhood and interact with the local government.

Bob Laliberte

>> In virtually any language.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean they mentioned that in one middle school alone, they speak 67 different languages, which is intense. And I can imagine the level of inclusion that we're able to gain in Dell and the city of Amarillo, which was a great guest on the show, are able to create and foster through doing that.

>> Yeah. Savannah, I want to ask you a question. I was getting the stories out on Silicon Angle yesterday. I was watching some of the broadcast, A little bit jealous that you and Dave got the great interviews with Sam Brokaw, Jeff Boudreaux, Travis and Ehab. What was your takeaway? Because it looked like the vibe was really strong on that set. What was the tone? What was Sam talking about? What was the key points and how did Ehab do, by the way? I want to know what his story was.

>> I mean, Ehab's been on the show many times. You know what a great guest he is.

>> Of course.

>> He was absolutely fantastic. Sam was an outstanding guest as well. One of the things that was common through each one of those conversations was the full product portfolio having a moment. What's interesting is Dell made announcements across the board, like we said, I mean everything from five new AI PCs to chips to partnerships, to the whole shebang. And so it was cool. I mean, I have to say, I don't know that we've interviewed folks or companies at their event like this at such a moment when they've had literally just reported their best quarter in the history of the business, which is wild. And you could just feel it. Everyone's so proud. One of the things that one of them said yesterday was that it was like having their kids on stage, watching everyone talk about it in those keynotes. So I think it's a real moment of realization for Dell where they can see that their hard work and a very big potentially kind of risky bet was made. And throughout, actually another theme in that, was how Dell looked at sat down and they all had a conversation, Michael and himself leading it and said, what's the company that's going to disrupt us? Let's go build that company. And I think that they've done a bit of that and really made themselves relevant again in a conversation of cool tech that they weren't necessarily a part of.

>> Savannah, that's a great point. It's very entrepreneurial kind of mindset. People are excited and confident, as you said, but also from a job perspective, it's like they can cut their teeth into something new that's definitely going to be obvious. So it's like AI as obvious... The generative AI specifically is obvious as the internet was, okay, it's going to be big. We don't know what's going to happen yet. So it's evolving in front of our eyes. So I think if you're an employee somewhere, you're like, "Hey, boss, can I cut my teeth into this?"

>> So on that note, something I thought was really interesting. So Dell has 125,000 employees, 60,000 of those employees are in the services business, which I did not know. I did not know 50% of their staff is helping their customers implement, which is fascinating. But beyond that, Dell is rolling out right now an internal program, an educational program looking at I believe 36 different use cases, five different types of AI applications, multiple models. And that's across the organization, so that everyone collectively, no matter your role in the org, can up-skill and be on the exact same page. And I thought that was actually really cool. I mean, I almost wanted to ask them secretly to send me that curriculum, that packet. I want to get on the Dell AI page. I mean, I guess perhaps we have sitting here on this week. But it's nice to see. They always eat their own dog food as we say, but they're also really up-skilling and educating their team as well as the industry as we jump into the deep.

>> So Sam was asked, what's Project Lightning coming about? Because he's proud of his new product that he launched, but then you guys peppered him on Project Lightning, which I didn't get what that was. Do you know anything about Project Lightning file storage?

Bob Laliberte

>> No, I don't.

>> I think it's a project that doesn't have a name yet.

Bob Laliberte

>> That's the parallel file system coming out sometime in the future.

>> I think so. I think it's one of those things there, but you can see they got stuff in the pipeline.

>> Oh yeah, you can tell there's definitely a lot in the pipeline. This was just the beginning, I think both for Dell as well as for some of these partnerships that we're hearing from. I think there's a lot of hardware to come and a lot of thinking around modular designs. I mean, the other thing that they mentioned too is their innovation cycle has been reduced. They used to be putting out computers as an example every two to three years. Now they're doing it in nine months.

>> Savannah, I want to ask you to put your analyst hat on for a second because you covered devices aggressively, you know the consumer market really well. At the end of the day, you hear about Snapdragon, that's essentially Qualcomm, right?

>> Yeah, .

>> So when we were at MWC, devices are going to be a very key part of the equation in the network. So device end-to-end is going to be big. What's your take on the market right now as you zoom out through the Savannah lens of, okay, knowing the consumer market's very vast, these guys are going to end up serving that market because the consumerization of IT has happened. Face it. That's the done deal. So what's your take of it? Are we there yet? You see it getting accelerating faster? I mean, NVIDIA talks about accelerated computing. That's more back office, but what's the consumer impact to all this?

>> Well, it's a great question. And the consumer impact is going to be at the edge. It's going to be in our edge devices, in our laptops, in our cell phones. That's where most of the planet will engage with this technology. And I would say we're close. I would say we're not there yet. I would say they just announced these first five laptops with AI in them. We are starting to see even creators and entrepreneurs making hardware around AI, but it's still very bumbly and clunky I think at this stage. Maybe not that. I mean, I haven't touched Dell's new devices, not assuming that about them. But in terms of where we're at in consumer space, so I would say consumers are excited, but right now the vast majority of people are still just interacting with AI via software in a chat format, in a ChatGPT format. So I look forward to when people are getting to learn. The hyper-customization is where it's going to get super interesting. And I think the first devices that really do have an enhanced experience, like when we got our first iPhone and when you got your first PC, I think whatever that stock is going to go through the roof. That's going to be a really interesting moment for us. And I'm not sure it'll look the same as these current devices that we have now.

>> And Michael Dell's point on stage, to your point earlier is that the pie is big and it's going to get bigger. What they don't know is what the new entrance is going to look like, a new brand, new startup. So it's not about who's in the ecosystem now. So share and don't worry about what people are doing, work together. You don't know what's coming. The new competition could disrupt things because generative AI flips the script.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, it does. And it's also, it's driving that innovation cycle so much faster, and that's only expanded by having those ecosystem partners combined to that and collaborate. We've heard a lot of that this week when we talk to people. It's been, well, no, we're collaborating with Dell. No, our engineers are working very closely with them. So a lot of these ecosystems, they're not just on paper, they're actually in the trenches engineering relationships that are helping to drive technology and helping to accelerate that innovation cycle.

>> Yeah, absolutely. What's your favorite thing to use generative AI for? Last question for everyone this morning.

Bob Laliberte

>> Oh, wow. That's a great question.

>> So far obviously.

Bob Laliberte

>> Right now, honestly, one of the most things is doing a lot of writing. I love using Grammarly. So having grammar checker that come in and be able to just say, hey, here's a utility. It's been a great productivity enhancer for me.

>> To me, it's all about the Copilot model of assisting me in whatever I'm doing. ChatGPT, I had been playing with the new stuff mainly because I love the multimodal, but from a utility standpoint, clearly brainstorming and framing stuff for me. So if I want to look at say, furniture layout, I'd just say type in description of the room and it gives you some ideas to framing up a research report, and I give it some basic parameters so I control the data and maybe kind of shape that. And of course the Grammarly things like that is good, but I think it is just really good at things I just want quick answers for. And I find I'm using it more than Google Search because what I want from is the search.

>> That's a big conversation right now.

>> Discovery of ChatGPT gives me different answers than Google, like how do I decorate the room? Or what's a good game to play with 28-year-olds, right? My kids. So it gives you ideas.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, I was at an event a couple of weeks ago, Marcus Nesbill from Extreme Networks, and he said, "Query is the new search."

>> Yeah.

>> I mean, my fantasy is coming up about agents. I can't wait to see how that works because when you actually have tasks that it does for you, that's where I think the market's exciting when the agents actually are real. And I just don't think the agents are real yet. The co-pilots are really more help with the grammar, help with the PowerPoint. That's why Microsoft I think is crushing it. They have a software estate with office and teams and whatnot. So I think they do well. I think Dell will probably match for the PC. So support, those kinds of low-hanging fruit use cases. But then it gets interesting when you can connect in your workflow, like my productivity.

>> It's kind of like your cheeky assistant.

>> Yeah.

>> Also to me, what I really like about generative AI and when we're talking about making images or using Dolly or something like that, is I feel like I get to press print on my brain, Which is a dangerous thing. I realize saying out loud, but it's a function I always wanted. Sometimes you're visualizing something, and I was looking at it, so supercomputing, they actually have a art competition for the show where you can enter with art that's made either using a supercomputer or using AI. So I was messing around because I'd like to enter the contest, and it was really fun. It was visualizing all of the women who have been in computer history and the way that Dolly does it versus how my brain would do it are completely different. It's a totally different axis, and it's really kind fascinating to open your mind to more than just what you had in your brain, but also what it looks like, actually visualizing emotions for me. So what does grief look like? What does hope look like? And it's cool. It's a fun time to be alive in technology. And I'm grateful.

>> I mean, if you feed a good data like your brain or your ideas, it works it. If you ask a generic question, it doesn't really do very well because it's kind of vanilla results.

Bob Laliberte

>> I'm kind of looking forward to that point when you can leverage Gen AI to create simulated data and traffic flow for a digital twin of your technology environment. So when you're thinking about we want to make changes, we want to add, we want to expand, being able to leverage that synthetically generated traffic from a Gen AI to be able to test and really flush out that system, I think is going to be really cool as well.

>> I think we're not too far from that. I think that's going to be sooner rather than later. I love it. Well, we have another fantastic day here. I'm excited to share the day with both of you. Bob, thank you for being here all week. You've done a fantastic job. John, always a pleasure to have your insights, get your takes, exciting time for all the partners, and thank all of you for tuning in to our three days of coverage here from fabulous 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.