Dell Technologies World 2026 | Caitlin Gordon & Travis Vigil, Dell Technologies

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More from Dell Technologies World 2026

Caitlin Gordon

VP, Product Management

Dell Technologies

Travis Vigil

SVP, ISG Product Management

Dell Technologies

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play_circle_outline PowerStore Elite and Exascale/PowerScale: 3X Performance, 6:1 Data Reduction and 40 GB/s Throughput to Maximize GPU Utilization

play_circle_outline Exascale Four-in-One Storage for AI Data Platforms: Unified File/Object/Parallel/Block with Cleansing, Annotation, Orchestration

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Caitlin Gordon & Travis Vigil, Dell Technologies

Caitlin Gordon

VP, Product Management Dell Technologies

Travis Vigil

SVP, ISG Product Management Dell Technologies

In this interview from Dell Technologies World 2026, Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at Dell Technologies, joins Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management at Dell Technologies, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and Dave Vellante about how Dell is evolving into a full-stack AI platform at the center of the enterprise infrastructure buildout. Vigil notes that while the conversation has shifted rapidly from generative to agentic AI, the real challenge enterprises face is operational and data complexity — not hardware alone.... Read more

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How has generative (agentic) AI changed conversations with enterprise customers, what challenges are they facing in adopting it (infrastructure vs. operational and data complexity), and how is Dell helping address those challenges beyond providing hardware? add

How does PowerStore Elite address the economic concerns (high memory prices and access to outcomes) and the technical challenges of GPU utilization and keeping GPUs fed? add

What were the main announcements regarding the AI data platform and storage solutions for generative AI? add

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Caitlin Gordon & Travis Vigil, Dell Technologies

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back, we're here on day two of Dell Tech World. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. This is Dell Technologies World. 2026, day one really kind of set the table. We see the massive growth, the business performance, the technology is coming together as AI hits the wave. Now the portfolio kind of fills in the puzzle for this next generation wave. Travis is back on theCUBE, great to see you.

Travis Vigil

>> Good to see you.

John Furrier

>> SVP of ISG product management at Dell. Caitlin, great to see you. VP product management. Private cloud, we'll get into that and AI solutions. Dell, great to see you. David Kennedy was talking yesterday about the performance and Dave asked, "Where's the growth?" He says it's going to come from the pull through on AI factory, storage, networking. These are the pieces that are driving the effectiveness. So my first question is, we heard from Jeff Clarke, the power is getting faster. He had all those 10 things that happened. He said any one of them could have been a banner year, but it's all popping. How are you guys viewing this? How's the business evolving? Because the product cycles are fast too.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Travis Vigil

>> I mean, generative AI has really changed the conversation that we're having with customers day in and day out. I mean, just even say generative AI sounds dated, right?

Dave Vellante

>> It's true.

Travis Vigil

>> It's agentic now. But the conversation has evolved and accelerated over the last couple of years and every enterprise we talk to is trying to answer the question, "What do I do about agentic? What do I do about generative AI?" And they spend a lot of time focusing on the infrastructure, which we have great infrastructure. And you saw all the fantastic announcements that we had today. Where we've seen them struggle more is operational complexity, IT operations, and data complexity in terms of data management. And so we at Dell are absolutely focused on making sure that we have the best price performance, the best performance, the best power and cooling specifications, lowest rack space, all of those things. But where we really think we can differentiate given our vast experience and the 5,000 customers that we have on the AI factory is helping them through the organizational, operational and data challenges that they have.

John Furrier

>> PowerStore Elite, the next phase, is here. We see two dimensions. I want to get your reaction to this. One is the economics because prices are high in memory and also the technical side where the GPU utilization is a big issue right now. People are starting to really talk about it, the costs of having something idle is a storage opportunity.

Travis Vigil

>> Oh, for sure.

John Furrier

>> Explain that because I think that also leads into the other side of the economic equation, not just pricing, but the access of the outcomes.

Travis Vigil

>> Yeah. So PowerStore Elite is the largest refresh that we've had for the PowerStore platform since we talked six short years ago on the initial launch. And it's 3X the performance, it's 3X the density. We've gone from a five to one data reduction guarantee to a six to one data reduction guarantee. So just a fantastic increase because of the underlying technology increase. But in addition to optimizing your private cloud environment, what customers are increasingly trying to do is make sure that the GPUs are fit. And that's where something like Exascale or PowerScale comes into play, the fact that we can deliver 40 gigabytes per second out of object scale to keep the GPUs fed. So we across the portfolio, whether you're talking about private cloud, whether you're talking about generative AI or Agentic or whether you're talking about cyber resiliency, we're keeping the portfolio front and center and on the leading edge of what's capable. And I think the private cloud aspect, the operational benefits that we provide are critical and that's where something like the automation platform and Dell Private Cloud comes into play.

Dave Vellante

>> Two years ago, a year and a half ago we put forth the premise, Caitlin, you and I talked about this, that while there's a lot of activity going on in the cloud, a lot of experimentation and POCs, the customers we talked to, they wanted to bring the AI to the data, everybody talks about that, but the problem was there weren't clear solutions. You guys have been building those solutions. That was kind of number one. The other sort of piece of that was the ecosystem. And you guys have made great progress on both of those. Obviously the private cloud solution is one of those. I wonder if you could talk about the progress you've made there and then we can maybe chat about the ecosystem.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. I mean, Travis talked about the operationalization of AI and the enterprise and some of that comes into the basics of just really accelerating the time to token, right? Time to value for AI. And that means that not only for the AI factories do we do all the validation and the testing and we publish these reference architectures and performance guides, but we're also delivering automated blueprints to enable our services to be able to deploy all of those in an automated fashion, which is great because then you have the runtime up and you have your GPUs available, but then the next layer is, what are you going to do with it? And that's where the ecosystem comes in. So having the new AI ISV ecosystem program enables us to bring ecosystem providers in context of their use cases and have Dell validation behind that and be able to really scale that for our enterprise customers so we can really help them onboard and deploy those in an automated fashion as well all through the Dell automation platform.

Dave Vellante

>> And you really have to take, I would say a slightly new posture for Dell in terms of the ecosystem because it's much more open today than it was say five or six years ago. I mean, pretty much anybody can come in. You had Thomas Kurian on the stage today. I know that like Veeam and Commvault are here because they run on data domain. It's a new posture that you guys have taken, very kind of AWS like and we've seen what they can do as the platform and it's you guys are just really just getting started with that posture.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Yeah. I mean a lot of what our team does in the solutions platform team is partnering with all of these different providers because we know what our customers need is changing rapidly and we have to be open to these different partnerships and we need to be able to solve these challenges together. And because we're all exploring such new territory across the board, we have to really look at it together because we each bring such different expertise into the equation and it's exciting because there's a new partner every day. I mean, just these announcements yesterday, we have a whole bunch of new phone calls coming in and it enables the whole new partner program. We've automated the intake, we've automated the testing, we enable these partners to do self-validation so that we can actually scale that. And of course we do hands-on testing from the biggest ones, but it enables us to have that balance of focusing on a big few strategic partners and enabling us to intake a lot more.

John Furrier

>> Partner is a great story because now they could do the heavy lifting. You guys are deploying, we heard on racks in six hours, the rack scale is amazing. Dave always used to talk about cloud repatriation and I want to ask about private cloud, not that it's back, it's real. Hybrid cloud is steady stay, we see distributed computing in hybrid cloud as the way, but private cloud highlights some of the changes on the technology inference, the workloads that are being automated. We're seeing automation of orchestrations, that's a word we're hearing. These things are forcing a repatriation, but it's still growth for everyone. Talk about the impact to why private is back or elevated to us-

Caitlin Gordon

>> I'm going to quote you on it. I like it, private .

Dave Vellante

>> I just want to chime in because I was always very negative on repatriation.

Travis Vigil

>> Was it ever gone?

Dave Vellante

>> Long live private cloud.

John Furrier

>> Kind of.

Dave Vellante

>> I've always said repatriation is not really a big thing, but I don't think it's so much repatriation as it's a change in the operating model that requires on prem infrastructure.

John Furrier

>> Cost too, Dave. I mean, cost to run workloads in the cloud have become significant.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> And we haven't even seen. We saw billions of tokens that you can run on premise. So I think the on prem isn't about cloud versus on prem, it's the fact that, hey, we have a hybrid, you can run private on it.

Caitlin Gordon

>> That's right. Yeah.

Travis Vigil

>> I think it's always been about the right tool for the job. And Arthur was talking about it up on stage today. The vast majority of data still resides on premises and being able to bring the compute and the data management and the orchestration and the automation to where the data lives is not only cheaper but it's more efficient. And so I think it's just a reality of customers more than ever need to turn the data that they have, that's the oil, right? Everything else is just piping to get value from the oil and the ability to leverage that in place is critical to our customers.

Dave Vellante

>> But I think it's more nuanced than that because what's different to me is that always existed, but the momentum in the market on prem was largely, the business value was largely a function of the refresh cycle. I'm going to get better costs. Now it's a function of a different level of business value that's touching the entire organization across the operating model. We're breaking down silos where the key piece is data, of course, and that's a whole new growth vector beyond just the modernization piece.

Travis Vigil

>> And I should , I mean, agentic and generative AI, I firmly believe that the knowledge of an enterprise is encoded in its unstructured data that lives on premises and it's structured data that largely lives on premises. And so while the data has resided on prem and that's been a constant for the last 10 to 15 years, the difference now is generative AI Being able to bring those models in that operating environment to where the data lives.

John Furrier

>> And Jeff Clarke gave an example of Dell how you guys are changing your workflows internally. That wasn't around five years ago. So again, we heard David Morin on stage talking about OpenClaw having that moment of excitement that the workflows are actually happening on premises in the workplace.

Dave Vellante

>> Because that's where the data is. Yeah.

Caitlin Gordon

>> We're doing that ourselves in product management. We have completely re-engineered our workflows for our core teams and completely changed the tooling in a matter of weeks because we can do our job better and we can do it more efficiently. So we really are living that throughout Dell and everything we're doing.

Dave Vellante

>> Give us a quick rundown of the announcements. Jensen's five layer cake never has data in there and so I love to see data being such a-

Caitlin Gordon

>> That's your favorite layer of the cake.

Dave Vellante

>> ... highlight of the keynote, which is awesome. It's your wheelhouse.

Travis Vigil

>> So let me start with the AI data platform. The big announcements that we had for the AI data platform was the unveiling of our data orchestration engine capability and integrations that we've done with the data orchestration engine across Dell Storage and the value that it provides and the ability to cleanse and annotate and pipeline data for generative AI. We also, from a core storage for generative AI perspective, we updated our offerings to be able to provide a four-in-one solution called Exascale, where you can basically take the same underlying building block and run a file, an object, a parallel file or a block personality on it. And we are also providing AI solutions including a broad ecosystem for the AI factory.

Dave Vellante

>> So I'm just going to interrupt real quick for the audience. This is right tool for the right job. You're not trying to do an all in one sort of Swiss Army knife, no, system. But, please.

Travis Vigil

>> The AI data platform is a solution that consists of multiple components and the customer gets to pick and choose which ones make sense for their environment.

John Furrier

>> Caitlin, talk about the ecosystem on the private cloud. I'm really interested in this one. I'll do a follow-up for sure. One, what the plans are and what's changed?

Caitlin Gordon

>> And zooming out a little bit. So in the Dell automation platform, we have a lot of different enhancements. On the Dell Private Cloud side, we've done a few really important things. We've had some really exciting early adoption of that platform and we've had a lot of great feedback from customers. So what we've done there, the big announcements are expanding that ecosystem. So we've added support for Microsoft Azure Local with PowerStore. Our Nutanix support now supports PowerStore. You see a theme here? And then we have also now introduced support for VCF 9.1 as well in the Dell Private Cloud because what we're finding in our customers is in addition to all of the AI that they're trying to deal with, they still have a hypervisor disruption that they're trying to solve. And the reality is that Dell Private Cloud with disaggregated infrastructure with PowerStore now six to one data reduction, you have up to 65% acquisition cost savings. And then on top of that, the private cloud software gives you the operational savings. So it's really a cost benefit analysis that is undisputed for every one of our customers that we're really trying to help them get out of the handcuffs of HCI and get into the freedom that they need with Dell Private Cloud.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. It fits the mold where AI factories is the gravity around the reinvention, the reset. AI infrastructure is on the main stage again, it continues to transform. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Travis. Caitlin, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Caitlin Gordon

>> Thank you.

John Furrier

>> Appreciate it. All right. Day two of theCUBE. We'll be right back with more wall-to-wall coverage. This is our busiest day. All the action is happening here in Las Vegas, Dell Tech world setting the agenda for the modern enterprise and as large scale computing hyperscalers are growing, everyone's winning in the AI, this is the new trend. We're seeing it happen and play out in real time. Thanks for watching.