Techaisle Blog

The Dell Generative AI Portfolio exemplifies the company’s dedication to unlocking the transformative power of GenAI. With various innovative solutions, such as the Dell Validated Design in collaboration with NVIDIA for Model Customization and an open data lakehouse solution, Dell is equipping businesses with the tools they need to tackle the challenges of GenAI deployment. The Precision 7875 Tower workstation hardware launch and Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift further highlight Dell’s comprehensive strategy. These developments not only streamline on-premises container management but also enable businesses to harness the capabilities of GenAI fully. Looking ahead, Dell’s ongoing efforts are poised to significantly influence a future where AI is integral to data-driven decision-making, creativity, and problem-solving, transforming the business landscape.

In January 2023, Dell acquired Cloudify, an open-source DevOps automation technology provider. Cloudify’s platform leverages AI to assist companies in automating their IT infrastructure and applications. Later, in August 2023, Dell acquired Moogsoft, an AI-driven IT operations analytics (AIOps) platform. Moogsoft’s platform employs AI to enable companies to identify and resolve IT issues more quickly and efficiently. These acquisitions of Moogsoft and Cloudify underscore Dell’s commitment to investing in AI and providing its customers with a broader array of AI solutions. Furthermore, Dell has formed partnerships with several others, including NVIDIA and Intel. These partnerships grant Dell access to the latest AI hardware and software, which it can utilize to develop and offer new AI solutions to its customers.

Periodically, groundbreaking technologies emerge that revolutionize our world. A few decades ago, personal computers (PCs) were the game-changers, enhancing efficiency and reshaping human experiences. This was followed by the iPhone in 2007. Today, GenAI is the technology in focus, showcasing its potential to transform business data interactions, customer engagement, and infrastructure management. However, to fully leverage this potential, it’s essential to have robust data foundations, well-structured infrastructures, and a comprehensive range of supporting services.

Dell’s portfolio is centered around providing supporting infrastructure products and services. With a broad range of GenAI solutions, Dell empowers businesses to run GenAI workloads across various platforms, including cloud environments, on-premises setups, and edge computing. The company has recently broadened its GenAI solutions portfolio by introducing Dell Validated Design in collaboration with NVIDIA for Model Customization. This includes professional services for strategy development and an open, modern data lakehouse solution. These solutions and services are designed to help businesses transform their workflows and processes throughout their GenAI journey. From data processing and model customization to strategic planning, Dell’s offerings are tailored to streamline operations for a more efficient and effective GenAI implementation.

Tailoring AI to Business Needs: Dell’s Validated Designs for GenAI with NVIDIA for Customizable Inferencing and Model Training

Hybrid work trends have emerged rapidly over the past year, changing how organizations approach collaboration. Not long ago, the hybrid mode of work was viewed as a luxury – a privilege only for employees who could manage their job from home on occasion. However, the pandemic compelled organizations to scramble for new ways to ensure business continuity, and Hybrid work transformed into a must-have from being a nice-to-have option. Organizations that fail to embrace this change and try to return to a 100-percent-office-based work strategy are at risk of falling short in productivity, talent retention, and much more. Amid the worldwide trend of ‘great resignations,’ organizations have been trying to find a balance between working from home and the office.

In a scenario where hybrid work is no longer a choice but a necessity, many organizations are already aware that they need to provide consistent technical support to employees across different locations to enable a hybrid work environment that is seamless, secure, and smart. Hybrid work requires more than just collaborative software; it requires advanced devices, robust security, dependable connection, and smooth networking—all of which must function in tandem. Furthermore, it requires a unified solution to avoid fragmented communication, additional IT administrative labor, and increased security concerns.

The Webex platform addresses all these essential aspects of hybrid work – where employees work and how they prefer to work. It offers several solutions that can be easily integrated with various pre-existing systems and ensure enterprise-grade security.

Read on learn about Webex, comparisons with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet

In this Techaisle Take analysis, I will discuss which customer challenges Red Hat is addressing with its cloud services, market differentiation, especially VMware, and why its significant value lies in providing a consistent full-stack development and operational experience.

The customer challenges

A successful approach to the cloud needs to be structured around its capacity to evolve, support changing business requirements and customer/partner/employee expectations, respond to competitive pressures, and embrace new opportunities for automation/integration of automated systems. Businesses may be comfortable pursuing a limited number of objectives, but these objectives are no longer static. One of the challenges to providing cloud services is that the cloud spans two significant disciplines. One of the challenges to providing cloud services is that the cloud spans two critical levels. At a strategic level, the cloud is a management issue, and at the execution level, it is an IT issue. In IT, there are two main actors, developers and operators. Both developers and operations teams hold promise to support cloud development and deployment. In response, businesses have turned to an approach to development known as DevOps. In response, businesses have turned to an approach to developing and operating systems known as DevOps. Because of the optionality and complexity of tooling, it can be difficult to source appropriate cloud support for DevOps at a practical level. Techaisle’s Container Adoption Trends survey data shows that 57% of commercial customers seek application modernization services, and 77% are currently engaged in application migration services. Yet, 22% of firms believe there is a lack of IT and business strategy alignment understanding related to DevOps practice. Although modernization is a business priority, determining the right approach, paying off technical debt, internal strife between scrum/agile teams, not well-understood data & application dependencies, and legacy SDLC processes slow down the modernization programs. The competing corporate objectives usually compel an organization to manage and deploy a mix of environments, including on-prem configurations, private cloud, and multiple public cloud services. These diverse environments result in the need for a hybrid approach.

As a result, businesses deal with many inhibitors when planning to add business value at a faster pace and compete in the digital economy. The big challenge is building applications faster, reducing time to value, and deploying on-prem in private or public clouds. Operations teams are specifically under pressure to control costs, reduce operational complexity, improve security, and consistently manage across multiple cloud deployments. Operations teams are managing legacy applications running in virtualized environments in the data center while witnessing explosive adoption of the public cloud and associated services. In addition, businesses are increasing edge deployments, specifically in the industrial and telco verticals.

The solution – Red Hat Cloud Services

Red Hat’s cloud services strategy is built to address the multitude of the above-outlined challenges. Red Hat OpenShift provides consistency across all cloud environments, helping developers in cloud-native application development and rolling out applications in containers faster, giving the operators the ability to have the same operating experience across every deployment footprint for every application in both on-prem and public cloud. In addition to the core OpenShift platform, Red Hat Cloud Services includes several tightly integrated application development and data services intended to help developers build workloads and applications within the OpenShift managed-service environments. These additional managed cloud services include an API management service (Red Hat OpenShift API Management), a Kafka and streaming service (Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka), a service to simplify access control across multiple database vendors (Red Hat OpenShift Database Access), and a data science service (Red Hat OpenShift Data Science) for AI/ML workloads. According to Techaisle’s Container Adoption Trends survey research, the additional services are likely to see an adoption growth of 68% among commercial customers within the year.

Techaisle's latest research forecasts worldwide small business (1-99 employees), core midmarket (100-999 employees), and upper midmarket (1000-5000 employees) IT spend (excluding telecom services) will reach US$1.25 trillion in 2022. IT services will see the highest proportion of IT spending. Datacenter solutions will exhibit a growth of 4%. Overall worldwide cloud spending within the SMB and midmarket will grow by 21%. By 2025, 43% of global SMB and midmarket IT spending will be in the cloud.

SMB IT investment is increasing to counter inflation, labor shortage, supply chain concerns and accelerate business transformation through digitalization. SMBs are looking for ways to streamline business and IT processes to best return on existing human capital. In the pursuit of greater efficiency, SMBs are also exploring options that help stretch budgets and use efficiency-oriented techniques to optimize the impact of wage inflation and the increasingly competitive landscape. SMBs plan to invest in PCs, analytics, cloud, security, UCaaS / CCaaS, customer experience solutions, and networking.