The Six Five team discusses Dell Tech World 2024.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Let’s dive into Dell Tech World, Dan and I were there in Vegas. I mean, it was just off the rail. Six Five was there. I think we did 11 videos. It was pretty awesome.
Daniel Newman: Hey, man. Well, yeah, great to be there. It was, it was a sort of end-to-end, wall-to-wall, quick trip on the weekend, got in town. Dell Tech World… Zooming out a little bit into the macro, I mean, look, OEMs were boring for a long time, and let me just tell you something, something happened at GTC this year. Jensen Huang, kingmaker, the godfather of AI, hint to who our guests may be later, suggested that Dell Technologies is the place to build your AI factories. I don’t remember the exact words he used, but he pointed, he walked, it became Twitter famous instantaneously, and he basically anointed Dell as the company that can build your end-to-end AI factories.
This event did not disappoint. Dell this week skyrocketed to a new all-time high. I know we’re not just talking about markets, we’re also talking about Dell Tech World, but these things are inextricably linked together. Right now, the world needs to build AI infrastructure. Now, there are the sort of mega cloud providers that are buying hundreds of billions of dollars of CapEx this year, and then there’s going to be the on-prem enterprises that are going to want to deploy competitive AI solutions. Dell Technologies, led by, of course, Michael Dell, Jeff Clark, this week came to market with more new good stuff, supporting the GPU upgrades, the Blackwell that’s coming from NVIDIA, basically talked about… What did Jensen say when he was on stage? “Don’t seduce me with your 72 Blackwells in one rack.” Was it 72-
Patrick Moorhead: No, I know that. There was this weird, awkward moment. I don’t know why are you not allowed to say, I think the word passion, or… I don’t know.
Daniel Newman: Seduce.
Patrick Moorhead: Seduce.
Daniel Newman: It doesn’t matter, Jensen can say anything he wants.
Patrick Moorhead: True.
Daniel Newman: But the net-net of it is, is that the AI factory for the on-prem enterprise is going to start to see scale, and Dell is going to be in great shape. This was evident in its last quarter’s AI server bookings. That backlog is growing by leaps and bounds, they’re coming out with the new parts, and as NVIDIA continues to accelerate its roadmap to shorter and shorter timeline, this is going to bode really well for the companies that can get the parts, and then get the servers built, and then can get them deployed, and can help enterprises deploy AI at scale on-premises. So that was the big part. And of course, they backed it with new storage-driven architectures that are going to be more well-designed for AI. They didn’t forget to focus on networking.
We saw Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom on the stage, and of course, they talked about end-to-end solutions, and software. Bill McDermott on the stage. It was the Bill, and it was the Jensen, and then it was the Michael Dell show. And by the way, best part of the event was our selfie analysis, where we got an epic selfie with those three gentlemen when we went over and chatted with them for a bit. It was a great event. We sat down with Michael Dell, you’ve got to check out the interview, we’ll put it in the show notes, long interview. I think Michael might have told you, Pat, that you are killing it. And that was a pretty amazing moment for all of us when a guy that’s created $100 billion empire by taking much, much more risk than most of the average bears, and at the same time, doing it so strategically, with such grace and humility. You’ve just got to love that guy, don’t you?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I’m pretty sure he told us we were both killing it, but…
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I like to hand the credit. I read a book called Play Nice But Win, it’s something about giving more credit than you take. So you can have the credit, I’ll live in the shadows, but I’ll cash the checks.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, I just thought you were doing it to… So it’d forced me to say, “No, Daniel, you really are killing it.”
Daniel Newman: Thank you, Pat. I needed to hear that this morning. The last thing I’ll say, and I’m going to leave a little bit of this, ’cause this’ll actually flow nicely into our next topic, but they did announce five new Copilot+ PCs, Dell, based on the Qualcomm architecture, which is a big, big deal. This has been going on for a long time. Qualcomm this week at Dell, and at Build, which Pat will kick us off into, made some mega, mega progress in its ambitions to play in the PC space, based on more mobile-like architectures, giving real competition to Apple, and Dell had five variants that it announced this week. So it wasn’t only an infrastructure show, it was an infrastructure show, it was a PC show, it was a great event for Six Five, check out all of our other videos. Pat, I’ll kick it over to you to talk Dell, and then of course, you can top on when I’m starting here with the AI PC and Copilot+.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So Dell Tech World, this is the first time that I have seen a cohesive strategy and communications from Dell related to AI. Hats off to them. It’s AI, end-to-end AI. And the whole premise of the Dell AI factory, it all starts with the data, that you and I have been talking about forever. And then Dell loads services, their ecosystem, and their infrastructure that delivers use cases, from content, code generation, data creation, a general digital assistant, computer vision, digital twins. And their objective here is to make it simple, secure, and economical. You cannot argue with that. And the way that they slice it up, they’re literally showing how you can build your AI factory on-premises, and they cut it by solution, by product, and by consumption model.
So the new stuff they brought out, it was literally a sea of new. A lot of the times, the Dell Tech World, you might see two or three things that are big, but it was pretty much off the rail, on the services side, enterprise hub, services for Copilot, open ecosystem. The new ones were Meta, Azure, Qualcomm, Hugging face, and as like you said, an expansion with NVIDIA. And the interesting thing that I don’t think a lot of people caught is Jensen said, “With Dell, it’s the largest go-to-market for his GPUs out there.” That says a ton. And I don’t know if that’s largest go-to-market on-prem, or overall, even looking at places like Azure and AWS, but it was very impressive.
And then on the infrastructure side, which we all know Dell for, like you said, five new Copilot+ PCs, new power scale, new power switch to connect all that goodness in the rack, and the fleet, and Dell data protection as well. So literally just like a one, two, three, four punch, it all came together. And again, for the first time, Dell brought together a coherent strategy, end-to-end. And by the way, Dell Data Lakehouse. Dan, how long have we been talking about the data game, and all the… I’m the annoying guy in the back of the room that says, “Hey, how about Snowflake? What about Cloudera? What about Databricks?” Somebody like that.
Daniel Newman: Snowflake had a good week, made a pretty good result. I mean-
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, they did. No, you see, but my point is not to… My point is, is that Dell, to me, for the first time, has pulled in the data part. Not the storage part not the data protection part, but the respect that data management is keeping most enterprises at bay.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
