Sustainability, hybrid cloud, edge operations and managed services were among the topics discussed at last week’s Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. 

During an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin spoke with Dell Technologies Inc. executives and several of the company’s partners and customers to discuss trends they’re seeing and their approaches to addressing today’s complex challenges. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell and Intel aim to reduce product carbon footprint

Driving decarbonization for a climate resistant future was a major theme at this year’s conference. Dell and Intel are working together to increase their customers’ energy efficiency by addressing four phases that make up the product carbon footprint: manufacturing of consumer products, transportation, use in the data center and end of life. While the use phase is problematic for the data center, the manufacturing of laptops and notebooks poses another, different kind of challenge.

“You’ll see the types of innovations at Dell and Intel that on the laptops and notebooks, we are focusing on how to be more responsibly manufactured,” said Alyson Freeman (pictured, left), sustainability product manager of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell. “And in the data center, we’re going to talk about how to make them more efficient. 

Dell’s strategy is driven, in part, by customers who have their own internal sustainability goals, as well as those who must comply with environmental social and governance regulations.

Data center efficiency is something Intel has been working toward for decades.

“In the last 15 years alone, by continuing to deliver a CAGR of 15% performance per watt improvements, we’ve saved a thousand terawatt hours of energy consumption for the planet,” said Jennifer Huffstetler (right), chief product sustainability officer of Intel Corp. “We’re innovating inside the processor as well, so not only are you getting more performance at lower power with Moore’s law and other transistor innovations, we’re also having product innovations inside to accelerate the workload for common and growing workloads like AI.”

As Intel processors increase in compute power, much of the carbon impact and energy cost involves cooling those processors. 

“As we innovate in our cooling technology, we can help compensate for the amount of extra power needed for the compute that the world needs,” Freeman said.

The partnership that Intel and Dell have, and the integration of their technologies, is what drives value for customers, according to Huffstetler. 

“Platform telemetry with your open managed software [represents] a really tight partnership that we have that helps the enterprise IT operator better manage their energy consumption.” 

Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Alyson Freeman and Jennifer Huffstetler:

Dell, Microsoft take shared vision for hybrid cloud to a new level

Dell and Microsoft Corp. have collaborated for more than 30 years. More recently, their association has culminated with their Azure Stack HCI partnership. The relationship has been built on the common desire to make hybrid cloud easier for customers to consume, deliver services that they know and love in Azure and extend them to on-premises or the edge in a way that reduces data latencies and resolves cost issues.

“It is a critical partnership for us and … even more so right now as we’re seeing a real pivot,” said Douglas Phillips, corporate vice president of the Azure Edge & Platform organization at Microsoft. “With the incredibly broad adoption we see from our customers of cloud and cloud computing, more and more of our customers want to take the power of the cloud … and expand that out into the world, where they live, work and make decisions. That’s the way we refer to the edge — it’s everywhere outside of our brick-and-mortar data centers. Our ability to partner together and deliver a seamless experience for our customers is absolutely critical.”

The companies are taking their partnership to the next level with the recent announcement of the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure. The integrated solution is designed to enhance the Azure hybrid experience with full stack software integration and automated lifecycle management through Microsoft-native management tools and extensive engineering collaboration between Dell and Microsoft. The announcement also stated that the platform is ideal for application modernization and delivers faster time to value of Azure based on Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure with consistent operations and governance across on-prem data centers, edge locations and the Azure public cloud using Azure Arc.

This initiative is driven by a significant shift in the market toward hybrid cloud. 

“We did a survey recently. Almost 50% of our customers are hybrid today, and over the next 12 to 24 months, an incremental 25% say they’re going to go hybrid,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management, cross-platform software installations at Dell. “We’re talking about 75% of all customers being in a hybrid workflow.” 

These hybrid customers are asking Dell and Microsoft to work together so that when they deploy the infrastructure to their data centers or at the edge, it’s easy to scale, easy to upgrade and ensures that everything is working properly so they can effectively scale that environment back on-prem.

Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Douglas Phillips and Travis Vigil:

Dell NativeEdge simplifies edge operations for Bosch manufacturing customers

As businesses become increasingly distributed, moving data is both costly and complicated and IT architectures can be difficult to manage, provision and automate. Companies are looking for simpler and more effective ways to manage and secure their ecosystem of edge technologies and applications.

On May 23, Dell announced Dell NativeEdge to address the need to manage and simplify a business’ entire edge estate with a single solution to, as the company asserts in its announcement, “help deliver better experiences, products and outcomes” to its customers.

“NativeEdge is an edge operation software platform that is going to help our customers … dramatically simplify, optimize and secure their edge operations across their entire edge estate,” said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president and general manager of the Edge Business Unit at Dell. “It is solving two very interesting problems at the same time. One is the ability to securely onboard devices with zero touch anywhere in the world. Another one is the ability to orchestrate applications to those devices, to data centers and to clouds to orchestrate a complete outcome. We’ve put those things together for the first time in the industry and are expecting to add great value to our customers.”

One of Dell’s partners in this endeavor is Bosch Global Software Technologies PVT Ltd., a global supplier of technology and services. The Dell-Bosch partnership spans nearly two decades, designing solutions for manufacturing companies that help them optimize their operations and accelerate innovation. 

“If you look at a shop floor nowadays, you see a huge heterogeneity of devices, of machines. You see a proliferation of disparate technology at the edge, and you see data and application silos, which is bascially a challenge if you want to create that digital backbone of your factory of the future,” said Tobias Grocholl, strategic innovations manager, Bosch Global Software Technologies PVT Ltd. “We experience that ourselves. There is a very specific challenge arising, which is how to actually deploy applications throughout the entire edge estate and how to run your lifecycle management, especially when you have this huge heterogeneity.” 

This is where NativeEdge comes into play, providing faster time to value and helping Bosch innovate faster while saving resources.

Dell’s playbook is based on delivering value as a horizontal company that provides technology, support and services while building an ecosystem that broadens its ability to solve problems specific to different industries through partners, such as Bosch.

“Nobody can do it on their own … so it was very important for us to add value, but not too much value, because there are people that are better than us in many, many ways,” Shneorson explained. “It’s a design guideline we’re living by, because we want to partner with people that know more than us, where it’s not our core competency. But we’re going to do a very good job in what we do know how to do, which is building hardware, the operating environment and the edge operation software.”

Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Gil Shneorson and Tobias Grocholl:

Dell’s partner ecosystem focused on removing complexities, enabling transformation

With more than 60,000 team members in 170 countries and an asset install base of more than 250 million, you could say that Dell Technologies Services has very big ears and a wide view to see what its customers are experiencing, the issues they have with technology and how they want to use that technology to achieve outcomes. 

“At the end of the day, it’s all about having the right solutions for the customers to be able to support their journey; that’s as simple as it gets,” said Satish Iyer, vice president and general manager of emerging services at Dell. “Multicloud … calls for some interesting architectures in terms of how our customers view their outcomes, and that’s another area where customers have choices and they have implementations. But when you marry that with what is already there, a lot of our customers, especially the global 500s and 1000s, have a massive amount and a lot of complicated implementations today. How do you basically adapt those, how do you transform those into this new design?”

Dell’s open partner ecosystem is expanding to solve complex multicloud and other critical issues, including the use of generative artificial intelligence technology, edge computing challenges and cybersecurity demands. A growing theme for Dell is that by deepening and extending its partnerships, the company can take on the burden of digital transformation for its customers, allowing them to focus on achieving the benefits rather than figuring out the mechanics of the implementations.

On May 23, Dell and Nvidia announced a joint initiative to make it easier for businesses to build and use generative AI models on-prem to quickly and securely deliver better customer service, market intelligence, enterprise search and a range of other capabilities. 

Companies are eager to explore the opportunities that generative AI tools enable for their organizations, but many aren’t sure how to get started. 

“Managing and developing these models are quite complex; they are not simple,” Iyer explained. “We talk about how much developers are going to spend time creating these new models versus managing the ecosystem of this model building, model management, and that’s where services can help. We have managed services that we can actually take the entire machine learning ops, DevOps cycle, and take the complexity away from them.”

Dell is also playing a critical role in facilitating the telecom industry’s adoption of technology to establish America’s first Radio Access Network 5G edge infrastructure. DISH Network LLC and Dell are collaborating on this cloud-native network that will be powered by Dell devices and expected to cover 75% of the population in the U.S. this month. The relationship and inroads into telecom represent “massive opportunities” for Dell to be a strategic advisor as telecom companies transform themselves, Iyer added.

Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Satish Iyer and Doug Schmitt, president of Dell Technologies Services at Dell:

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE