Dell has announced the launch of the new XPS 13 laptop range as the company targets “accessible” pricing options for customers – and sets the stage for a showdown with the MacBook Neo.

The move builds on a commitment by the tech giant at CES 2026, namely competing “at every price point” in the hardware market.

Indeed, pricing for the XPS 13 comes in at $699, although a student-focused promotional campaign will bring this down to $599 in July - that puts the device on-par with the Neo.

According to Dell, the XPS 13 is the “lightest and most accessible” XPS to date, and it’s also the lightest and thinnest. The laptop measures 12.7mm and weighs only 1kg (2.2lbs).

The company specifically highlighted the fact the device is smaller and half a pound lighter than the MacBook Neo, and also boasts a larger display.

“The lightweight and durable chassis is built to the same standard as every XPS, because a lower price shouldn’t mean a lesser build,” the company said in an announcement.

So what can customers expect with the XPS 13?

Under the hood of the Dell XPS 13

The base version of Dell’s new budget laptop will come equipped with a six-core Intel Core 5 320 “Wildcat Lake” chip.

Dell noted that future versions will also be available with Intel Ultra Core “Panther Lake” chips, although information on the timeline here is yet to be revealed.

The XPS 13 also boasts 512GB of storage, and just 8GB of RAM for the base version, with the option of scaling up to 32GB.

That might seem low, but the MacBook Neo also comes with what some would describe as paltry RAM capabilities.

Elsewhere, the XPS 13 comes equipped with two USB-C ports, but no 3.5mm audio jack.

XPS 13: Design and features

The base version – and future versions – of the XPS 13 will come with a 13.4 inch touchscreen as standard, boasting 2560 x 1600 resolution and 30Hz to 120Hz variable refresh rate for “smooth visuals”.

Dell noted that the device also has a streaming battery life of up to 17 hours, largely due to the fact it automatically adjusts refresh rates based on what’s on the screen.

Other key features include:

• A 2.5K touch display (covering 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut)
• Backlit keyboard
• Faster USB-C (3.2 Gen 2)
• Intel Wi-Fi 7
• Windows Hello
• Quad speakers

A showdown with Apple

Dell is keen to emphasize the XPS 13’s comparison with the MacBook Neo – and distinct advantages. Indeed, the company’s blog post referenced the device four times.

“Apple’s MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there’s real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices,” the company said. “Where Dell differs is what we think premium means at this price point and what we were willing to build to deliver it.”

The MacBook Neo took the industry by storm earlier this year, generating huge interest and marking the company’s first foray into the budget device market. As ITPro noted at the time, the MacBook Neo launch set the stage for the rest of the industry to react on pricing.

Pound for pound, the two shape up fairly similar in terms of storage and RAM options. The XPS 13 entry-level device offers 512GB storage and 8GB of RAM, while the Neo comes equipped with 256GB storage and 8GB of RAM.

It’s worth noting, however, that due to Apple using in-house developed parts - chips, operating systems, and hard drive - the Neo could eke out more performance from just 8GB compared to a comparable Windows device.

From a visual perspective, the situation is much the same. The MacBook Neo is Apple’s smallest laptop to date, boasting a 13in display and coming in at just 12.7mm thick. The XPS 13, meanwhile, is 12.7mm thick with a slightly larger screen.

Who’s this for?

Dell specifically highlighted students as a key demographic for the XPS 13. However, much like the MacBook Neo, the pricing could be tantalizing for smaller businesses aiming to get more bang for their buck.

The launch of the Neo came at the height of the RAM crisis with prices spiralling globally, and lingering concerns about hardware costs mean Dell has an opportunity to capitalize in the budget market.

Essentially, small businesses now have another viable option alongside the Neo – and that's massive news given low budget devices were expected to be among those worst hit by the memory crisis.

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

It’s been a busy week for the enterprise tech world in Las Vegas as Dell Technologies customers, partners, and channel partners poured into the Venetian Conference Center to hear about the company’s latest strategies, products, and predictions for the future of IT.

In this episode, Bobby speaks to Jane about what she’s learnt during her week at the conference, what some of the big announcements were, and whether her pre-conference predictions were correct.

Highlights

“The move towards agents has changed the conversation around what's important in terms of hardware, so for parallel computing and for LLM training and whatnot, it's all about the GPUs, but as we move to inference and we’ve moved to to AI agents, the CPU starts to become more important again, just because of how compute intensive these things are.”

“Agents are token hungry, you know. They can use up in days or months what otherwise would take in months to a year. You may have seen the story, or listeners may have seen the story, that Uber has used up its entire AI budget for 2026 in April or early May … and it‘s prompting a bit of a rethink about how this is used now.”

“It seems like there's a reckoning with the economics of this since the invention of agents and their increasingly widespread use thanks to OpenClaw. There's a big change coming and fortuitously for Dell, from my perspective, and from the perspective of experts who I spoke to for my feature on this, it does probably work out quite well for Dell and other hardware vendors.”

Related content

• Could rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?
• “Now we have, for the very first time, useful AI” – Jensen Huang and Michael Dell talk up the power of agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
• Dell unveils Deskside Agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
• Three things I expect to see at Dell Technologies World 2026, and one I don’t
• Google Cloud Next 2026: Scaling AI agents
• The agentic identity crisis
• CES 2026: The year of AI PCs?

“Tokenomics” has been one of the key talking points at Dell Technologies World 2026. Indeed. executives have been claiming that it could be more economical to invest in on-premises hardware rather than using public services when it comes to AI agent deployment.

To coin a phrase, there’s a strong element of “well they would say that, wouldn’t they?” Dell Technologies is a vendor of data center hardware and, since the launch of AI Factory with Nvidia two years ago, the company has been positioning itself as the answer to enterprises’ AI needs.

At the company’s annual conference, the message was clear: agents are brilliant, but they are token-hungry and high token usage means high costs. Jon Seigal, SVP of client solutions group and online marketing, said that Dell Technologies has direct experience of this, with one ‘super user’ developer running up a bill of $3,400 in just 24 hours thanks to high token usage by the AI agents they were running.

High-performance computers that can handle demanding AI workloads are, in the words of Dell Technologies COO Jeff Clarke “a free, unmetered token generator”.

“That’s the future,” Clarke added. Conveniently, Dell Technologies has just the hardware line up for this agentic future in Deskside Agentic AI, which was launched on the first day of Dell Technologies World 2026.

Deskside Agentic AI is part of the Dell Technologies AI Factory with Nvidia and uses Nvidia Nemoclaw, Nemotron-3, and a host of other software for building, running and managing AI agents.

It might be, however, that Dell Technologies’ messaging isn’t just convenient for its own business model – it may, actually, be right.

What is tokenomics?

If you search for “tokenomics” on the web, you’ll be presented with answers relating to cryptocurrency. While there is crossover between the worlds of crypto and generative AI, this isn’t one of them.

In the world of generative AI and AI agents, tokenomics refers to the cost of using AI tokens versus the return they give.

While the cost of a token is predictable, how many tokens any given query or prompt will use is inherently unpredictable.

“Tokens are not created or used equally,” William Fellows, research director, cloud native at 451 Research from S&P Global, explains to ITPro. “Do the same thing a few times – even on the same model – and each prompt will consume a different amount of tokens.”

Varun Chhabra, VP of infrastructure (ISG) and telecom marketing at Dell Technologies, agrees. “It's very hard to predict, even now, when you ask an LLM something, how many tokens it’s going to use,” he tells ITPro.

Additionally, despite increases in efficiency and the cost of creating tokens in and of itself going down, overall costs associated with token use are going up.

“It’s the Jevons Paradox,” says Chhabra. “The cost of creating tokens and consuming them is declining substantially, but the adoption within an organization is ramping up so fast that costs are going up for everybody.”

He argues that this is a sign of things working well. “It’s a sign that people are finding value with it,” he says. “They're using it, becoming more productive.”

With AI agents, this issue of token usage is compounded.

“As more employees use AI tools continuously, and as AI systems begin interacting with other AI systems, those costs can grow quickly and become difficult to predict in public cloud environments,” explains Don Gentile, data platforms and resiliency analyst at Hyperframe research.

This was already an expensive prospect, with reports that superusers (and perhaps tokenmaxxers) are using up token allowances that were supposed to last a year within just one quarter. As reported by The Information, Uber’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga revealed the company had blown through its AI budget for 2026 by mid-April – an admission that came just one month after he posted on LinkedIn about how much code was being written by the company’s background coding agent.

While this is already an expensive problem, changes to how major LLM service providers are billing could push it even further towards the edge.

Per-token billing and the agentic apocalypse?

As reported by The State of Brand, on 14 May Anthropic announced that from 15 June it would be splitting its Claude subscription into two. If a human is interacting with Claude, they will stay on the existing flat-fee subscription. Agentic subscriptions, however, will be moved to a fixed monthly API credit.

The tiers are as follows:

• Pro: $20 monthly credit
• Max: $100 monthly credit
• Max 20x: $200 monthly credit

According to a blog from 4sAPI, that $20 of credit equates to about six to seven million input tokens, or one million output tokens. When you consider that the fabled $3,400 superuser’s bill was the result of a team of 10 agents consuming one billion tokens in just one day, even at the Max 20x tier, the token allowance will disappear fairly quickly. Once the credit runs out, the standard API rate will be charged up to any limit set by the subscriber business. Unused credit will not be rolled over from one month to the next.

The reason for this shift, in the words of Anthropic’s head of Claude Code Boris Cherny, is fairly straightforward business economics.

“Our subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” he said on X. Which is to say, tools like OpenClaw.

The reckoning for both public cloud AI providers and their customers is, it seems, approaching fast or perhaps already here.

Determining the value of agentic AI

“I think the discipline of FinOps for cloud spend management has to be re-invented for token economics, especially inferencing which is where the use is,” says 451 Research’s Fellows. “I think the centre of gravity here will ultimately be around determining what value is returned from token consumption as a more useful measure than the dollar amount.”

“Companies such as Pay-I are tryin to get at this. I don't think anyone has nailed it yet,” he says.

Nobody seems to be suggesting public cloud services have no value, though.

“Cloud services still offer speed and flexibility with lower upfront costs, which makes them attractive for experimentation and fast deployment,” Gentile says. “But for companies running large, always-on AI environments, owning the infrastructure can sometimes provide more stable and predictable long-term costs.”

For Dell’s part, Chhabra says: “There's going to be this balance of a hybrid world where, we believe, a lot of organizations will decide ‘I've reached that inflection point where it is going to be more advantageous for me to actually have my own token generator’.”

“Of course, some portion of things [will be] in the cloud or directly hitting the APIs,” he adds. “But trying to get a grapple on those economics and getting maximum utilization [and] driving down your token generation costs – per token costs – is actually going to really involve having your own infrastructure and being able to utilize that in an effective manner.”

Catch up on all the news and analysis from Dell Technologies World 2026 here.

AI agents were the name of the game on the first day of Dell Technologies World 2026, with multiple speakers indicating that they make a step-change in business interest in AI.

During CEO Michael Dell’s opening keynote, guest speaker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reflected on the level of technology available when the two companies launched Dell AI Factory with Nvidia.

“Two years ago, when I was here, we had just started with … generative AI as the product. Generative AI can, of course, generate content, but remember it can also generate content to think with – generate thoughts,” said Huang, “which led us to reasoning, which led us to planning, which led us to agentic systems. So now we have, we now have – for the very first time – useful AI.”

Huang claimed that agentic AI is significantly shortening the timeframes for tasks such as software programming, which can be reduced from a month to a week.

“Because it’s so useful, the number of people using agents is now all over the place,” he said. “Every enterprise – my company, [Dell Technologies] – everybody’s using agents all over the place to do software development, DevOps, SRE, all of our CI/CD work, QA, testing.

“The amount of software work that we do in the company now supported by agents is incredible.”

Steven Dickens, CEO and principal analyst at HyperFRAME Research, told ITPro that he agrees, but with some caveats.

“Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “I think that the generative AI phase where we got AI to write for us was useful for some professions (content marketing would be a good example) but it largely was limited to tasks that require summarization and writing. The agentic AI value is a lot higher because AI is now not merely writing it is doing.”

“We are still very early into this phase of adoption. The usefulness of agents is still relatively nascent and is still in the early adopters phase,” he added. “As tools like Amazon Quick, Perplexity Computer and Claude CoWork become more widely adopted then the perception of usefulness will radically change. This will also be the same beyond personal productivity in areas like AIOps for instance.”

One key challenge for the widespread adoption of agents, however, is how resource-hungry they are. For Dell Technologies, the answer lies in bringing agents out of the public cloud and returning them on premises.

This potentially solves the issue of high costs associated with high token use – a single Dell Technologies developer reportedly ran up a $3,400 token bill in 24 hours – but companies will still have to reckon with the cost of buying hardware outright.

Michael Dell believes, nevertheless, that this is the way the wind is blowing.

“The real agent takeoff hasn’t really even happened in broad scale across millions of companies,” he told delegates at the company’s Partner Conference, which is also happening at Dell Technologies World.

“I think it’s still pretty early in all this and … the models, they’re great! But they’re the worst they will ever be, and they’re going to keep improving. There doesn’t seem to be an asymptote in the capabilities.”

ITPro's managing editor Jane McCallion is at Dell Technologies World all week. Click for all our coverage of the event, including news and analysis.

Welcome to our Dell Tehnoloiges World 2026 live blog. Dell Technologies World 2026 is taking place this week at the Venetian Conference Center in Las Vegas, with Michael Dell kicking things off on Monday 18 May with his opening keynote speech.

You can follow along live here with all the updates as they happen, plus catch up with all our coverage of the show so far here.

There's a steady stream of delegates arriving to the Venetian Conference Center already, with just under two hours to go until Michael Dell's Day One opening keynote kicks off. With the title "Unleash the Future", the whole keynote is expected to last for about an hour.

The auditorium is starting to fill up as delegates take their seats ahead of Michael Dell's Day One Keynote. We have about five minutes to go before the Dell Technologies CEO is expected to take to the stage.

Lights, camera, action. We're being treated to a short video reel with absolutely thumping.

And here is the man himself. He's talking up the power of AI – unsurprisingly – claiming that models are "smarter than all of us".

For enterprises, he says, AI is becoming an operating model, not just a tool. He's also spoken about the number of partners Dell Technologies is working with in AI.

Diogo Rau, EVP and chief information and digital officer at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, has joined Dell on stage. He's talking about the history of Lilly, which is 140 years old now, stretching from the American Civil War through World War I and onwards, including the discovery of penicillin*, synthesising insulin, and using the scientific method in medicine.

(*ITPro is aware of the existence of Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin and father antibiotics)

Fast forwarding, Lilly was one of the earliest investors in supercomputers, having installed a Cray Two system back in the day. It has recently installed one of the most powerful supercomputers in the pharmaceutical industry.

According to Rau, AI and digital twins have become cornerstones of what the company is doing now as a manufacturer of medicines and treatments.

Dell Technologies World 2026 kicks off next week, running from 18-21 May at the Venetian Convention Center in Las Vegas.

The event is Dell Technologies’ big annual get together and we can expect to see new product reveals, partnerships, and strategies. I’ll be reporting live from the ground – you can keep up with all the coverage here – but ahead of the event kicking off here are three things I expect to see at Dell Technologies World 2026 and one I don’t.

The event is Dell Technologies’ big annual get together and we can expect to see new product reveals, partnerships, and strategies. I’ll be reporting live from the ground – you can keep up with all the coverage here – but ahead of the event kicking off here are three things I expect to see at Dell Technologies World 2026 and one I don’t.

New enterprise infrastructure

Dell Technologies has already been making hay in the AI PC market, but we’ve seen less movement in its infrastructure business.

Last Dell Technologies World, there were a few new cybersecurity features added to PowerStore, Data Domain, and PowerScale, but that’s not the same as new hardware. In 2024, there were some updates to the company’s NAS offerings but again, this was quite limited.

In recent months, however, the company blog has been leaning hard into the idea that data center hardware is key to the success of enterprises’ AI strategies. In March, the company published a joint blog with Nvidia and Schneider Electric highlighting the AI features of its PowerEdge servers.

That same month, the company’s VP of corporate strategy, strategy growth, and activation, Mindy Cancila, published a blog highlighting the need for scalable server solutions, the possible cost savings of running AI inference on-prem, and how important direct-to-chip cooling will be in the coming years.

Conveniently, this is something Dell Technologies’ servers, storage appliances, and other enterprise hardware can offer, so expect to see some significant enterprise hardware announcements this year.

AI factories and AI platforms

Dell’s partnership with Nvidia on AI factories has been a cornerstone of announcements both in 2024 and 2025. I can almost guarantee AI factories will get a mention – not just because of the announcement made at Nvidia’s own GTC conference in March, but also because Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is listed as one of the featured speakers.

Of course, Nvidia isn’t the only chipmaker Dell works with and on 7 May the company announced an expanded Dell AI Platform with AMD, as well as support for AMD Instinct MI350P PCIe GPUs in PowerEdge XE7745 and R7725 servers. While it’s not a given, there’s a good chance this deal will get a mention, even if there are no other big AMD-led announcements.

Agents, agents, agents

When I spoke to Dell CTO John Roese at Dell Technologies World 2025 for the ITPro Podcast, I asked him what the topic of conversation would be in 2026. Straight away he answered “agents, agents, agents”.

He’s certainly right that AI agents have been the talk of the IT sphere in the 12 months since then, for better or worse. Mainly worse. Indeed, there’s already been a very public snafu where an AI agent deleted a startup’s entire production database, as well as all backups.

Dell Technologies, however, is seemingly still optimistic on agents. With just days to go until the start of Dell Technologies World – and as I was writing this article – the company released some research it had jointly commissioned from IDC with Nvidia on the subject of governments’ appetite for agentic AI adoption.

According to the research, 71% of government decision makers believe agentic AI will “accelerate AI adoption in government”. However, it also goes on to outline concerns around sovereignty, privacy, security, and skills

No new laptops

In January 2025, Dell Technologies retired the Dell XPS, Latitude, Inspiron, and Precision laptop ranges in favor of a more streamlined (and arguably more confusing) naming convention. New devices would be named either Dell, Dell Pro, or Dell Pro Max, depending on device specs and capabilities.

12 months later – almost to the day – the XPS range experienced a Lazarus moment, with the company’s COO Jeff Clarke resurrecting it on stage at CES 2026.

According to Clarke, the company had listened to its customers and taken the decision in reaction to the still present demand for the device range.

You can read the full write-up of that product launch from our reviews editor, Bobby Hellard, here, but as a result I think it’s unlikely we’re going to see any major announcements on the laptop front.

Dell Technologies has announced a slew of new end-to-end AI services and hardware solutions, including new support for enterprise-scale data processing and new server racks equipped with the latest Nvidia chips.

Announced at Nvidia GTC 2026, the new features for Dell AI Factory with Nvidia include expanded support for data analytics, processing, and parallel file storage.

Since it was first announced in 2024, Dell has launched over 240 products, updates, and releases within Dell AI Factory with Nvidia and more than 4,000 Dell customers have started to use the offering.

This includes the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a world leader in genomics, which has used the offering to go from generating three genomes over the course of a decade to one genome every seven hours.

“The Dell AI Factory with Nvidia provides a unified, vertically integrated data foundation that brings analytics as well as AI together in a single stack,” said Varun Chhabra, SVP, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies.

Dell has announced a range of new offerings within the AI Data Platform with Nvidia, which underpins the wider Dell AI Factory with Nvidia offering, including a new Data Orchestration Engine.

This is a no-code and low-code engine, a result of Dell’s December 2025 acquisition of the end-to-end AI development platform Dataloop.

Chhabra explained that it helps to automate data workflows for customers and improve visibility for data engineers and data scientists, to reduce the amount of manual data tagging and data pipeline creation that workers need to do.

Dell is also bringing new AI support across the Data Analytics Engine, which makes SQL data accessible via natural language processing (NLP), as well as support for Nvidia’s CUDA-X libraries within Data Search Engine and Data Processing Engine.

All told, Dell said the improvements unlock 12 times faster vector indexing and three times faster data processing. In internal tests with Qwen3-32B, the new features also enabled 19 times faster time to token.

Dell touts new storage offerings for the largest enterprises

Another major addition to Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is the Dell Lightning File System, a new tier 0, ultra-high performance storage offering intended for maximal GPU utilization and the lowest possible latency.

Dell Lightning File System delivers data transfer speeds of up to 150GB/sec per rack unit and is intended to complement Dell PowerScale and Dell ObjectScale for the most intense customer demands.

“The Lightning File System is really aimed at the largest of the large AI workloads, whether it's neoclouds, GPU as a service providers, or extremely high performance needs such as high frequency trading,” said Chhabra.

Dell said the Lightning File System offers twice the throughput of competing parallel file systems and 20 times greater performance than competitors using flash-only scale-out file systems.

Customers looking to launch large-scale AI storage clusters will also benefit from Dell Exascale Storage, a new software-defined, three-in-one architecture for deployments exceeding 10PB.

It brings together Dell PowerScale, Dell ObjectScale, and Dell Lightning File System, with up to 800 Gbit Ethernet network connectivity and 6TB/sec performance per rack performance.

“The goal here is this is not a new storage product, but a storage delivery vehicle, if you will, that customers can use to adapt different storage personalities over time without having to re-platform,” Chhabra explained.

“So if certain AI or HPC workloads are best suited for file data, they can deploy PowerScale on the Exascale Storage. If they are looking at modern applications or modern AI applications that require large-scale object storage deployment, they can deploy ObjectScale on the same cluster.

PowerEdge for frontier models

In addition to its Dell AI Factory with Nvidia announcements, Dell has used Nvidia GTC to unveil a slew of new hardware advancements.

First, Dell announced PowerEdge XE9812, a rack-scale system for the Dell Integrated Rack 9000 (IR9000) that comes packaged with the Nvidia Rubin NVL72.

Dell said the PowerEdge XE9812 can achieve 10 times lower cost-per-token compared to Nvidia Blackwell chips and needs four times fewer GPUs to inference a mixture of experts (MoE) model.

New NVLink capabilities within the rack allow it to achieve GPU to GPU bandwidth of up to 260TB/sec.

“The single rack has more bandwidth than the entire internet, which is kind of incredible,” Chhabra said.

The server is fanless, as it’s fully liquid-cooled, and quick disconnects for hot swaps and maintenance that doesn’t disrupt operations.

In addition to its latest frontier offering, Dell also announced new 100% liquid-cooled server offerings in the form of the PowerEdge XE9880L, XE9885L, and XE9882L.

“All of them have HGX Rubin GPUs and the difference between the systems is really the CPU choices,” Chhabra explained.

The XE9880L comes with dual-socket Intel Xeon CPUs, the XE9885L comes with next-generation AMD Venice CPUs, and the XE9882L comes with Rubin Arm-based CPUs.

These servers support up to 144 GPUs per rack, which are liquid cooled for higher performance per kilowatt. The servers house Nvidia HGX Rubin NVL8, which pack 8 Rubin GPUs in a 2U chassis interlinked with NVLink v6 connectivity and complemented with BlueField data processing units (DPUs) and Spectrum-X Ethernet switches.

Overall, Dell recorded a 5.5x performance improvement with this server family compared to B200 GPUs.

Dell also announced the Dell PowerEdge R9822 and M9822, which bring Nvidia’s Vera CPU to rack-scale environments.

“These two servers extend the power edge portfolio with support for the Vera processors, as I mentioned, which enable organizations to deploy modern ARM based compute on trusted power edge infrastructure,” said Chhabra.

He added that the servers are intended to support AI factories, high-bandwidth data analytics, databases, cloud-native applications, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Finally, Dell is launching the PowerEdge R770, R7725, and R7715, which feature Nvidia RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell GPUs for three times faster data processing than L4 tensor core GPUs, four times faster visual compute and content creation than the previous generation.

PC announcements for edge AI

addition to Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell Ultra GB300 Superchip, the workstation comes with 496GB LPDDR5X CPU memory and 252GB HBM3e GPU memory.

It is capable of 20 petaflops of FP4 computing power, enough to run trillion-parameter models entirely at the edge.

Jon Siegal, SVP of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies, said the Dell Pro Max with GB300 is “purpose-built” to meet next-generation agentic AI workloads.

Dell is also bringing back the Dell Pro Precision workstation range, with a range of offerings designed to run trillion-parameter models locally for specialized industries such as healthcare, deep tech, and financial services.

In response to a question from ITPro, a Dell representative also indicated that the firm is seeing some customers fine tuning trillion-parameter models into billion-parameter small language models (SLMs).

Dell’s mobile workstations are now thinner, lighter, and more powerful. The Dell Pro Precision 5 series, available the latest Intel Core Ultra H processors and Nvidia RTX Pro discreet graphic options, delivering a blend of powerful graphics performance and up to 50 TOPS of AI processing capability.

The Dell Pro Precision 7 series is aimed at designers and creators, with RTX Pro 3000 discrete graphics in addition to the Intel chips.

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Dell Technologies has announced a series of updates to its partner program for 2026, including new incentives and resources designed to tap into evolving market opportunities.

The move builds on the vendor’s incentive-led channel revamp introduced in 2025 with the aim of further standardizing and automating how it does business with its channel ecosystem.

Last year’s initiative centered on improved storage and client incentives, sustainability tools, and a more consistent tier structure than previous iterations.

Dell’s 2026 updates build on those foundations, introducing new resources to further simplify how partners do business with the company and strengthen collaboration across the ecosystem.

Incentive-driven updates

One of the major additions to the program is the reintroduction of Titanium incentives.

After enhancing growth incentives for Titanium partners back in 2025, Dell has now restored Titanium partner eligibility for Storage & Client New Business Incentives.

Storage Competitive Swap rebates have also been restored in a move the firm said will provide more targeted support.

The company also revealed it is continuing its VxRail Transition Program, designed to help partners transition customers from Dell VxRail to modern infrastructure tied to the Dell Private Cloud service.

The initiative means partners will be able to earn more through incentives and rebates while also benefitting from no-cost training and migration services, trade-in or try & buy programs, and financial services offerings.

Dell is also sharpening its focus on storage and client growth with the introduction of a reimagined Storage & Client Growth program for its largest partners, offering two target levels of achievement geared towards driving profitability and attainability.

Modernizing the partner experience

Elsewhere, Dell is making notable changes to modernize its overall partner experience.

The company has implemented AI to automate key processes, including accelerating the sharing of demand signals with partners, enabling closer collaboration between partner and Dell teams, as well as streamlining the quoting and buying experience.

A new integrated partner experience will also be introduced at the Dell Technologies World event in May, bringing together tools and processes which the company said will drive more seamless channel interactions.

In an announcement, Dell said these updates prioritize intentional growth in critical areas to help partners “execute with operational excellence.”

"Our mission is clear: to empower our partners to navigate the evolving landscape, lead customers through critical transformations and capitalise on growth opportunities,” said Denise Millard, Dell’s chief partner officer.

“We are committed to our omni-channel approach and these updates will help us go further and faster with our partner ecosystem."

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Can your company recover after a cyber attack? Perhaps not as well as you think, according to new research from Dell Technologies.

The vast majority of organizations have a cyber resilience strategy – 99% of those surveyed, according to the tech giant – but nearly two thirds of IT leaders think their bosses are overestimating their readiness.

That hubris is what the tech giant describes as "resilience debt", and it refers to the gap between what organizations believe they can recover from and what they can actually recover from

"That mismatch isn’t an abstract philosophical disagreement – it’s a leading indicator of resilience debt," said Colm Keegan, Senior Consultant at Dell Technologies, in a blog post. "Because when leaders believe they are more prepared than they are, they stop asking the deeper operational questions."

Those questions can include when the last recovery test was run, whether backups are validated or if the company just hopes they work, and if the team tried running a full restore.

Keegan argues that "recovery readiness decays unless it is actively refreshed," leaving organizations feeling prepared but caught off guard when they do fall victim to a cyber attack.

For example, backups can be corrupted or even targeted by attackers, while documentation ages out of use as staff depart or infrastructure changes.

The Dell study found that enterprises that test their recovery process monthly will have a 55% success rate, while those that test less frequently fall to 38%.

Crucially, it found that failing to recover is common. More than half (57%) of organizations surveyed said they did not recover as well as hoped following a recent incident or drill.

"That's resilience debt coming due," said Keegan.

Resilience debt vs security debt

Keegan compared resilience debt to security debt, which includes unpatched flaws or outdated policies. Recent research from Veracode shows eight-in-ten public sector organizations are leaving flaws unpatched for a year, while separate research from the security company shows remediation times have grown 47% over the last five years.

While there's no question that security debt also needs addressing, Dell is arguing that resilience debt is harder to spot and a tougher sell for companies.

"Resilience debt is more deceptive – because it remains hidden until the worst possible moment: When the organization actually needs to recover," he said.

Dell found that 78% of enterprises invest more in preventing attacks than prepping for recovery. While this is expected, Keegan said that imbalances often leave recovery “underfunded, untested, and underprioritized”.

"Prevention-only strategies don’t eliminate resilience debt; they accelerate it,” he added.

How to address resilience debt

So what should companies do to target resilience debt? Treat it as a strategic capability with board-level support, just like security, rather than an afterthought.

That idea echoes comments made by a Gartner analyst last year, who noted security leaders need to stop seeing resilience as a "tick box exercise”.

At a practical, technical level, Dell suggests that could include building "isolated cyber vaults" to protect critical data, using automated validation to test recovery, and running regular tests of recovery systems.

As with security debt, the good news is that enterprises can make headway in addressing the problem. But progress on this front depends on swift action, according to Keegan.

"Resilience debt is real. But it’s not irreversible."

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

AI agents could excel at managing workers and completing mid-tier tasks, according to first-hand testing from Dell Technologies.

John Roese, CTO and chief AI officer (CAIO) at Dell Technologies, told ITPro that the real value of agents is starting to emerge, even as unsophisticated tools are unhelpfully sold as ‘agentic’.

“There's tremendous agent washing,” Roese told ITPro.

“Everybody is calling everything they do an agent which is not true. Agents are autonomous systems, they are not a chatbot and we have been spending a great deal of time on actually maturing the ecosystem, getting real autonomous agents to work.”

Dell’s work on AI agents has included the development and delivery of the agent to agent (A2A) protocol and model context protocol (MCP), which help connect AI applications to external systems.

Dell defines an agent as a piece of software containing four distinct components:

• A large language model for ‘world knowledge’, including communication and reasoning.
• A knowledge graph, embedding specialized information and memory rules into the agent so it has access to data it wasn’t trained on and the capacity to build skills.
• MCP, an open standard for agent tool use and data access.
• Inter-working protocols such as A2A, which connect agents together in teams or fleets.

Roese contrasted this model with the approach of traditional and generative AI tools to date, which have focused on knowledge retrieval.

“Every tool to date has done one thing in AI: it's unlocked proprietary data,” Roese told ITPro. “That's what chatbots do, that’s what RAG does, ChatGPT does that, that's it, that's all it does – unlock data that exists somewhere that you can't access it.

“Agents do work, and you can't do work with a tool that was designed to just unlock data. You need an actual agent.”

AI agents could be managers one day

The first ‘wave’ of AI adoption was centered on unlocking this proprietary data, augmenting human capabilities with technology. This next chapter will go one step further, however.

“Agents aren't about that,” Roese said. “Agents are about the second part, they're about digitizing the skills, taking the skills that you have that are locked up in people's brains and making them scalable, making them repeatable with technology.”

The vast majority of deployed agents are intended as simple productivity tools or expert workers. But Roese said that recent testing by the tech giant found agents excel at completing simple tasks that aren’t being completed within organizations due to lack of time or low cost benefit.

“The big ‘aha’ moment was some of the work we can apply [agents] to is actually not done now by people, nor will it ever be done by people, because it's not worth doing it with people.

Indeed, Dell is beginning to deploy what it calls ‘steward agents’ or ‘hygiene agents’ and using them to clean its CRM data.

Roese gave the example of a private hospital in the UK which has struggled to keep its database on the specialties of doctors up to date. Historically, the only way to do this was to ask doctors to spend hours filling in forms, hire data workers to complete the task, or hire admin workers to do it at a poor return on investment.

Agents that work based on outcome, with access to data and reasoning capabilities, could constantly work in the background to keep this database accurate and current.

“You wouldn't say it's a high value task, but it's incredibly interesting if it happens because healthcare gets better but to do with people, or even augmented people, would be unaffordable.”

Much has been said about the potential for workers to become the ‘bosses’ of AI agent teams, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff having last year predicted today’s CEOs will be the last to oversee an all-human workforce.

But Roese suggested that the reverse will also be a trend in the near future, with agents used to coordinate complex human work.

“So what we started to try is, what if we give an agent the goal of making sure that the entire team accomplishes a task and we plug it into teams and communication streams?”

“It’s not the thing doing the work, but it knows that the goal is to build this product or to deliver this outcome, or to run this campaign, or whatever.”

For example, Roese suggested an editor within a news organization could use an agent to monitor the collaboration between staff writers on the team, with the system intervening to keep workers on track.

Dell has rolled out these coordinator agents in production environments and workspaces, Roese said, to overcome the “human entropy, the fact that large, complex processes rely on the goodwill of human beings to work well together”.

“So what we found is agents don't replace the humans but they act as this continuity manager, this coordinator,” he explained.

“Because they're on seven by 24, because they can reason, because they can do just a lot of work, forever, if you put an agent as the glue layer on a team of people and machines working together on a task, the entire task becomes more predictable.”

Throughout 2026, Roese added, firms will be surprised by the extent to which agents transform their organizations.

Dell’s AI ROI

In 2024, Roese told ITPro that Dell had narrowed its internal AI attention down from 800 potential projects to just four key areas that could deliver the most value: global supply chain, global services, global sales, and global engineering.

Since then it has deployed AI tools across these areas and is already seeing a significant return on investment.

“The net effect when we did our financial results after that full year of or just about a full year of those four big areas – in their first generation, it's just the starting point – was that our revenue last fiscal year grew by about $10 billion and our absolute cost declined by 4%.

“Now that that may not sound important, that's never happened in 41 years of Dell. Every other time that the revenue went up, the cost went up with it.”

This is not just a result of adopting AI tools, but transforming the entire company including its people and processes in anticipation of the “AI era”, Roese said.

For example, one of Dell’s major internal AI focuses in 2025 was to use AI to give back time to salespeople, allowing them to spend their day generating more money.

“It turns out 40% of their life was spent preparing to be in front of customers, that is now significantly less and the result is that they're just spending more time in front of customers,” he said.

At the same time, he added, Dell has increased the number of salespeople it employs, as fewer people are needed behind the scenes to handle outdated technology and data.

“One of the trends that we've seen across all of these is when you do AI right, you may or may not have more or less people, that's not really the goal. But what you do find is that the people that are in your organization shift to the core work: if you're in sales, you sell.”

There’s intense interest in replicating these results across Dell partner and customer organizations. Roese told ITPro that he spent much of 2025 helping customers to move AI projects into production and to validate what had been, up to this point, theoretical benefits.

“We track how many one on one customer conversations I have and it was hundreds, hundreds of meetings with chief AI officers, CIOs, boards of directors, CEOs about this topic so there's an insatiable appetite.”

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Dell Technologies argues that there's no longer a debate between public cloud or private – instead, the focus is on using all of the available options and finding ways to manage that complexity.

"The conversation around enterprise IT is changing," said Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Multicloud Product Management for Dell Technologies in a blog post. "It’s no longer about choosing between public cloud and on-premises infrastructure."

"Nor is it a simple decision between running traditional or modern workloads. Today, the real challenge is how to manage all of these different environments and application types together, simply and consistently."

To help, Dell is expanding its existing partnership with Microsoft – which already offers AX System for Azure Local, later adding PowerFlex to the mix – and will offer support for Dell Private Cloud and PowerStore on Azure Local, Microsoft's system for running Azure services on in-house data center infrastructure.

"Microsoft and Dell Technologies share a vision of empowering businesses to achieve more through innovation and collaboration," said Dean Paron, VP of product management for Azure Edge Infrastructure at Microsoft.

"By bringing Microsoft Azure Local to Dell Private Cloud and PowerStore, we’re helping customers simplify their IT operations and unlock the full potential of their hybrid cloud strategies," he added.

The partnership comes amid a rising debate over cloud repatriation – the idea of moving workloads from the cloud back to on-premise infrastructure to help reduce costs, increase control, or improve flexibility.

While firms like Basecamp and Ahrefs have saved millions making such a move, hybrid remains the most popular option at 68% of companies, according to one survey.

Private Cloud on Azure

Gordon said the partnership delivered a first for private setups on Azure, and this latest announcement shows the duo want to take things further.

"Dell Private Cloud is the first Azure Local offering… a full-stack solution across compute, external storage, and networking, delivered from a single vendor, with end-to-end solution-level support included," Gordon said.

With Dell Private Cloud, Azure Local users will get automated lifecycle management, with end-to-end automation to help reduce complexity, as well as independent scaling, allowing compute and storage to be managed separately to reduce costs.

Plus, the system offers a disaggregated approach – as Dell puts it – that gives businesses a future-ready, adaptable system.

"This combination of Dell Private Cloud and Dell PowerStore delivers the simplicity, flexibility, and performance customers need to manage both traditional and modern workloads across their IT estate, Gordon said.

PowerStore for flash storage

The addition of PowerStore, Dell's enterprise-grade, all-flash storage solution, will give flexible scalability with built-in data protection, Gordon added.

"Always-on data reduction lowers storage costs without impacting performance, backed by the industry’s best 5:1 DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) guarantee," Gordon added.

Early access for Azure Local with Dell Private Cloud and PowerStore will begin in Spring 2026, the company confirmed.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Dell Technologies doubles down on AI with SC25 announcements
• Dell Technologies wants to cut infrastructure costs – here's how it plans to do it
• Dell Technologies just announced a major data platform overhaul

SC25 – the annual global supercomputer conference – is taking place this week in St Louis, Missouri and Dell Technologies has used the occasion to announce a slew of new AI-focused products and updates.

In its PowerEdge server range, the AMD Instinct-powered XE9785 and XE9785L – both of which were first announced at Dell Technologies World 2025 – are now generally available. The company also introduced a new Intel-powered PowerEdge server, the R770AP.

All of these servers, Dell Technologies said, are optimized for working with AI workloads, with the XE9785 and XE9785L capable of “breakthrough performance with AI training and inference”. The R770AP, meanwhile, can “handle demanding HPC and AI workloads”.

The company has also introduced two new switches, the Dell PowerSwitch Z9964F-ON and Dell PowerSwitch Z9964FL-ON. According to the firm, these switches are able to deliver 102.4 Tb/s of switching capacity, which means they can “meet the needs of the most intensive AI fabrics”.

AI Factories and Nvidia partnership boost

Dell Technologies also announced updates to its AI Factory offering, which is underpinned by Nvidia hardware.

AI factories have been a cornerstone of Dell’s AI strategy since 2024, with Nvidia chips underpinning it from the start. The idea of these factories is in essence a bundled offering, with Dell Professional Services helping deliver the ‘factory’ to the buyer rather than them having to put it together themselves.

In the announcements from SC25, Dell Technologies revealed its ObjectScale and PowerScale storage devices are now integrated with the Nvidia NIXL library. NIXL library is in turn part of Nvidia Dynamo, described by Nvidia as “a distributed inference-serving framework” built to deploy and automate AI models at “data center scale”.

Additionally, Dell AI Factory with Nvidia also now includes Dell PowerEdge XE7740 and XE7745 servers, both of which feature the chip-maker’s RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and Hopper GPUs.

Finally, the Dell Automation Platform is also available on Dell AI Factory with Nvidia and, according to Dell Technologies, “will deliver smarter, more automated experiences by deploying validated, optimized solutions with a secure framework”.

All of these products are available immediately.

Computacenter has filed its own claim against Broadcom and Dell as part of a wider lawsuit brought by Tesco.

Last month, the supermarket giant announced plans to sue Broadcom for £100 million over VMware licensing contracts. Broadcom bought VMware in 2022 for $61 billion, sparking a backlash from its own customers by changing licensing terms in a way that led to price increases for many.

Tesco said via court filings that the licensing changes led to prices it paid for VMware software to jump by 237%, accusing Broadcom of refusing to negotiate and taking advantage of its market dominance to hike up prices.

So what does any of this have to do with Computacenter? The IT reseller was pulled into the lawsuit as a defendant, because Tesco got its licenses for VMware via Computacenter.

As spotted by The Register, Computacenter has filed a legal claim against both Broadcom and Dell. Court filings seen by the publication noted that Computacenter used Dell to distribute VMWare software, and in 2021 quoted Computacenter for subscriptions for Tesco to use VMware's Tanzu Basic and Tanzu Mission Control for five years with an extra four years of support.

Computacenter is suing for damages if Tesco wins because it hasn't supplied those services at the prices quoted, despite the agreement, and Dell for breaching its contract. Dell told the publication that because of "the changes within VMware and actions by Broadcom" it couldn't fulfil the promised renewals at the pricing.

The Register also noted that Broadcom has filed documents in its defense against Tesco's initial suit, saying it can't deliver products it doesn't sell anymore, among other claims.

VMware upheaval

The lawsuit from Tesco is just one complaint of many from VMware customers after Broadcom overhauled the virtualization giant's licensing structure post-acquisition.

Broadcom said the changes were designed to "streamline" its partner program, and led to fewer companies able to resell VMware products. Critics, meanwhile, have said it appears Broadcom is focusing on larger players.

In response, the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has essentially called for the acquisition to be reversed, with its own research showing some prices have gone up by between 800% and 1,500%.

That trade body said new agreements were "often signed under significant pressure", adding: "Consequently, while Broadcom has succeeded in transitioning VMware customers to its new licensing framework, these customers continue to face substantial financial burdens and operational disadvantages due to the imposed terms."

While CISPE warned that some customers remain locked into the VMware ecosystem, rivals have started to launch competing solutions, including Pure Storage, NetApp, and HPE's VM Essentials.

In the meantime, CISPE has called for Broadcom to restore fair licensing by offering advance notice of six months or more to contractual or pricing changes, offer transparent pricing with no penalties for over or under use, and have agreed charges for peak usage.

If that doesn't happen, CISPE called for regulatory action against Broadcom's "harsh, exploitative practices" — if that happens, we could see further trouble for Broadcom beyond the legal cases brought by Tesco and now Computacenter.

ITPro approached Computacenter, Broadcom, and Dell for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• VMware partners face more disruption with latest Broadcom changes
• Broadcom EMEA CTO claims the company has been able to solve most of its customer issues following VMware acquisition
• VMware license changes could spark a wave of data center 'devirtualization'

Dell Technologies has issued a warning to customers after the discovery of critical vulnerabilities in its Storage Manager service.

The three flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-43995, CVE-2025-43994, and CVE-2025-46425, command CVSS scores of 9.8, 8.6, and 6.5, respectively.

All versions of Dell Storage Manager prior to version 20.1.21 are affected by the vulnerabilities, and the company has urged customers to immediately follow remediation steps to avoid potential compromise.

Remediation is available for versions 2020 R1.22 and later, according to the advisory.

“Dell Technologies recommends all customers consider both the CVSS base score and any relevant temporal and environmental scores that may impact the potential severity associated with a particular security vulnerability,” the company told customers.

Dell Storage Manager flaws: What you need to know

Ranked as a critical vulnerability, CVE-2025-43995 is an improper authentication flaw in the DSM Data Collector feature for Dell Storage Manager.

In a customer advisory, the company said this could enable an unauthenticated attacker with remote access to bypass protection mechanisms and exploit exposed APIs.

“An unauthenticated remote attacker can access APIs exposed by ApiProxy.war in DataCollectorEar.ear by using a special SessionKey and UserId,” the company said.

The second of the three flaws disclosed, CVE-2025-43994, is a missing authentication for a critical function vulnerability.

This means an unauthenticated attacker could trigger information disclosure, enabling them to steal configuration data, which could allow additional network intrusions.

With a “medium” rating of 6.5, CVE-2025-46425 contains an “improper restriction of XML external entity reference” vulnerability. Dell noted this could allow an attacker with remote access to exploit the flaw to access sensitive files.

What can customers do?

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and Co-founder at CyberSmart, said while there are no signs the flaws have been exploited in the wild, the advisory from Dell should still be a “serious concern” for customers, urging them to act immediately.

“The first step to remain safe is to update to Dell’s newest version immediately which has been released to address these issues,” he said.

“Next, harden access to the management interface and restrict it to trusted networks, enforce multi-factor authentication, and monitor logs for anomalous authentication or API activity.”

Akhtar added that frequent vulnerability scanning alongside adoption of “least privilege” principles are also advised.

“Even if an attacker reaches storage tooling, lateral movement must be made as difficult as possible."

MORE FROM ITPRO

• The unseen risks of cloud storage for businesses
• Why firms ignore vulnerabilities at their own risk
• Patch management vs vulnerability management

Dell Technologies has announced extensive updates to its AI Data Platform, aiming to help enterprises enhance the performance and scalability of AI workloads.

The advancements include enhanced partnerships with Nvidia, Elastic, and Starburst that expand Dell’s data engineering capabilities.

Dell’s AI Data Platform enables organizations to convert fragmented data into actionable insights, and the new features focus on enhancing storage and data engines across the tech giant’s services.

The changes are about catering to the growing demand for scalable AI infrastructure.

For storage, Dell’s network-attached storage (NAS) component, PowerScale, now integrates with Nvidia GB200 and GB300 NVL71 – much of this update is about reduction as it will use up to five times less rack space, 88% fewer network switches, and up to 72% lower power consumption when compared to rival services.

According to Dell, the integration will also deliver 16,000-plus GPU-scale.

Meanwhile, ObjectScale, Dell’s object storage platform, is now available as both an appliance and a software-defined option on Dell PowerEdge servers. This will offer speeds up to eight times faster than previous generations of all-flash storage.

It will also include Amazon S3 over RDMA support as a technical preview starting from December.

Dell Technologies eyes data engine boost

The announcements also included a roll-out of new and improved data engines, in partnership with AI specialist Elastic. These are for Dell’s Data Search Engine, which integrates with MetadataIQ data discovery software to search billions of files on PowerScale and ObjectScale using granular metadata.

For developers, it means they can build smarter RAG applications in tools such as LangChain with the engine. What’s more, they save compute time and keep vector databases current by ingesting only updated files.

Meanwhile, a collaboration with Starburst will deliver new features in Dell’s Data Analytics Engine, such as an Agentic Layer, which uses LLMs to turn raw data into business assets in a matter of seconds.

This is described as ‘enterprise-level AI model monitoring and governance’ as it gives teams control over both access and use.

“Access to all of your data is the foundation for enterprise AI success,” said Justin Borgman, the CEO of Starburst.

“Our expanded collaboration with Dell Technologies unites Starburst’s data federation with Dell’s AI Data Platform, giving organizations the ability to unlock insights from anywhere and accelerate their path to real-world AI outcomes.”

All ObjectScale features will be available as a preview in December, while the Data Analytics Engine’s Agentic layer will be released in February 2026. Dell’s PowerScale services with Nvidia, however, are already available.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Dell is betting big on AI PCs, but customers are less enthusiastic
• Dell Technologies World 2025: All in on AI
• Dell Technologies wants to cut infrastructure costs – here's how it plans to do it

Dell has unveiled a suite of new servers and cooling systems at Dell Technologies World 2025 that it says can reduce energy usage and increase performance across a variety of workloads – most notably AI.

“The industry is facing a pretty critical challenge as GPU demand is skyrocketing for energy capacity to keep pace,” said Varun Chharba, SVP of infrastructure and telecom marketing at Dell.

Pointing to the company’s pedigree in both liquid cooling specifically and advanced cooling more generally, Chharba continued: “We're very excited to add to our portfolio here … the Dell power cool enclosed rear door heat exchanger, or the eRDHx and the Integrated Rack Controller.”

Compared to standard rear door heat exchangers, the eRDHx offers up to 80kW of air cooling capacity per rack and up to 60% reduction in cooling energy cost, according to Dell.

To achieve this, eRDHx has a self contained airflow system, which Chharba described as an “industry first” and is compatible with warmer water temperatures, ranging from 32ºC to 36ºC. This, Chharba said, reduces reliance on chillers, which “helps [customers] reduce costs and supports their sustainability goals”.

Meanwhile, the integrated rack controller provides rack-scale visibility, real-time thermal monitoring for better risk management, and advanced leak detection and integrates with the open managed enterprise software Dell has for its servers and racks.

Dell targets server performance boosts

In addition to the eRDHx, Dell Technologies also took the wraps off the Dell PowerEdge XE9712 with Nvidia GB300 NVL72 – one of a number of Nvidia-powered servers announced as part of a focus on AI factories during the first day of Dell Technologies World.

This particular piece of hardware, according to Dell, “offers efficiency at rack scale for training” and can, the company says, carry out 50 times more AI reasoning inference output.

In addition, it features Dell PowerCool technology, also announced at the conference, which the company claims allows businesses to achieve five times greater power efficiency.

Catch up with all the rest of the news and analysis from Dell Technologies World, as well as our live blog.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• Dell orders staff back into the office as the company shakes up hybrid working practices
• Dell partners with 6WIND to drive virtualized networking capabilities
• What is infrastructure as code (IaC) and what are its benefits?

Welcome to ITPro's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2025, coming to you live from the Venetian Convention & Expo Center in Las Vegas. Thousands of delegates, made up of Dell Technologies' partners and customers, have made their way to the Nevada desert to find out what the company has in store for them for the coming year and beyond.

Day one kicked off with a strategy and customer-focused keynote from CEO Michael Dell, while day two will likely be more hardware focused with chief operating officer Jeff Clarke leading proceedings.

With only a couple of hours to go until the keynote gets underway, the Venetian Conference & Expo Center is buzzing with activity. I've so far heard speculation about a change in incentives for partners, while some of the images on the Las Vegas Sphere last night seem to hint at announcements to do with laptops and PowerStore.

There's only about 30 minutes now until the opening keynote and the auditorium at the Venetian Conference & Expo Center is starting to fill up with delegates, who are taking their seats to the sound of 'Poprocks', our house band for the morning.

Lights down, roll VT we are off! A montage of factories, F1 cars, call centers and electricity pylons gives an idea of some of the topics that might be up for discussion this morning

Michael Dell, CEO and founder is now on stage on "Dell Technologies Way" where the future is built, he says, talking about the future of business and AI.

"You know, at Dell, we love Data," he says. And AI is the future of data, business and our lives, he claims.

"We're creating a future where intelligence amplifies human potential on a massive scale," says Dell. "Standing on the corner of Dell Technologies way and a new age of the world's most advanced intelligence factories are right here, from ... AIS Colossus to core weave, ServiceNow, Mistral and many others."

"These are specialized deployments requiring high value engineering, custom designs, all delivered at unprecedented speed. Here's an example of what we're deploying right now. It's 110,000 GPUs, the electric, direct, liquid cool," he says. "It uses 240 megawatts of power. It's 27,500 GPU nodes, 2800 racks, 6000 network switches, 27,000 miles of network cables. That's enough to wrap around the earth and then some six miles of water pipes and 77 miles of rubber hose to circulate the 100,000 gallons of water needed to recirculate throughout the system"

Not everyone needs such specialised infrastructure, he says, "but you do need AI". This, he says can take the form of AI PCs or "small, domain-specific models running on the edge".

Michael Dell has been joined on stage by Larry Feinsmith, head of global technology strategy at JPMorgan Chase, to talk about how his company is using AI and Dell's products.

"We firmly believe that technology is a differentiator and the heartbeat at everything we do at JPMorgan Chase," Feinsmith says. "In terms of our priorities, four key priorities, the first is to build best in class digital experience for our clients, customers, employees, many of the 44,000 software engineers, and for these experiences, as [Michael Dell] said, we want to leverage that exit by the data and put AI into everything we do." This includes cybersecurity, private cloud, and LLMs.

Turning now to data, Feinsmith says it is the "cornerstone to achieve value from AI".

Here's a common refrain we're hearing more and more from large businesses – that AI isn't new. Feinsmith says JPMorgan Chase has been using AI for more than a decade, for "things like machine learning models, for fraud, personalization, marketing, [and] operations". But generative AI, he says, is a "transformational shift".

Michael Dell is now solo on stage again to talk up some of the company's hardware innovations – with a focus on AI, naturally.

"Personal productivity is being reinvented by AI," he says. "The Windows 10 end of life is coming, and we are ready."

"We've simplified our portfolio and made it easy for you to choose the right system for you, and we give you the choice of the latest from Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm," he adds.

Turning to data center hardware, Dell talks up the capabilities of PowerStore, PowerEdge, Networking, and PowerFlex.

There is more to come on this tomorrow, he says, so come back here then for the news as it's announced.

Michael Dell is joined on stage now by Seemantini Godbole, CTO of hardware store Lowe's, about how her company is using Dell products and generative AI.

"Lowes is a great example of a company that's reinventing itself for AI."

AI's not here to replace employees, though, he says.

"AI is a collaborator that frees your teams to do what they do best to innovate, to imagine and to solve the world's toughest problems," says the Dell Technologies CEO. "And Dell is the infrastructure, the backbone enabling enterprises to think faster, to act smarter and to dream bigger.

"Last year at Dell tech world, we introduced a new kind of factory that produces intelligence, and today we have now more than 3000 customers running Dell AI factories with a lot of success," Michael Dell continues. "The Dell AI factory is up to 60% more cost effective than the public cloud, and recent studies indicate that about three fourths of AI initiatives are meeting or exceeding expectations."

He claims that this means ROI and productivity gains from 20%-40%, with 85% of enterprisees planning to move generative AI workloads back on premises in the next two years, with the help of Hugging Face, Red Hat, Cohere, Meta, Mistrale, and Microsoft.

We are now finally onto some product announcements!

The main hook is Dell Technologies AI Factory with Nvidia 2.0 – the original having been announced last year.

I predicted we'd have a special guest at Dell Technologies World 2025 – it seems I was only half right. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is not here in the flesh, but instead we have a pre-recorded video of Michael Dell and Huang having a fireside chat.

The tow CEOs discuss the announcements they have made this week, as well as some of Dell's other recent hardware announcements in the Dell Pro line.

Asked if he wants to give any advice to the Dell Technologies World audience, Huang says: "This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. In the last 60 years, this is the biggest reinvention that you and I have seen. This is incredibly exciting technology. You want to engage it. The impact to your company is incredible. And you want to be an early adopter. This is the beginning of a decade of transformation. But you don't want to be second."

We're now onto the "final stop of Dell Technologies Way", to talk about practical, everyday uses of AI with a video from a startup that creates a robot called Norby that helps people learn new languages and with speech therapy.

Final thought – "Ai is the new electircity and Dell is the grid powering the transformation, connecting the data, the intelligence and the innovation," says Dell.

"At our core, we're about solving the world's toughest challenges and enabling human requirements, and that's happening every day in laboratories, on manufacturing floors, in boardrooms and dinner tables around the world, and we are so proud that it's all right here on our street where ideas turn into actions."

And with that, the first day keynote of Dell Technologies is done. Catch up with all the latest news from the event here and come back at 10.00am PT tomorrow for the day two keynote.

Welcome to day two of Dell Technologies world here in Las Vegas Nevada. To recap yesterday’s keynote from CEO, chairman and founder, Michael Dell, took a strategic tone with a focus on AI, data, and how they’re being used. While the company did make some product announcements, the keynote was light on detail, although we were told there would be more information on some of the new “modern data center” products in today’s keynote.

While we had two customer speakers yesterday, from JPMorgan Chase and Lowe’s, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, wasn’t there in the flesh, with a video of him and Michael Dell discussing Dell Technologies AI Factory With Nvidia 2.0 run instead.

ITPro understands Huang was supposed to attend but travel problems meant he wasn’t able to get back from Computex in time. Let’s hope the same fate hasn’t befallen any of today’s speakers, who are:

• Brian Venturo, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CoreWeave
• Arthur Lewis, president of the infrastructure solutions group at Dell Technologies
• Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere
• Sam Burd, president of the client solutions group at Dell Technologies
• Rob Johnson, executive director of workforce digital services at USAA

We've got a steady stream of delegates making their way through the Palazzo towards breakfast at the Venetian conference & expo center ahead of today’s keynote. Once again a real buzz about the place as we approach the opening session.

The main theater is open and seats are starting to fill up with delegates ahead of the day two keynote with COO Jeff Clarke.

What can we expect this morning? Well yesterday Michael Dell said we'd hear more about the Modern Data Center announcements, such as the appliances featured below. There may be some additional announcements today on this topic, although there's equally plenty to talk about based on yesterday's news.

Given we also have a representative from CoreWeave on the schedule, generative AI discussion is also firmly on the table, as well as some examples of how Dell's customers are using its technology. Only five minutes to go...

Lights, camera, action – here comes Jeff Clarke

Jeff is giving an outline of what we're expecting today, including updates on what was announced last year.

He's talking about the acceleration of generative AI update, and how expected CapEx will exceed what it took to send Neil Armstrong and Buzz aldrin to the moon – even adjusting for inflation.

Now we're talking about Dell's AI factories. Announced last year, they've grown massively, as this graphic shows.

"In the past year, from PCs to the data center to the largest cluster, note the build out edgely network and what's happening at the edge at scale implementation, but optimize storage, optimized networking, the services around that put together a set of capabilities that, again, has unmatched our industry, and we've only continued to build on that" he says.

"I love a good top 10 list, so I'm gonna start our morning off [with one]."

Clarke has moved on to talking about the challenges companies face when implementing generative AI. Is there really a return? How is it done? Do they have the space, power and tools?

"In the spirit of misery loves company, I thought I'd share the detailed experience we've had in this journey over the past two years," he says.

When they first started, they were "horrified" and "shocked" to discover there were over 900 products branded as AI that the leadership had no idea about.

"We were all over the place" he says.

"Data Governance wasn't as tight as we wanted it to be, or should have been. We were confused and often interchanged bots and automation Gen AI, confusing ourselves. We were doing that, we lacked strategy architecture.

"In other words, we had a bunch of well intended people working on the latest and coolest technology, and if they called it that, they got funding."

So what did they do? First, they put in place some governance and rules, focused on data – where it lives, how it's used etc. Then the chief AI officer, John Roese, led the charge in deciding how the company would go forward with AI programs and projects.

Clarke gives an example of how this is working in practice via its global services organization. It used the data that it already has in this department, which is a lot – there are 10s of thousands of reams in over 170 countries with 250 million assets in the field to draw on.

This was largely in silos, however – or "data islands" as Clarke calls them. So they created a "data mesh" to pull it all together and applied generative AI to extract value from it.

"Nothing here is going to be new and unique to you, but for us, it was our first effort at taking what we've been talking about now for the better part of two years, a series of AI techniques with open source software like machine and deep learning and, of course, generative AI, we had a combination of variety of prompt engineering very capable large language models," he says.

"Every one of our service team members now has a genius on their shoulder telling the best way to solve any issue that they have when they're on the phone. So we created service assistance for all of our service members in our organization."

He says that as a result, agents close more cases and they do it faster.

"Our dispatch rates are down, our repeat dispatch data, our respect, our repeat our repeat dispatch data are down even more. Our rates are down more and then, most importantly, the thing that matters most is customer satisfaction time.

"So we're able to solve more cases faster with a higher resolution rate, whether it's the first time in the second time that a route dispatching, our close rates were down, and the ultimate outcome is a more happy customer."

We now have the co-founder and chief strategy officer at CoreWeave on stage Brian Venturo, to give some more color and insight on what Clarke describes as "Big AI".

Venturo is talking about how the company started as a hobby.

"We were building GPU mining rigs in my grandmother's garage," he says – an activity that confused his grandfather.

"arly on, our entire goal was, how do we get the scale? How do we have as many GPUs as we can? We'll figure it out after," he says.

"When we took our first customer, we were a crypto Mining Company, which is great, because you never had to talk to customers," Venturo says to laughter from the audience.

"Nobody yelled at you, made money or you did it. And the day that we took on our first customer, we became a business. "

"Dell has been incredible, from a speed, you know, a partnership perspective around engineering, your engineering teams world class, better than everybody else we've worked with. You solve problems, you proactively solve problems, and you really work with us when we need the most," he says.

Venturo says there will be no "killer app" for generative AI.

"There's going to be a subtle impact to everyone's lives. To make a decision ... to make it easier to do things, to make your kids schedules easier, to manage deal with your shopping cart better when you're ordering information car, like, there's going to be so many ways that AI impacts us," he says.

"I think it's going to happen very, very quietly, and it's going to be a lot more nuanced than the world expects today. I think that the scale challenge is real," he says. "To serve all these applications and everybody in this room, you need a lot of GPUs. And the market and the world has to understand that we have to invest in the infrastructure and the critical it to do so."

With that Venturo is gone, and we're now moving onto the possibilities of agentic AI.

Agentic AI is very compute heavy, says Clarke.

"They require a world class AI infrastructure, the Dell AI factory with Nvidia as an example, to process what will likely be yet another multiple of tokens in the order of 100 times. So reasoning 100 times tokens 100 times. That's 10,000 times more processing capability than we would have thought a year ago. That's the future."

Out next speaker is on the stage, Arthur Lewis, president of the infrastructure solutions group at Dell Technologies.

"I hope we've seen that adult technologies we are not simply witnessing the next wave of innovation. We are engineering it. We are not simply building AI tools. We are redefining the future architecture of an intelligent enterprise. Our AI platforms and solutions are private cloud platforms, and our full stack innovation is designed to turn data into intelligence and complexity into clarity, we are empowering customers to deploy AI where it makes sense to modernize without compromise and to innovate at scale with confidence," he says

Lewis is talking up some of the capabilities of Dell Technologies hardware, including PowerScale and ObjectScale.

He's also talking up the new partners on Dell AI Factory, including AMD, Intel, Hugging Face and others. you can read full details on that here.

Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, is now on stage to talk about the two companies' partnership. Focusing on Cohere North, its "secure AI agents platform.

"It enables employees to automate complex workflows with seamless data integration, comprehensive security features," Gomez says.

"The partnership between Dell and cohere marks a significant step forward enterprise. AI, you know, from agentic workloads to seamless integration and robust security. We're delivering a solution that enhances innovation without increasing complexity."

Gomez leaves the stage and Lewis is now onto the big announcements of the day – significant updates to cybersecurity features on PowerStore, PowerScale and Data Domain.

Next speaker: Sam Burd, president of the client solutions group at Dell Technologies

"I can tell you that AI revolution is not a spectator sport, and with Dell Technologies, you're not just ready for the future. We are. You are defining it," Burd tells delegates.

Burd's impressing upon the audience the importance of the edge for AI and that, for most enterprises, the PC is "the ultimate edge device".

"Fast forward to 2030, for a few years beyond that, there will be 2 billion AI PCs, each capable of hundreds or 1000s of tops Jeff's token machines made personal."

And here's one he (or, rather, Dell) made earlier: Burd holds up a Dell Pro Max with GB10. This can best be described as an AI mini PC. It really is very small, but as the company says has some pretty impressive specs.

Announced at GTC, it's capable of one petaflop of calculations per second, which Burd says is "great for an AI developer to get going with their own dedicated desk side AI resources, or my favorite, stack and couple together and you've got a mighty edge inference machine".

Applause, whoops and cheers from the audience – they love it apparently, and Burd says he does too.

That's not the only hardware on show today, though. Burd also introduces the Dell Pro Max Plus laptop – announced yesterday – once again to applause from the audience. It's an AI laptop that's capable of doing inferencing on device. You can read more details about the Dell Pro Max Plus here.

Clarke is back on stage to wrap up.

"AI is taking off like a rocket ship. We've innovated at an unmatched pace," he says. "Our Dell AI factories ... we're in the early innings of enterprise AI. I hope I made it clear, if you don't start now. You will be behind your competitors."

"Dell technology, understands the needs of enterprises, better than. anyone else in our marketplace. We have the right solutions, we have disaggregated architecture with the strongesst ecosystem of partners that you've seen today," he says.

"We're here to help accelerate you on your journey. Enjoy the show!" And with that, Clarke leaves the stage.

That's the end of the keynote, but not the show. You can read all our coverage so far here, and stay tuned for more news and analysis throughout the rest of the week.

John Roese may be one of a few people to hold the job title of Chief AI Officer (CAIO) — but he'd like to see more like him.

Last year, Roese — who also holds the title of Dell Technologies' CTO — said more companies need a CAIO like him in order to ensure AI is adopted and implemented strategically.

"If you’re not the chief AI officer and you’re not empowered and supported by your board and your leadership, your ability to prioritise the right AI work in a company is limited," he said. "You may not get any budget, you may not have control, and there may be competing AI efforts that are not the right ones."

Regardless of his job title, it's difficult to imagine anyone not listening to industry veteran Roese when it comes to AI projects — Dell Technologies isn't his first rodeo, after all.

Who is John Roese?

Born in Boston, Roese studied electrical and computing engineering at the University of New Hampshire, and has kept up with innovation research — he holds 20 patents in topics including networking, location-based services, and security.

From then, he started his career at Cabletron before becoming CTO at Enterasys, followed by Broadcom and Nortel. He later joined Huawei as senior VP and GM for North American R&D, later setting up that company's Enterprise Global Competency Centre. Alongside those roles, Roese has sat on the boards of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Telstra, Ericsson, and One Laptop Per Child, among others.

When he joined EMC in 2012 as CTO he was already a 20-year veteran of the IT industry; there, he was tasked with leading EMC's work on the trends of the day: cloud, big data and trusted IT. In 2015, Dell bought EMC for $67 billion — it remains one of the biggest tech deals in history — and Roese became the CTO for DellEMC before the company emerged as Dell Technologies, with Roese as CTO. Last year, he added CAIO to his role.

Roese on AI ROI

As a long-running tech leader with a job title like CAIO, Roese has a practical way of looking at AI: does it offer a return on investment (ROI)? Last year, he told ITPro that all AI decision making is driven by whether it will deliver ROI.

"The very first thing we evaluate before anything else, before technical or security, is ROI," said Roese.

"And now the process in Dell is if you have a great idea and you want us to evaluate it as potentially something we're going to do, the very first question is show us the ROI."

That pragmatic approach is a shift from a previous consensus building approach at the company. "This is not consensus building; our first go-around we tried to do that by the way, we tried to get consensus and it went nowhere," he said. "It’s not the fault of anybody – if you take 15 business leaders, bring them into a meeting and say they’re going to collectively decide on which project they should prioritize of the 15 projects they all want, guess which one they all vote for? They vote for their own and that's what we pay them to do."

He also told ITPro that Dell originally had 800 internal AI projects — and Roese had to whittle them down to 16.

Although he's been at such work for decades, Roese says he's still learning — and that's why it's so important for Dell to use AI as well as develop it. "Every time we're doing it ourselves, we're learning about what the products need to be, what the ecosystem needs to be, how we get this to the broader market. So, you know, the phrase ‘drinking your own champagne’ or ‘eating your own dog food’, whichever one you prefer, we are absolutely doing that at scale."

Meta is reportedly laying off workers across several divisions as part of a continued cost-cutting drive.

First reported by The Verge, roles at WhatsApp, Instagram, and the Reality Labs units are among those in the firing line. The move from Meta appears to coincide with an ongoing reorganization scheme within specific teams.

Some workers have taken to social media in the wake of the move to confirm their roles have been cut. Jane Manchun Wong, who became known for revealing unannounced features coming to apps before joining the Threads team in 2023, is among those affected.

"I’m still trying to process this but I’m informed that my role at Meta has been impacted," she wrote on Threads. "Thank you to everyone, especially my Threads and Instagram teammates, for my wild journey at Meta."

"Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy," a company spokesperson told ITPro.

"This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees."

This isn't the first time in recent years that Meta's made layoffs. In 2022, it shed 11,000 employees, around 13% of its total workforce, after being overoptimistic about its prospects following the Covid pandemic.

2023, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously described as the ‘year of efficiency’, saw the tech giant lay off another 10,000 workers and cancel 5,000 job vacancies in a bid to reduce headcount and cut costs.

The latest move marks the second batch of layoffs at the Reality Labs division in a matter of months. In the summer, Meta confirmed plans to restructure the hardware unit into two groups, resulting in a small number of job losses.

Meta cuts the latest in another troubling year for big tech

Meta isn’t alone in its cost-cutting efforts in recent years. A host of other major players in the global technology industry have followed suit, largely due to challenging macroeconomic conditions in the wake of the pandemic.

In August, for example, Cisco announced plans to cut thousands of roles - around 7% of its staff - on top of the 4,000 it cut earlier in the year.

At around the same time, Intel announced plans to cut its workforce by 15%, or 15,000 roles, blaming poor returns on AI and saving a reported $10 billion. Dell also cut 12,500 staff, or around 10% of its workforce, on top of a further 20,000 roles shed over the previous 15 months.

Other major tech firms making large rounds of layoffs since the beginning of the year include Microsoft, eBay and PayPal.

However, according to data from Layoffs.fyi, the number of job losses across the tech industry is lower than at the start of 2023, with a total of 263,000 jobs cut across the tech sector last year.

ITPro has approached Meta for comment.

Companies give a lot of reasons for employees to come back to the office — innovation, communication, productivity — but as many as a quarter are also quietly hoping that staff quit.

That's according to research from BambooHR, which surveyed companies on the return to office (RTO) trend, finding that 18% of HR professionals and 25% of VP and c-suite executives hoped for some level of voluntary turnover because of a tougher RTO mandate.

Indeed, 37% of managers, directors and executives believe that layoffs that followed RTO policies happened because fewer people quit than expected.

And they're likely to get their wish, at least in part. More than one-quarter (28)% of employees said they would consider quitting if RTO policies were enacted at their workplace.

"By using RTO mandates as a workforce reduction tactic, companies are losing talent and morale among their employees," the report said. "Nearly half (45%) of the employees who have experienced RTO report significant talent loss within their organizations — talent that was highly valued and wished to be retained."

RTO mandates demotivate staff

Beyond losing staff, companies face other challenges if staff are unhappy about RTO mandates. "This level of dissatisfaction could lead to a further drain of talent, affecting not just morale but also the stability and innovation potential of the workforce," the report found.

Lauren Neal, the founder of Valued at Work, said she's seen RTO mandates being used for layoffs.

“I have seen an organization mandate RTO to a different office — changing from central London to over an hour’s commute away," she said. "The office did not have the space to accommodate all employees, and the thinking was that some would quit."

"I personally feel this dishonest approach does the organization no favors — especially when other personnel can see what’s happening. A lack of trust leads to disengagement and even higher rates of attrition due to a toxic workplace culture."

No wonder then that companies such as Microsoft has made it clear a RTO mandate is not on the cards.

The reasons behind the return to the office push

Of course, companies don't say that they're hoping to cut headcount when they issue an RTO mandate — instead they talk about working practices and innovation.

When Amazon ordered staff back to the office five days a week, CEO Andy Jassy said the aim was to "invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other".

But staff aren't entirely buying those reasons. After the Amazon announcement, one employee suggested the aim was to encourage employees to quit, an idea called "quiet firing".

Dell Technologies cited similar motivations with regard to workforce synergy when it demanded a return to the office for staff. This incident also prompted a significant backlash among employees.

Of course, quiet firing isn't just about RTO mandates, noted Glenn Hayes, employment law partner at Hill Dickinson.

“This is the more subtle phenomenon of “nudging” employees slowly but surely out of the door, often indirectly and to avoid conflict, such as not giving pay rises, opportunities for advancement, or putting in place unpopular, but not unreasonable, demands designed to encourage resignation," he says.

Companies should be wary of taking this route though, as this could create larger problems further down the line.

"While employers would need to be careful to avoid constructive dismissal claims in this regard, it may allow them to keep those they want while giving gentle encouragement to those they don’t want to eventually leave," he says. "It’s a careful tightrope to walk.”

Legally dubious

Using an RTO mandate to slash headcount has a significant risk of backfiring, according to Fiona Morgan, a senior employment lawyer with Arbor Law.

"They risk negative workforce morale and even industrial disputes, with adverse consequences for productivity and reputation," she told ITPro.

"And they risk employment tribunal claims from categories of employees who are adversely affected – such as indirect sex discrimination claims from working mothers who may struggle to meet the requirement to return to the office, and claims for failure to make reasonable adjustments and/or discrimination arising in consequence of disability from disabled staff — or staff who have caring responsibilities for disabled family members."

Companies may well have a contractual right to require staff to return to the office, but they shouldn't use it for quiet firing, Morgan added Morgan.

"UK employers who wish to slim down their workforce would be advised to follow a transparent, fair and compliant redundancy consultation process instead," she said.

More from ITPro

• Eric Schmidt’s car crash Stanford interview showed big tech’s true colors on remote work
• Not everyone working from home is procrastinating – but I miss doing it in the office
• Summer will soon be over – but is anyone coming back to the office?

Amazon staff are up in arms over a controversial return to office (RTO) mandate imposed by the company earlier this month.

The new working arrangements, unveiled by CEO Andy Jassy in mid-September, will require all staff to return to the office five days per week from January 2025, and will see hotdesking scrapped.

Amazon has employed a hybrid work policy since mid-2023, with staff required to work from office sites a minimum of three days a week.

However, senior leadership at the tech giant said the policy change aims to bolster productivity by returning to pre-COVID working practices, enabling the workforce to “invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other”.

“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote in a letter addressed to employees.

“I’ve previously explained these benefits, but in summary, we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”

Within just weeks of the announcement, staff have signaled their disapproval of the move, according to reports from Fortune.

Hundreds of workers at the tech giant have complained about the decision, suggesting that it will both negatively impact their personal lives and produce little improvements in terms of productivity.

Sentiment on the RTO mandate was revealed in an anonymous survey created by Amazon employees, Fortune reported last week, and has been circulated among staff via Slack channels.

The creators of the anonymous survey noted they plan to share its results with Jassy and other senior executives in a bid to “provide them with clear insight into the impact of this policy on employees”.

“We are seeking honest, constructive feedback on the recent decision to require a 5-day return to the office schedule,” the survey introduction reportedly states.

The survey revealed that the average staff satisfaction rating following the RTO mandate stood at 1.4 out of a possible 5, highlighting the disapproval of affected workers.

Amazon isn’t alone in sparking a worker revolt

The backlash from some Amazon employees marks the latest pushback against controversial RTO policies. Earlier this year, for example, Dell Technologies faced a similar staff revolt after changing its working practices.

This pushback came after the tech giant implemented new rules requiring hybrid workers to track their office attendance to prove they were entering a physical office space 39 days per financial quarter.

Meanwhile, fully remote workers were also warned they would no longer be eligible for promotions or role changes under the move. Nearly half of the firm’s workforce opted to remain fully remote regardless of the policy, however.

The scale of worker unrest in the wake of this dispute was then laid bare in an internal company survey, with leaked documents at the time showing staff satisfaction had plummeted.

The annual ‘Tell Dell’ survey, which is used to track workforce satisfaction, uses an employee ‘net promoter score’ (eNPS) to measure whether a worker would recommend the company as a place to work.

The company-wide eNPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of “detractors” from the percentage of “promoters”.

Results of the survey uncovered widespread dissatisfaction, with the latest eNPS score dropping from 62 to 48.

Dell’s RTO mandate wasn’t the only contributing factor to this decrease in satisfaction, however. Sizeable layoffs at the tech giant were also believed to have played a key role in the dip.

More from ITPro

• If I’d spent billions on fancy office spaces, I’d want staff working from them too
• Eric Schmidt’s car crash Stanford interview showed big tech’s true colors on remote work
• Pushing staff back to the office? You may want to reconsider

Hackers are claiming that they've carried out a second hack on Dell within a week, accessing internal files by compromising the company’s Atlassian account.

According to reporting from Hackread, data allegedly leaked in the breach is believed to include information from Jira, Jenkins, and Confluence, including data associated with Jira files, database tables, and schema migrations.

It amounts to 3.5GB of uncompressed data, and may contain information about Dell’s internal infrastructure, including system configurations, user credentials, security vulnerabilities, and development processes.

This second breach was carried out alongside a second hacker, named 'Chucky', according to ‘grep’, the threat actor behind the original attack.

Dell is already investigating a data breach that took place on 19 September, and that's believed to have involved the leak of the data of more than 1,000 employees.

Last week, 'grep' revealed the breach after posting on the dark web forum BreachForums, offering a large Dell database for sale.

"In September 2024 Dell suffered a minor data breach that exposed internal employees data," read the post.

"Were affected over 10 800 employees belonging to Dell and their partners. Compromised data: Employee ID, Employee full name, Employee status, Employee internal ID."

Dell confirmed to another publication that it’s aware of the claims and that its security team is currently investigating the incident.

Dell data breach shines more light on data security

Erfan Shadabi, cybersecurity expert at comforte AG, said the latest incident at Dell is a serious cause for concern and highlights the importance of robust data security practices.

"This data breach on Dell demonstrates just how important it is for every organization to rethink data security. Dell must now assess just how much sensitive information has been released,” Shadabi commented.

“Hopefully, they can navigate this situation effectively with minimal damage..

"The distressing fact is that ordinary individuals and users invariably find themselves at the mercy of organizations failing to fortify their data against potential breaches. The fallout from such incidents can range from identity theft to financial losses, leaving users vulnerable to a myriad of cyber threats."

Grep appears to have been busy of late. Earlier this month, they claimed to have stolen 20GB of sensitive data from French tech and consulting firm Capgemini.

The data was said to include databases, source code, private keys, credentials, API keys, projects, and employee data such as names, email addresses, usernames, and password hashes.

Dell is yet to comment on this second breach. ITPro will update this article if and when the company confirms.

While some of us dream of TV-sized monitors on our desks, the reality of the modern office is that space is often at a premium. That's why monitors such as Dell's U2723QE are such an appealing prospect. This smart 27in monitor packs in a 4K IPS panel, color-accurate performance, an adjustable stand, a five-port USB-C hub with 90W charging, and KVM functionality for under £500. Intrigued? We certainly were.

Monitors with a 4K resolution aren't newsworthy these days, but there are benefits to squeezing 8 million plus pixels into a modest 27in diagonal, and especially so for office use. Text is crystal clear – dramatically more so than similarly sized 1440P monitors – and when that clarity goes hand-in-hand with superb color accuracy, you have a recipe for productivity nirvana.

On that front, Dell's decision to employ a high-quality IPS Black panel both boosts contrast and provides good color accuracy in both sRGB and Display P3 modes. For professionals who prize image quality as highly as business-friendly features, the Dell is an easy sell.

There are some slightly finicky aspects – some USB-C-equipped laptops and desktops may have to pick between a 60Hz refresh rate and maximal USB 3.2 data speeds via the built-in hub, something which we'll discuss in more detail later – but overall it's hard to be too critical at the price. Suffice it to say, the U2723QE does an awful lot right for the money.

Dell UltraSharp U2723QE monitor: Design and features

From the moment you start unpacking the Dell, it's clearly a cut above your average 27in monitor. The slender stand clicks and screws into place in seconds – there are no tools or screwdrivers required – and the solidity of the build immediately feels like a step up from cheaper rivals.

That sturdy-feeling stand does almost everything you could ask of it, too, providing 150mm of height adjustment alongside tilt, swivel, and rotation into portrait mode. There are some minor niggles, though. For instance, while it is possible to adjust the height one-handed without the base lifting up, tilting the monitor backward or forwards is a two-handed job – the base rocks back and forth as the tilt mechanism is just a tad too stiff. The rather rough, rumbly feel to the height adjustment is another nitpick; it doesn't slide smoothly up and down like the best we've encountered.

Still, it's hard not to appreciate the overall design. The neat little angled cut-out at the base of the U2723QE's stand allows you to slot cables through quickly and easily, gathering them neatly to the rear, and this neatness goes hand in hand with a smart two-tone silver and black design which looks pretty slick from any angle. It's a really tiny thing, but we also appreciated the fact that the stand doesn't protrude very far beyond the panel's bottom edge: you can push your keyboard right back up to the base's flat edge when you're not using it, and reclaim some precious desk space.

Connectivity is impressively well-rounded. You get HDMI 1.4 and DisplayPort 1.4 inputs, both of which are HDCP 2.2-compliant, alongside a USB-C input at the rear which receives 4K 60hz signals and provides up to 90W of power via USB-PD. A second upstream USB-C port and DisplayPort output are both masked off with orange rubber bungs – you can use these ports to take advantage of the Dell's KVM functions and/or daisy chain a second monitor. There's also a gigabit Ethernet socket for good measure and this is shared to any connected computer – albeit only one at a time – via the USB connection.

The in-built USB hub is generously appointed: there are four USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports at the rear supplemented by a further two – a single USB-C and single USB-A port – positioned just underneath the monitor's bottom-left-hand corner. All six of these ports only supply 15W of power, though, so while you can charge a device from any of them, it'll be at a reduced rate.

It's good to find some cables in the box – a 1.8m DisplayPort cable, a super-speed USB-A to USB-C cable, and a plain 1m USB-C cable – but it's a shame Dell couldn't stretch to an HDMI cable, too. It's also a tad shortsighted to only provide a 1m USB-C cable; a 1.8m cable would have provided more flexibility.

And much as we love the simplicity of USB-C, the U2723QE's implementation isn't quite plug and play: it requires the user to pick between two modes, High Resolution or High Data Speed. Activate High Resolution mode and the USB-C cable passes uncompressed 4K 60Hz images but limits data transfers to USB 2.0 speeds. Switch to High Data Speed mode and you'll get full-speed 10mbit USB 3.2 transfers, but DisplayPort 1.2 devices are limited to 4K 30Hz images while DisplayPort 1.4 devices with support for Display Stream Compression (DSC) get compressed 4K 60Hz images. It's also worth noting that you'll need to use High-Resolution mode while daisy-chaining a second monitor from the U2723QE if you want 4K 60Hz signals across both displays.

The Dell's KVM features are a nice bonus. This means you can also connect a second PC or laptop to the U2723QE and share one set of peripherals and any other devices connected to the monitor's USB ports without constantly needing to swap cables. We'd think twice before using it to share an Ethernet connection, though, as it only provides a wired network connection to one computer at a time – you may be better off buying a basic Ethernet switch for this purpose.

If you are tempted to make use of Dell's KVM functions, make sure to install Dell's Display Manager software, as this lets you set up a hotkey to switch from one computer to the other, and set up the monitor's Picture in Picture (PiP) and Picture by Picture (PbP) functions. While it is possible to swap between machines and activate PbP or PiP via the monitor's OSD and four-way rocker at the back of the monitor, it's not something we'd recommend – it's very fiddly and slow.

Dell UltraSharp U2723QE monitor: Display quality

Even at its default settings, the Dell serves up some gorgeous images. Peak brightness hits a sensible middle ground of 170cd/m2 – a bit bright for artificial office lighting, but probably about right for offices with more natural light – and the overall color accuracy is excellent, with the monitor producing faithful colors and natural-looking skintones.

The monitor defaults to the DCI-P3 color space out of the box, and the measurements are very respectable. The average Delta E of 1.48 indicates that colors are accurate enough for color-critical work, and the U2723QE only exceeded a Delta E of 2 in the more saturated red part of the spectrum, where the Delta E peaked at 3.48. Color temperature is very slightly cool at 6,595k, but it's not far off the ideal of 6,500k.

Dab the four-way joystick on the rear, however, and it's quick and easy to flick the display into sRGB mode. That done, the color accuracy improves dramatically, with the average Delta E dropping to a professional-class 0.33, with a maximum Delta E of 0.99 peaking in the most saturated reds. Contrast remains consistent at 1,649:1, as does brightness at 170cd/m2 and color temperature is again a whisker away from a perfect 6,500k with a measured 6,564k.

Contrast is pretty much as good as it gets for IPS displays, too, thanks to the IPS Black panel. The measured contrast ratio of 1659:1 falls short of Dell's claimed 2,000:1, but it's still good by IPS standards.

Dell's other claims are closer to reality. The U2723QE's is quoted as covering 100% of the sRGB color gamut and 98% of DCI-P3, and our test results largely agreed: we measured 100% sRGB and 97% DCI-P3 coverage. It also manages to cover around 85% of the Adobe RGB color space.

The U2723QE's semi-glossy anti-glare coating is likely to divide opinion: in brighter rooms, the panel is dramatically more reflective than fully matte monitors. On a black background, this means you can see a fuzzy, heavily blurred reflection of yourself and anything around you. Compared to a monitor with a fully matte anti-glare coating such as the Philips 27E1N1600AE, the difference is huge: the Philips reduces those same reflections to dim, barely there shadows. Suffice to say, the Dell's glare can be distracting, so it isn't the best choice for bright, open plan offices.

We measured contrast and brightness across 25 points on the Dell's panel, and the results were acceptable. Brightness dipped by 9.4% in the panel's bottom right corner and 5% in the upper left, and contrast dropped below the recommended tolerance levels across the entire left and bottom edges of the display. Viewed in a dark room, backlight leakage is obvious across those areas, too, which is disappointing at this price – we had a £200 Philips 27E1N1900AE alongside it, and the Dell's backlighting was, if anything, slightly more uneven around the edges of the panel.

HDR performance isn't a huge draw for office use, but the Dell U2723QE does support it – and it also offers a very rudimentary local dimming feature. The local dimming activates in any of the HDR modes, but as there are only 4 zones and edge-lit backlighting, it's of very little benefit. We tested in the DisplayHDR400 mode and peak brightness increased from around 368cd/m2 in SDR to just over 375cd/m2 with HDR enabled, but that's still nowhere near bright enough to make HDR highlights dazzle. Make no bones about it: if you want great HDR, then you need a pricier OLED display, or a Mini-LED panel with numerous local dimming zones at the very least.

Motion performance is another downside. The Dell's claimed GtG response time of 8ms isn't exactly fast, and this was noticeable in both Blur Buster's motion tests and general usage – the smearing and lack of clarity around moving objects is quite obvious. Cranking up the overdrive mode to its Fast setting does improve clarity slightly, but it adds so much inverse ghosting around the edges of objects that we preferred leaving it off.

Dell UltraSharp U2723QE monitor: Is it worth it? 

At this price, anyone needing respectable HDR performance or gaming-friendly features such as adaptive sync or high refresh rates should be looking elsewhere. While the Dell U2723QE is just fine for casual gaming, it's really not that kind of monitor.

Those with a more pure productivity focus, however, will find much to appreciate. It's by no means perfect, but most of the Dell's flaws begin to fade once you consider what you're getting for the money. If the Dell U2723QE's combination of clarity, color accuracy, and useful features ticks most of the boxes on your wishlist, then there's a good chance you'll be in a forgiving mood.

Dell UltraSharp U2723QE specifications

Dell Technologies and Red Hat are teaming up to bring the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) to Dell's PowerEdge servers, aiming to make it easier to develop, test and deploy generative AI models.

The idea is to help organizations to implement successful AI and machine learning strategies to scale their IT systems and power enterprise applications across their businesses.

"AI by nature requires extensive resources spanning enabled servers, compute power and GPUs,” Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager, Generative AI Foundation Model Platforms at Red Hat.

“As organizations evaluate and implement GenAI use cases, it is imperative that they build on a platform that is able to scale with their business while also providing the agility to experiment and develop AI-driven innovations.

"By collaborating with Dell Technologies to validate and empower RHEL AI on Dell PowerEdge servers, we are enabling customers with greater confidence and flexibility to harness the power of GenAI workloads across hybrid cloud environments and propel their business into the future."

The duo said they're providing a more consistent AI experience on optimized, AI-enabled hardware solutions, all delivered on RHEL AI on Dell PowerEdge. This involves continuously testing and validating hardware solutions, including Nvidia accelerated computing, with RHEL AI.

"In today’s fast-paced market, it is critical for organizations to be equipped with validated and trusted AI-enabled solutions to kick-start their GenAI use cases," said Bob Pette, Nvidia's vice president, enterprise platforms.

"Red Hat and Dell will extend GenAI capabilities for customers with an optimized experience for Nvidia accelerated computing, including Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, with Dell PowerEdge servers and RHEL AI."

RHEL AI brings together open source-licensed Granite large language models (LLMs) from IBM Research, InstructLab model alignment tools based on the Large-scale Alignment for chatBots (LAB) methodology, and a “community-driven approach” to model development through the InstructLab project.

The solution, which will be available in the third quarter of this year, is packaged as a bootable RHEL image for individual server deployments across the hybrid cloud.

It's included as part of Red Hat OpenShift AI, Red Hat’s hybrid cloud machine learning operations (MLOps) platform, for running models and InstructLab across distributed cluster environments.

"Validating RHEL AI for AI workloads on Dell PowerEdge servers provides customers with greater confidence that the servers, GPUs and foundational platforms are tested and validated on an ongoing basis," said Arun Narayanan, senior vice president, Dell Technologies.

"This simplifies the GenAI user experience and accelerates the process to build and deploy critical AI workloads on a trusted software stack."

Dell Technologies’ recent earnings call shows its AI focus is beginning to bear fruit despite a rocky start in the generative AI race, with the tech giant reporting record growth for server and networking products. 

Revenue surged 9% to $25 billion in the last quarter, the company revealed. The positive quarterly results follow massive job cuts at the hardware maker.

At the beginning of last month, Dell slashed 10% of jobs, saying the reorganization was designed to focus the company on AI — a similar AI-centered motivation has fueled job cuts at Cisco, Intuit, and Dropbox.

Revenue was up, but so was income, with a 3% increase to $2bn for operating income and net income up 7% to $1.37bn.

Such restructuring makes sense given the AI-focused bump in its results. For Dell's second quarter, its Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) saw revenue up 38%, with sales of servers and networking hitting a record $7.7bn — up by 80%.

“Our momentum in ISG is a significant tailwind, with record ISG revenue of $11.6 billion, up 38% year over year," said Yvonne McGill, chief financial officer of Dell Technologies, in a statement.

Meanwhile, Dell's Client Solutions Group — which includes PCs — slipped 4% year on year, falling to $12.4 billion. The company predicted growth for commercial PCs in the second half of the year, boosted by the drive to use AI tools and the looming Windows 10 end-of-life deadline next year.

"The coming PC refresh cycle and the longer-term impact of AI will create tailwinds for the PC market," said McGill in a conference call.

Server sales paint a rosy picture for Dell Technologies

Dell said in its results statement that demand for servers was seeing growth across AI and traditional technologies, as well as improved margins. 

“AI momentum” accelerated significantly across Q2, according to Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and chief operating officer, with the company recording a sizable increase in the volume of enterprise customers buying AI solutions.

“AI-optimized server demand was $3.2 billion, up 23% sequentially, and $5.8 billion year to date,” Clarke added. “Backlog was $3.8 billion, and our pipeline has grown to several multiples of our backlog.”

In a conference call, Clarke noted that increasing server orders were largely driven by tier-2 cloud service providers. The company’s positive results were also supported by demand for Dell’s air and liquid-cooled AI servers.

Dell made much of its Dell PowerEdge XE9680L, its new rack server which uses direct liquid cooling (DLC), at Dell Technologies World 2024. The rack contains 72 of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips and was launched as a supporting pillar for Dell’s ‘AI Factory’ offering.

Similarly, Dell also saw an increase in the number of enterprises purchasing AI solutions, with appetite for dedicated sovereign AI services also spiking.

"Enterprise remains a significant opportunity for us as many are still in the early stages of AI adoption," he said. "We are also excited about the emerging sovereign AI opportunity, which plays to our strengths given our position with governments around the world."

McGill said Dell is also applying AI across its own business, beyond selling hardware, and beginning to see benefits.

"We're using it to improve customer and team member experiences in sales, software development, services, content management and our supply chain," she said in the conference call. "And in turn, we're using our experiences to help our customers realize the benefits of AI for themselves."

The results — and argument in favor of the benefits of AI for enterprises — come amid concerns about the rising costs of AI for the industry. Beyond the aforementioned job cuts, Microsoft warned that its heavy spending on investment on AI may mean a return on investment takes as long as 15 years.

More broadly, Gartner said data center spending is expected to increase 24% and software spend up 12.6% as companies shell out to jump on the AI bandwagon.

Small businesses seeking an affordable entry-level server have a wide range to choose from but most tend to be black, blocky, and, dare we say, a bit boring. Decked out in eye-catching silver, Dell's PowerEdge T160 breaks the mould as it packs an impressive hardware package into a remarkably compact and stylish chassis.

Commendably, Dell aims to reduce the server's environmental impact by avoiding metallic paint and leaving the steel chassis unfinished. It has a zinc coating for protection and although Dell doesn't give a figure, uses some recycled steel.

Stepping up as the replacement for the PowerEdge T150, it is 42% smaller and supports the latest Intel Xeon E-2400 CPUs and up to 128GB of DDR5 memory. Storage sees significant improvements as whereas the T150 supports up to four drives, the T160 has room for a total of seven devices – more on that later.

Another reason for the T160's industrial-strength construction is Dell is aiming it at 'near edge' applications such as warehouses and retail offices and offers an optional bezel kit with a dust filter. It's also protected from knocks and bumps as each corner has a plastic cover that doubles up as support if you want to stack multiple units on their side.

Dell PowerEdge T160 review: What's inside?

You'll get a good idea of build quality when you pick the T160 up. It may be significantly smaller than the T150 but a fully populated T160 weighs almost the same at around 11.6kgs.

The metal side panel is retained with two thumbscrews and also incorporates a Kensington lock tab at the back for extra physical security. Underneath you'll find a single plastic shroud that completely encloses the motherboard and upper front drive bays for improved air flow.

With the shroud removed, you'll find a busy interior although cabling is kept neat and tidy with all key components easily accessible. The CPU has a large passive heatsink and cooling is handled by a single 9cms standard fan behind it. 

Four DIMM slots sit below the CPU allowing the full 128GB of memory to be realised. The server has an integral LOM (LAN on motherboard) presenting dual Gigabit ports and there's room to expand as the motherboard has two PCIe Gen4 slots at the top with both supporting half-length, half-height cards.

Dell PowerEdge T160 review: Storage surprises 

Main storage is handled by a large internal cage at the front with room for three cabled LFF hard disks. It's a cinch to access as after removing one thumbscrew, the cage can be flipped down and a smart design feature is the tension spring at its base which stops it falling down and hitting the desk.

Up above are two more bays with plastic carriers for SFF drives such as SATA SSDs. Base systems will have the drive cages cabled to the server's embedded PERC S160 controller which offers software-managed stripes, mirrors, RAID10, and 5 arrays for SATA drives.

If you want more, the T160 supports Dell's PERC H355 card which offers stripes or mirrors for SAS and SATA drives, or the higher-end H755 which adds RAID5, 6, 50, and 60 arrays to the storage equation. The non-RAID HBA355i adapter provides simple pass-through services for storage devices.

That's a total of five drives so where are the other two? Amazingly, there's room below the PCIe slots for Dell's optional BOSS-N1 card which presents two M.2 NVMe SSDs in hot-plug carriers accessible at the rear. 

The BOSS-N1 is ideal for running an OS or hypervisor on a fault-tolerant mirrored array and it keeps all the main bays free for data storage. Bear in mind you can't prevent external access to the NVMe SSD carriers so if the server is out at the edge, you may want to keep it in a secure cabinet.

If you add the BOSS-N1, a PCIe card, or SFF drives in the upper cage, you'll need the extra high-performance fan unit. Fitted behind the upper drive bay, it does increase noise levels but these shouldn't be noticeable in a busy office and definitely not in a factory or retail environment.

Dell PowerEdge T360 review: Abundant management features

Good remote management is normally a feature you don't often see in a low-cost entry-level server but the T160 bucks the trend as it comes with Dell's iDRAC9 embedded controller and dedicated Gigabit port. This delivers the same features as found in Dell's higher-end servers with its web console presenting a wealth of information about system and component status along with direct access to the server's BIOS settings.

The T160 includes an iDRAC9 Basic license in the price which enables web access, hardware monitoring, and remote power controls. It's worth upgrading to an iDRAC9 Enterprise license as this enables virtual media services and full OS remote control.

A downside of the PERC S160 controller becomes apparent when you select the web console's storage tab. The S160 software controller won't be listed as the iDRAC9 only supports inventory and management of Dell's HBA and PERC RAID add-in cards plus the BOSS-N1.

Dell's embedded LifeCycle Controller makes light work of OS installation. Selected from the BIOS boot screen, we used it to install Windows Server 2022 from a mapped ISO file in only 30 minutes and it ensured all the correct drivers were loaded.

Dell PowerEdge T160 review: Is it worth it?

Absolutely. With prices starting at a shade under a grand, the PowerEdge T160 is a top-value tower server perfectly suited to small businesses and those that want to push some compute power nearer to the network edge.

Dell's design is exemplary as size for size, there's no other entry-level server that can match its hardware specification. Support for Intel's Xeon E-2400 CPUs and DDR5 memory provide plenty of power, it offers a versatile range of storage options, the embedded iDRAC9 delivers classy remote management and its slinky silver surfaces ensure it stands out from the crowd.

Dell PowerEdge T160 specifications 

Wipro has announced an expansion of its partnership with Dell Technologies in a move it said will provide organizations with access to the latest AI technology and chip designs. 

The partnership will see Wipro’s Enterprise AI-Ready Platform leverage Dell’s AI Factory with Nvidia, complete with Dell Validated Designs for Generative AI, to add a cost-effective way of managing data through generative AI processing.

The offering is supported by Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software platform and leverages the chipmaker’s H100 Tensor Core GPUs, as well as its Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.

In an announcement, Wipro said the collaboration will enable improved cost control and risk mitigation for enterprises, while accelerating the adoption of AI across cloud, data center, and edge environments.

“Enterprises are keen to utilize their own data and business context to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI on Dell solutions,” said Jo Debecker, managing partner and global head at Wipro FullStride Cloud. “This approach effectively and efficiently integrates advanced AI into their core business processes, bringing AI to the data rather than moving data to AI.”

Wipro’s AI Control Center operates as an advanced orchestration layer within the Wipro Enterprise AI-Ready Platform and enables organizations to seamlessly leverage AI capabilities.

With this expanded partnership, the layer will now deliver enhanced throughput from the Dell infrastructure, with seamless integration of use case blueprints across the entire AI life cycle.

The control center will also help support the safe, responsible, and sustainable adoption of AI using robust governance, observability, and automation capabilities, the firm said.

“The solutions we have created as part of this collaboration will help enterprises achieve new levels of flexibility when building their enterprise-specific AI ecosystems,” Debecker added.

“Our goal is to make AI consumption as efficient, agile, reliable, and sustainable as possible - ultimately helping advance the adoption of enterprise-level AI.”

Dell’s AI Factory with Nvidia pulls together a range of AI-optimized technologies, validated and integrated solutions, as well as expert services into a broad AI-focused portfolio to help drive faster outcomes for customers.

“As the market demand for AI enabled solutions continues to climb, Dell is innovating at every level of the AI technology stack to deliver future-proof data centers,” commented Denise Millard, chief partner officer at Dell Technologies.

“By leveraging the Dell AI Factory in Wipro’s Enterprise AI-Ready Platform, we’re providing customers with a comprehensive collection of products, solutions and services to accelerate their AI initiatives.”

Return to office (RTO) mandates have become a recurring flashpoint between businesses and staff, but only a small number of firms are still asking employees to return to the office full-time, according to analysis from Flex Index.

Where 8% of organizations were enforcing strict return to office (RTO) mandates that demanded full in-person attendance last year, just 3% are enforcing the same sort of policies this year. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Flex Index’s report found that 79% of the 2,670 surveyed firms offered completely flexible working arrangements in 2024, signaling a slight increase from 75% companies in 2023. 

Most firms also appear to be giving their staff more choice on working policies, the report noted, marking a relinquishing of control by many in the long-running RTO conversation. 

The report found that more than half (56%) of surveyed businesses had an “employee’s choice” model in 2024, a form of office attendance policy that allows staff members to shape their working arrangements to their individual needs.

This figure is up from 38% of businesses using the same model in 2023, making it now the most popular policy among tech firms.

By contrast, only 18% of firms are employing a “structured hybrid model” in which they mandate which days their workers must attend the office. Fully remote models are also dwindling though. 

Flex Index found that only 23% of firms don’t offer staff a physical location to attend in person. This figure is down from 37% in 2023. 

The return to office battle has been intense

Flex Index’s report comes at a time when some of the biggest names in the tech industry are engaged in drawn-out disputes with their staff members over RTO mandates and strict office attendance policies. 

The most notable example of these is Dell Technologies, which has come under serious fire for the way it handled RTO policies. The tech giant initially told fully remote staff they would have to forfeit the right to promotions or role changes unless they agreed to come back to the office, sparking a major workforce backlash.

Half of Dell’s workforce chose to ignore the threat - or risk incurring the damages - in a blatant expression of support for hybrid working policies. An internal survey at the firm then revealed the extent of the internal resentment caused by the strict RTO measures. 

Google has also had notable difficulties in coaxing staff back to the office, with attempts to enforce stricter attendance policies met with backlash from staff that forced the firm’s hand and made top-level decision-makers reconsider. 

The return to office debate was once again thrust firmly into the spotlight last week when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt attributed the tech giant’s sluggish performance in the generative AI race to its working policies. 

Schmidt told attendees at a Stanford University talk that the tech giant had prioritized its work from home policies over striking a lead in the AI race, suggesting that competitors had gained an edge due to their rigid policies in this regard. 

Naturally, Schmidt’s comments prompted a fierce backlash online.

Despite reports suggesting that a full return to office is inevitable, frequent backlash from staff and statistics such as those gathered by Flex Index show that hybrid working practices appear to be here to stay.  

Small businesses and remote offices seeking a compact and capable rack server will find Dell's PowerEdge R260 has a lot to offer. Designed to fit in the smallest of spaces, its short-depth 1U chassis offers a 24% footprint reduction over its predecessor, the R250.

Dell is also aiming the R260 at 'near-edge' applications such as warehouses, desktop deployments, small data cabinets, and retail offices. It can handle these harsher environments as Dell offers an optional bezel kit that incorporates a replaceable dust filter.

The small chassis doesn't compromise processing power as the R260 supports all the latest Intel Xeon E-2400 CPUs. Our system was endowed with a speedy 3.3GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E-2456 but businesses with a keen eye on costs can opt for one of two Pentium Gold G7400 dual-core models which brings the starting price down to around £1,400.

All Xeon E-2400 and Pentium G7400 CPUs support up to 128GB of memory which is the faster DDR5 variety. Storage sees improvements too, as the R260 is available with a hot-swap cage for up to six SFF HDDs or SSDs – the R250 only offers up to four LFF bays.

Dell PowerEdge R260 review: Internal design

Under the lid, you'll find a tidy interior with cable clutter kept to a minimum and easy access afforded to all key components for upgrades and maintenance. Behind the right-hand front grill are three cold-swap cooling fans that look after the CPU and four memory slots mounted further back.

We have the dual LFF drive cage which has a fourth fan behind it with Dell also offering an optional high-performance module. If you order the larger 6-bay SFF hot-swap cage, you'll receive two more standard fans which are also located behind it.

Expansion potential looks good as the R260 comes with two PCIe slots on each side of a riser with both supporting half-length, half-height cards. The server has an integral LOM (LAN on motherboard) presenting dual Gigabit ports and upgrade options are plentiful with Dell offering dual and quad-port copper Gigabit or 10GbE adapters.

You have a choice of 450W Platinum or 700W Titanium power supply units (PSUs) although most configurations only allow the latter to be selected. Redundant PSUs aren't supported but that's hardly surprising considering the size of the chassis as cooling could be an issue.

Dell PowerEdge R260 review: Storage decisions

Whichever drive cage you choose, you'll be pleased to know that the R260 has an embedded PERC S160 controller that supports software-managed stripes, mirrors, RAID10, and 5 arrays for SATA drives. The R250 has an older embedded S150 controller although its feature set is identical to the S160.

The S160 is configured from the server's BIOS setup menu where you choose AHCI for pass-through mode or RAID. With the latter enabled you can then configure your drives for the desired RAID array type.

If you want to use SAS drives you'll need an adapter card and Dell offers three PERC 11 models. The HBA355i provides pass-through services for SAS3 and SATA drives, the H355 adds stripes and mirrors while the top-dog H755 brings RAID5, 6, 50, and 60 to the table along with 8GB of DDR4 cache memory.

Another feature we're pleased to see is the bay next to the PSU for Dell's optional BOSS-N1 card. This is the latest version which presents two hot-plug M.2 NVMe SSDs at the rear and is ideal for running an OS or hypervisor on a fault-tolerant mirrored array without wasting any front bays. In fact, one of Dell's target applications for the R260 is near-edge virtualization.

Dell PowerEdge R260 review: Management and monitoring

It may be an entry-level server but the R260 won't be found wanting for remote management services as it sports the same full-strength iDRAC9 controller as its bigger PowerEdge brothers. It presents a smart web console offering a wealth of information on system and component status, power usage, and cooling efficiency along with a hardware inventory plus direct access to BIOS and storage configurations.

We ran Dell's OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and after it discovered the server's iDRAC9, we could manage and monitor it, control power, and run remote control sessions. Plenty of plug-ins are available with the Power Manager activated with an OME Enterprise Advanced license applied at the iDRAC console.

This plug-in adds a set of graphs to the OME console device view showing everything from CPU, storage, memory, fan, and FPGA power consumption to component utilization and airflow in CFM (cubic feet per minute). You can use it to enforce per-rack power cap and thermal event-based policies to automatically throttle servers back as required.

Once the server has a valid support contract, you can integrate OME with Dell's free CloudIQ cloud-hosted service. OME functions as a collector for CloudIQ, sending telemetry and alert logs to it every 15 minutes, and you can use the CloudIQ portal to view all monitored servers, storage arrays, and switches, see system health status and alerts, pull up historical trending reports and create custom dashboards. The Cybersecurity feature will prove useful as it alerts you to a wide range of potential risks such as default or weak iDRAC admin passwords, SSH access, enabled USB ports, and having a secure boot disabled.

Dell PowerEdge R260 review: Is it worth it?

With prices starting as low as a shade over £1,400, the PowerEdge R260 is an affordable entry server for SMBs and also for larger businesses that want to push compute power closer to the network edge. Despite its compact dimensions, it offers a powerful hardware package, has room for further expansion, delivers plenty of storage choices, and won't be faulted for management and monitoring services.

Dell PowerEdge R260 specifications

Staff satisfaction at Dell Technologies has crumbled under the weight of mass layoffs and unpopular return-to-office (RTO) mandates, according to a leaked internal survey seen by Business Insider. 

Conducted annually and dubbed ‘Tell Dell’, the survey is used by the firm to track satisfaction among staff. At least one of the metrics used is the employee net promoter score (eNPS) which measures the extent to which an employee would recommend Dell as a place to work. 

In the latest ‘Tell Dell’ results, the company-wide eNPS score - calculated by subtracting the percentage of “detractors” from the percentage of “promoters” - dropped from 62 to 48.

Based on the responses of about 98,000 staff members, this decline is a noteworthy indication of lingering negative sentiment in the firm. One employee told Business Insider they had “never seen” a score move that quickly toward the negative. 

Tellingly, another employee said that most of the people they work with were “expecting a steeper decline”, pointing to the pervasive sense of dissatisfaction within the company. 

Some areas of the business were more deeply affected. In Dell’s global marketing department, the eDPS score dropped by 68% and was even approaching or at zero in certain smaller divisions. 

"I think the marketing teams feel particularly threatened due to the accelerated adoption of GenAI to streamline marketing processes and reduce cost," one staff member said by way of explanation.

Despite the evident staff uproar, however, it is not clear the extent to which Dell plans to improve the current eNPS score. 

"It's as if every leader was given the OK to ignore it," one employee told Business Insider regarding the firm’s response to the survey. Multiple staff members agreed that Dell’s leadership seemed to ignore the eNPS result. 

"I don't think leadership cares about our feedback. They just keep rowing in whatever direction they want," said another staff member.

Dell Technologies staff have faced one thing after another

News of Dell’s freefalling eNPS score comes in the wake of a challenging period which included rounds of layoffs that saw the firm cut over 6,000 jobs last year.

More recently, execs at the company have been engaged in a drawn-out dispute with staff members over the firm’s RTO policies, which have come under fire for being overly strict.  

In the first instance, Dell demanded that hybrid workers track their office attendance to prove that they were entering a physical office space 39 days each financial quarter, equating to about 3 days a week. 

Fully remote workers were also told that they would no longer be eligible for promotions or role changes. Despite these measures, nearly 50% of the firm’s staff opted to remain fully remote.  

Experts told ITPro at the time that, in general, the demand for remote working capabilities is high within workforces. Other tech firms have been experiencing similar pushback and Dell’s RTO policies are not surprising in their unpopularity. 

UPDATE: Dell Technologies responds to claims

In a statement given to ITPro, Dell Technologies has responded to claims surrounding the internal staff survey. 

In the Tell Dell Survey, our team members shared that they believe their leaders treat them with respect, uphold the company's Culture Code values and offer flexibility to balance work/life," a spokesperson said. 

"Our team members also expressed their confidence in the future vision, strategy and leadership of Dell. While it is true that our eNPS score did drop from last year, you’ll see from a blog from Perceptyx that our score exceeds the industry averages."

The spokesperson added: "To be clear, as we know many have reported on our hybrid work policy (in some cases inaccurately), globally, about 75% of our team members have opted to return to office in a hybrid capacity. In the US, nearly 70% of all team members who live near a major Dell office opted for a hybrid role."

Like a host of industry counterparts, Dell Technologies has been struggling to get employees back into the office despite company-wide RTO mandates – and they still can’t accept that workers just don’t want to return to the grind of the daily commute. 

Many employees are pushing back on RTO mandates regardless of the pressure placed on them by the firm, according to internal data seen by Business Insider.  

Earlier this year, Dell Technologies introduced new policies requiring hybrid employees to track their office attendance and ensure they entered a physical office space 39 days a quarter, or roughly three days a week. 

Those who classified themselves as remote workers had to agree that they were no longer eligible for job promotions or role changes under the mandate. 

According to this new data, close to 50% of full-time Dell workers in the US have opted to remain fully remote despite these measures, highlighting the appetite for alternative working arrangements. 

Speaking to Business Insider, several staff expressed a range of reasons for their decisions to continue their positions remotely in spite of Dell’s RTO demands.

"I benefited a lot from being WFH since 2020 and had a lot of personal growth. I'm not willing to give that up if I don't have to," one employee said. 

"With the salary that we are receiving, a return to the office would leave a huge hole in our budget," another employee said in reference to food and commuting costs. 

Dell Technologies isn’t alone in its failure to push workers back into the office en masse, though, according to Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO of Flexa. Across a range of industries globally, employees have come to value hybrid and remote working compared to the pre-pandemic 9-5 commute and grind. 

"Employees’ stance on strict ‘RTO’ mandates and set office-working days is clear - and not only amongst Dell employees,” she told ITPro. 

Johnson-Jones cited Flexa’s own data from earlier this year which showed half of all workers were seeking remote roles and nearly half (42%) of workers were searching for “remote-first” working opportunities, “whereby regular office attendance is optional and teams meet up every month, for example”.

Other research from Scalable, also conducted this year, showed 35% of workers “resent” mandated office attendance.  

Hybrid and remote working policies come with a range of benefits for many employees, from financial savings to lifestyle flexibility, and such benefits appear tempting enough to put the kibosh on Dell’s RTO plans. 

"There are any number of different reasons why staff might need or prefer to work remotely,” Johnson-Jones said.

“Some people simply find that they work better at home. This includes many neurodivergent workers, who can struggle with in-person interactions and overstimulating office environments,” she added. 

“Others rely on remote work to fit their jobs around their caring responsibilities, or health needs".

Dell isn't the only firm experiencing RTO pushback

RTO mandates have become a flashpoint in the global tech industry over the last two years, pitting employees against senior management on a number of occasions. 

Several major industry players have tried - and failed - to push workers back into the office. The approach taken by firms to tempt staff back has varied wildly, with some opting for a hardline approach and others pushing added incentives. 

Last year, Google was heavily criticized over plans to record office attendance rates for use in performance reviews, for example. The move was described by critics as a clear attempt to strongarm workers back to the office.

The firm then offered workers a ‘discounted rate’ on hotel rooms at corporate campuses in a bid to tempt some back to the office. 

Fundamentally, RTO mandates don’t have a great effect and do little to persuade staff to get back to the office. If anything, these policies could cause companies to lose vital staff. 

Research from Gartner earlier this year found that one-third of executives plan to ditch their current roles over office attendance policies. 

The survey, which fielded responses from 3,500 employees, also found that 19% of workers in non-executive roles would leave their organization due to RTO rules. 

As Dell Technologies World 2024 comes to a close at the Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, partners and customers will be walking away with the word “AI” ringing in their ears. This was always to be expected, given the continued interest in the technology and significant developments in the field since last year’s event.

Over the four-day event, Dell Technologies pitched itself as an end-to-end AI enabler for its partners and customers, focused on empowering them to create their own ‘AI factories’.

This end-to-end, comprehensive deployment platform for AI provides customers with the infrastructure, data storage, and models necessary for enterprise AI deployment, leaning on Dell Technologies’ own infrastructure and services as well as Nvidia hardware and software.

“It’s your data center for the future, built and designed from the ground up, with an AI-first mindset,” says Michael Dell, founder and CEO at Dell Technologies.

Enthusiasm aside, one would be forgiven for entering day-two of the conference feeling a little frustrated with the lack of detail. This was less a list of announcements and more of a soapbox for Michael Dell and friends to rave about AI.

Dell Apex, the company’s flagship anything as a service (XaaS) offering, was also largely absent in either of the keynotes, even though it is linked to Dell’s AI Factory which is available through a Dell Apex subscription. Apex has also been expanded to include new support for digital assistants and AIOps.

In choosing to spend the keynotes focused on AI potential and demand, coupled with regular reminders from the likes of Dell himself that the firm is not in the business of making predictions on precisely what AI will look like in a few years’ time, Dell Technologies has doubled down on a strategic rather than technology-driven approach to AI.

Dell Technologies eyes greater flexibility

Throughout the event, Dell Technologies executives such as global CTO John Roese argued that strategy and infrastructure, not individual pieces of technology, are what organizations must get right to adopt AI. This is the guiding principle for the company as it looks to enable AI across the broadest possible range of use cases.

While the firm might not know precisely what AI will look like in just a few years, its familiarity with customer needs and the routes to return on investments with AI allow it to anticipate the most common ways in which generative AI will be delivered.

This might not be what partners were looking to hear at the event, but it may just be what they needed to hear.

A prime example of this can be found in Dell’s multi-tiered approach to AI hardware, which runs from kit to support small-scale AI at the edge to new server racks that lay the groundwork for trillion-parameter models.

On the one hand, you have the PowerEdge XE9680L, the firm’s new rack server optimized for demanding AI workloads packed with direct-liquid-cooled (DLC) Nvidia Grace Blackwell generation chips and capable of 400Gbits/sec throughput.

On the other, Dell Technologies says its customers are more likely to use open source models for better efficiency at the edge and lower latencies, which the company is meeting through its open ecosystem tie up with Hugging Face and new line of NPU-equipped laptops in its XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron ranges.

Flexibility is key, with Dell Technologies arguing that customers are better off bringing AI right to their data. This links to the firm’s new focus on generative AI inference over AI training or fine-tuning, which it argues can deliver outputs with lower latency and reduced costs compared to training.

“Most enterprises will not train their own large language models (LLMs),” says chief operating officer Jeff Clarke. “They will use open source models like Llama 3, Mistral, and others to utilize generative AI in businesses.”

The fast-changing nature of AI

AI architecture has already evolved away from the architectures that headlined conferences last year and Dell Technologies is striving to keep up. Roese tells ITPro that one of the most radical changes has been the widespread adoption of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

This is a framework for AI in which a vectorized knowledge repository is connected to AI models, so that each output is informed by both the user input and organization-specific information for more relevant results.

Though the technique is now becoming well-known and is a core part of Dell’s AI Factory approach, Roese points out that he himself only found out about it a year and one week ago in a conversation with Douwe Kiela, co-founder of Contextual AI and a co-author of the original paper on RAG.

RAG has allowed models to be used more or less off-the-shelf, with businesses grounding outputs in their own data at the inference stage rather than through excessive AI training or fine-tuning.

“That became the mainstream thinking and today you wouldn't dream of building an enterprise architecture that wasn't using RAG,” Roese tells ITPro. “But that was one year and one week ago, that was not 10 years ago.”

The rise of RAG isn’t the only fundamental shift in the AI field over the past 12 months. In a panel discussion, Roese argues the rate of change across the sector is such that global AI legislation will be undeliverable if governments connect laws to specific technologies.

Matt Baker, SVP of AI strategy at Dell Technologies, noted that Dell has advanced rapidly since last year’s Project Helix, its collaboration with Nvidia aimed at helping customers fine-tune or train LLMs using proprietary data.

“So Project Helix was to get a platform out that could fuel experimentation, so people were talking about are we going to train models, are we going to fine-tune models, are we going to inference, etc,” Baker says.

“That was a platform that was well-suited to get started with. But over the last year we've learned a ton and we've learned that for the most part, [more than] 80% of the applications that we see in a private environment at an enterprise, organization, or a government tend to be these RAG solutions.”

Dell Technologies is drinking its own champagne

Customers could be worried about Dell Technologies admitting that it’s been surprised by the direction AI has taken since this time last year, but the company is using that as a selling point for its ‘Validated Designs’ catalog for AI. 

Its argument is that while everyone has been blindsided by AI advances, it has learned lessons from them that it can pass onto customers through its service layer.

Jeff Boudreau, chief AI officer at Dell Technologies, explained how his role was created in September 2023 as part of a move by Dell and Clarke to “make a statement and symbolism” by setting up an executive who could oversee a refinement of Dell Technologies’ data and governance strategies and teach its 130,000 employees to use AI effectively.

As part of this new approach, Dell Technologies has adopted a four-pronged framework for AI: “AI in, on, for, and with”:

• ‘AI in’ is about how Dell can embed offers in AI to make them better for customers.
• ‘AI on’ relates to Dell’s goal to have the right infrastructure in place to support AI, from devices to the data center.
• ‘AI for’ is Dell’s internal use of AI for improvements in areas such as its sales and business experiences.
• ‘AI with’ refers to the open ecosystem of partners that Dell has put at the center of its AI offerings.

The key here is that Dell sees itself as the first case study for the AI solutions it offers its customers – the phrase “drinking our own champagne” was used throughout the event, to encapsulate the belief that Dell needs to demonstrate the benefits of AI by example.

“It's a sharing of knowledge, the good, the bad, the ugly, everything we've learned inside as Dell being our ‘customer zero’,” Baker says.

Baker adds that from this experimental basis, Dell Technologies is “in a unique position” to realize the goals of its partners and customers by leveraging its services and infrastructure portfolio.

This echoed across its new announcements, including Dell Generative AI Solution for Digital Assistants, which accelerates the implementation of digital assistants rooted in Dell and Nvidia solutions. Throughout talks at the conference, executives also predicted that businesses will

While Roese’s predictions that we’ll soon be seeing “billions” of AI agents deployed worldwide might seem out there, it’s also clear that there’s enterprise demand for lightweight, customized AI assistants and tools. We see this with Google Cloud, which unveiled its Vertex AI Agents at Google Cloud Next 2024, as well as with Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs and Microsoft Copilot.

In its pragmatic approach to AI adoption, Dell Technologies is asking customers to trust in its ability to meet their needs and help them deploy cutting-edge AI as the technology evolves.

While its genuine uncertainty over where AI is headed in the near future could pour cold water on those who hoped to have a specific roadmap laid out at this year’s event, Dell Technologies will also have reassured customers that come what may, it will have laid the groundwork to make the most of it.

Global legislation on AI is unlikely to reach a point of consensus in the near future, according to industry experts, who urged organizations to focus on the relationship between AI and workers rather than trying to account for specific approaches to the technology.

Discussing the future potential for AI in a talk held at Dell Technologies World 2024, experts concurred that AI development is currently the rate at which the public sector can keep pace with safety controls.

The panel included Lisa Ling, journalist and broadcaster; Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder of AI firm Affectiva; Paul Calleja, director of research computing at the University of Cambridge; and John Roese, global CTO at Dell Technologies.

On the point of AI regulation, Calleja said that a global governing body is “kind of impossible”, noting that policy occurring on a national level is a more direct route in the short-to-medium term.

Acknowledging the EU AI Act as a “good start,” el Kaliouby added that delivered in its current form, the legislation will be unable to develop in lock-step with AI innovation. In the long-term, she contended, this will prevent it from being effective.

“It's going to take two years to be implemented and with the pace of change it's going to become obsolete fairly quickly unless it’s kept up to date,” she explained, adding that disagreement over the risks AI poses continues to stymie any government’s response.

“I used to serve on the World Economic Forum’s Global Council for AI and Robotics and it was multi-stakeholder from all over the world. It was interesting, we could not agree on what is a good use of AI and what is not, so I think it’s hard.”

The panel acknowledged that events such as the Seoul AI Summit are important for global communication on AI, but ultimately unlikely to result in meaningful controls.

This is because generative AI is breaking the mold for technological development, the panel said, given the multitude of advances that have already been made in the field.

“We have very little chance for our current legacy approach of regulatory and standard setting to be successful,” Roese said.

Roese added that while the development time for previous technologies gave governments three to ten years to develop scientific consensus and hold summits on regulatory approaches, regulation is already lagging the leading edge of AI by years.

“This is moving so fast and if we really want to create a high-end regulatory ethics framework, one of the mistakes we must avoid is just trying to make it specific to the technology,” said Roese.

“Let's define the relationship between people and machines, let’s define the high-order things and put our governance structure around that.”

Roese cited the example of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), in which LLM outputs are grounded in unstructured data to improve their relevance, as proof of how fast AI.

“Let's make the assumption that the underlying technology of today will not even be relevant in three years, maybe two years, maybe one,” he said.

Tackling AI risks demands a diverse response

The panel covered some of the largest risks that AI poses, including its potential to embed algorithmic biases and the danger of AI-powered cyber attacks.  

Leading AI companies have promised to halt development if models get dangerous, including the likes of Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. The agreement was made at the Seoul AI Summit 2024, the follow-up to the AI Safety Summit held at Bletchley Park in 2023.

“Everybody in this room is a thought leader, or a business leader, an AI innovator, or a tech innovator. We all have a responsibility to not just wait for regulation to happen but to do the right thing for our communities, organizations, and teams,” said el Kaliouby.

She cited examples of use cases for AI that Affectiva has actively avoided supporting, such as the use of AI for autonomous weapons or for surveillance.

el Kaliouby added that while the firm had been approached by an intelligence agency seeking to use AI for lie detection, this is an avenue with limited regulatory protections in place and one which holds significant potential for discrimination and that as a result it had rejected the proposal.

Prior to the talk, Roese told ITPro that technical issues aren’t the biggest barrier to AI adoption but instead that a general lack of clear brand identity and vision for AI deployment in the boardroom is holding businesses back.

Approaching with this clarity of mind is key to tackling bias, said el Kaliouby, noting that new AI firms can use the pressures of their product launch as an excuse to delay bias mitigation indefinitely.

“It’s very easy to say ‘we’re a small startup, we need to shift products so who cares about bias for now, we’ll fix it later’. I think you have to build it from day one into the system and these are the kinds of startups I’m looking for, who are really thinking thoughtfully about bias and misinformation.”

For added focus, el Kaliouby added, she tied the bonus plan of her firm’s entire executive team to successfully implementing levers within its machine learning pipeline to ensure bias was being mitigated.

Despite the doubts over a global approach, the panel was united in acknowledging that certain AI risks will have to be addressed through national policy. Calleja noted that leaders will need to ensure that AI is “not for the few, for the many and that these tools are used to drive equality not make inequality”.

A lack of clear vision for AI continues to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for businesses looking to adopt the technology, according to John Roese, global chief technology officer (CTO) at Dell Technologies.

In conversation with ITPro at Dell Technologies World 2024, Roese states that the main barrier to enterprise AI adoption in 2024 is leaders not having clear plans for what they want to achieve using AI.

“Today the big obstacle isn't anything technical,” he says. “The customers that haven't moved yet are really struggling not with technology to use, they're still stuck on what process, what data, what is their goal.”

“We're having way more conversations with people at the most senior levels, not about what technology to use even though that’s important but more about this discussion of what makes you, you as a company. “

“If you don't understand what your core value, process, and capability is then you don't really know the answer to where you should start. But the minute you know, that's the answer.”

At Dell, for example, Roese says there are four clear areas where AI-driven improvements have justified its investment in the technology: global supply chain, global sales force, global engineering capability, and global services schedule.

“If we do any of those four better than we do today, we win. Because we’re already really good at them and we said ‘If that makes Dell, Dell’ then we’re going to apply all our energy to apply AI first.”

Roese says this process of figuring out your brand identity and goal also applies to getting your data in the right structure for AI and ensuring it’s been cleaned for use in a data pipeline, as he told ITPro at Dell Technologies World 2023. For example, several years ago Dell removed non-inclusive language from its entire content repository, as part of a wider sectoral move to drop words such as ‘blacklist’ or ‘slave’ from code and documentation.

Roese says this not only brought Dell’s data in line with its values but also, through “dumb luck” helped ready it for AI trained on its one data. As Dell’s data no longer has off-brand language, he says, “your ability to feed that into AI becomes significantly faster, because you’re no longer worried that it’s going to misrepresent your company”.

A lack of governance hindering AI innovation

Randomly picking a process to be enhanced through AI is a recipe for failure, Roese says, but he adds that this is still the hurdle at which many businesses fall. 

“The thing we discovered in many customers is that they didn't have a governance process, so the first project that showed up asking for stuff got it. By the time the third project showed up, there were no more resources. But they didn't know if the first project or the third project were the ones that were going to move the needle.”

Roese notes that some customers are stuck in an introspective phase where they don’t move into AI for fear of choosing the wrong solution or adoption strategy.

“They don't know where to apply it. They’re not saying they don't understand the technology – that may or may not be true. They're saying, ‘I don't know where to start and I'm afraid that if I take all my resources and randomly throw them like a dart with my eyes closed, I might hit the wrong target, it might have no value.’”

Dell has moved rapidly to adopt AI internally but Roese is clear that it had to be just as introspective as any other firm.

“We learned that early on, we had 800 projects at Dell that were potential candidates and we quickly whittled them down to about 16,” he tells ITPro.

When it comes to Dell’s strategy on AI, Roese is the first to admit that it’s still learning and adapting to the changing AI landscape.

“Every time we're doing it ourselves, we're learning about what the products need to be, what the ecosystem needs to be, how we get this to the broader market. So, you know, the phrase ‘drinking your own champagne’ or ‘eating your own dog food’, whichever one you prefer, we are absolutely doing that at scale.”

Although pinning down one’s vision for AI and getting to grips with your brand identity can be difficult, Roese says that the limiting factor for AI adoption being how clear your view of the technology is rather than your technical prowess is cause for great hope.

Hallucinations no longer an issue

Even as businesses continue to struggle with their AI strategy, many have now overcome some of the best-known technical issues with the technology. Asked if issues such as hallucinations are still a real concern for enterprise AI, Roese responds with a confident “no”.

‘Hallucination’ is the term for when an AI model confidently outputs incorrect information. These AI missteps were subject to intense scrutiny throughout 2022 and 2023, with OpenAI’s Sam Altman saying they are part of the ‘magic’ of generative AI and some leaders holding off on AI investment due to worries that models could spout nonsense answers to customers or produce poor-quality code.

But Roese says that in 2024, new methods and a better understanding of how to situate AI within a company’s ecosystem have reduced the impacts of hallucinations dramatically.

“Enterprise architectures aren't just about the adoption of a large language model (LLM), you don’t just take Llama 3 use it, you either fine-tune it or you connect it to your data via retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and you put countermeasures and techniques around it,” Roese explains.

“We've worked through that, because no enterprise would legitimately use a technology that was giving out bad information all the time. You know, a year ago the concern was ‘are these things ever enterprise-ready?’ because by themselves they hallucinate, they interpret things in interesting ways.”

Roese says that once you really recognize that no AI model is working in a vacuum, concerns around hallucinations go down.

“We realized it's not them by themselves. We realized very quickly that enterprise architecture is using the data that you already have that, hopefully, is accurate and really reflects your company, its ethos, its customers, and its priorities.”

AI systems are still prone to error, as we saw with ChatGPT’s very public malfunctioning in February 2024, which is something that businesses still keep an eye on. But Roese argues that this isn’t unique to AI and is, in fact, not meaningfully different from knowing someone who regularly exaggerates or outright lies.

When we meet these people in our lives, he says, we respond by simply approaching what they say with a pinch of salt.

“The reality is now we have an ecosystem with AIs, if I'm using ChatGPT I am aware now that it is a public AI service that is prone to a higher degree of creative license and hallucination,” he tells ITPro.

“That's fine and if I want to write a haiku, that's probably okay. If I want to summarize something that I understand well, that's probably fine. But would I use it to do really proprietary confidential and mission-critical things? Probably not.”

Overall, Roese says that hallucinations come up to a far lesser degree in boardroom conversations. Even as leaders look to tackle strategic issues with AI, their understanding of the technical approaches that can improve the reliability of AI systems such as grounding models in data has improved their confidence in the technology.

Welcome to ITPro’s live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2024. It's day two here in Las Vegas, and we've got another jam-packed day ahead of us. 

It's very early here at the Venetian Resort, but we're up and getting ready for the day-two keynote. Stay tuned for all the latest news, updates, and announcements throughout the day. 

Good morning from Las Vegas. The opening keynote here at Dell Technologies World is a few hours away, and due to kick off at 10am PT. We can expect to hear lots about AI and infrastructure, with a scheduled appearance from the likes of Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia.

Just under three hours to go until the conference kicks off with today's keynote led by Michael Dell, CEO, chairman, and founder of Dell Technologies. The floor is already buzzing with attendees here at the Venetian – along with an Elvis impersonator – and the energy is only going to increase.

AI is set to be one of the main topics of today's keynote and this is reflected in the visuals currently shown on the Las Vegas Sphere:

All night ahead of the conference, the Sphere has been cycling through animations related to Dell Technologies World 2024, as shown in the header image for this live blog.

Dell is in an interesting spot with regards to AI, as it's leaned heavily on its existing infrastructure and partnerships with the likes of Nvidia. It's clear that this is set to continue throughout this year's event, with Dell having announced its own AI Factory with Nvidia at this year's Nvidia GTC conference – something the company is certain to follow-up on on its home turf.

Today's keynote teases announcements that will help customers "transform your greatest ideas into action with AI, Multicloud, Edge, and more," with representatives from relevant firms such as Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Sungwoo Hwang, president and CEO at Samsung SDS joining Dell on stage to explain more.

Any further detail Dell can give on lightweight LLMs – critical to its approach of bringing AI to the edge, including potentially AI on business laptops – will be key here.

We'll be bringing you the latest news as it comes, so don't go anywhere.

We're in the keynote arena, which is filling up quickly. As is tech conference tradition, the soundtrack right now is an upbeat DJ set – the current song is a trance beat remix of Livin' on a Prayer.

The era of AI

And we're off, beginning with a video montage recapping Dell's year in the industry leaning heavily on AI with a montage based around the phrase "Make it X" e.g. "Make it creative", "make it sustainable".

Here to run us through all of this and more is Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies. 

"We are thrilled to bring you some of the leading voices in technology today," Dell begins, along with a promise of real customer stories. This ties into Dell's stated goal in its keynote descriptions – namely, showing the concrete benefits of AI.

Celebrating 40 years of Dell, we're told, and Dell runs us through all the advancements of the past four decades including meaningful scientific breakthroughs and all the evolutions in computer hardware we've enjoyed.

This isn't just any other Dell Technologies World – it's the 'AI edition'.

"All that progress that came before was really just the pre-game show," Dell tells us, emphasizing that the tech sector is currently experiencing a pivotal moment in its history.

Dell says we're "moving from computation to cognition, into the age of AI".

Dell says that organizations can't just look to "turn the wheel", when it comes to adopting AI. Instead, they must reinvent and innovate to transform their entire organization to make the most of it.

To hear more about AI and the work Dell is doing with its partners to harness the technology, we're now welcoming Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO, ServiceNow to the stage.

"ServiceNow is an idea, and just like how Michael Dell had his dream for Dell, I have mine for ServiceNow: to make sure it becomes the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century," says McDermott.

"Every workflow, in every industry and every corner of the world will be reinvented wirh generative AI," McDermott adds, implying that it changes our understanding of Moore's Law.

McDermott says he's currently working with the Schwarz Group, Europe's largest retailer, and notes that "one bad experience" for a customer makes them a third less likely to do business with your company ever again. AI can help here, he says, but it must also be done carefully.

"It's a mess out there, ladies and gentlemen. When you have people swivelling between 17 different applications a day, no wonder they don't want to come back to the office," he says.

"What we do is put a clean pane of glass on the mess, we become the AI platform of business transformation."

McDermott says with the right approach, organizations can achieve exponential benefits, but this will require a "human revolution" among the workforce driven by leaders.

In his closing remarks, McDermott praises Dell's cloud infrastructure which he says provides the most reliable basis for enterprise processes and feeds directly into ServiceNow's "unheard of" 99% retention rate.

"We use Dell's servers to train our large language models, and we're putting AI to work for people," he says, giving the example of conversational self-service for better customer experience.

So far, this has been a glowing 20 minutes of praise for Michael Dell, but light on announcements. But there's every indication that's about to change, with Nvidia's Jensen Huang having already been mentioned several times.

Dell's AI factories for customers

Before we get there, Dell is running us through some key stats for enterprise AI adoption. Running inference on LLMs on premises, Dell says, can be 75% more cost effective versus the public cloud. This is what Dell is looking to empower through its 'AI factory' approach, an end-to-end ecosystem for AI training, inference, and tuning.

"Data has been, and is, at the center of everything: it's the rocket fuel," he says.

"So let's go where the data is. And no company in the world has provided more data storage capacity than Dell."

On this note Dell has today announced PowerStore Prime, a new NAS storage solution for 66% improved performance through flash storage and secure snapshots for data protection.

Joining this is the PowerScale F910, described by Dell as a product that "feeds the beast of accelerated computing" with unstructured data. 

The heart of today's hardware announcements, however, is the PowerEdge XE9680. Dell says its specs include:

• Eight Nvidia GPUs
• 4TB/sec throughout
• 50% more GPU direct score access

To handle all the throughput for these AI workloads, Dell has partnered with Broadcom and Nvidia for networking fabrics.

AI at the edge

Dell is keen to move onto edge computing, with a landmark five new AI PCs announced today.

"We are using an advanced architecture with a CPU, a GPU, and an NPU," in each laptop, Dell says.

Dell claims that these devices are ideal for inferencing AI models at the edge without cutting into battery life.

All of this ties into Dell's AI ecosystem, we're told, which also includes open source AI models, services around retrieval augmented generation, and connections with Azure, DataBricks, IBM, and Snowflake.

If that sounds like a flurry of sudden announcements, it is – Dell almost said it all in one breath. We've been promised more details on all that in tomorrow's keynote, which we'll also be covering live.

Leveraging AI on premises with Dell

But how does all this benefit customers? Here to give a personal example is Sungwoo Hwang president and CEO, Samsung SDS.

"Our enterprise customers are very interested in using hyperautomation using LLMs, but they're worried about security because they have to put their proprietary information into LLMs, their company's core data," Hwang says.

Hwang says Dell has helped Samsung SDS in a meaningful way by providing its customers with low-latency AI solutions that are also inherently secure, being hosted on premises through Dell infrastructure.

"Dell AI Factory is expected to contribute to the establishment of data sovreingty for companies by enabling strong data security and customized AI service deployment," Hwang adds, praising Dell for its approach.

We've heard a lot of praise for Michael Dell already, but Dell is now taking time to give credit to Dell's partners and customers across the sector.

"We are getting faster, stronger, smarter to be by your side for both a sprint and a marathon," Dell says. The demand for AI is already touching every industry and organization, Dell says, but notes that AI models will vary by use case.

LLMs, for example, can create real value as chatbots for customer service but aren't so useful in a manufacturing context. For this, other models such as vision and multimodal AI will be necessary, he adds.

Small models also have a powerful role to play, Dell adds. As predicted, we're hearing more about the smaller, edge-capable LLMs now.

'AI factories' with Dell and Nvidia

"The early movers are making massive bets," Dell says, noting that we're at the start of a new industrial revolution. But don't take it from him, he urges – take it from the man he's quoting, Jensen Huang founder and CEO, Nvidia.

"Instead of just producing software, we're now producing intelligence, formulated in the form of tokens," Huang says. While the previous industrial revolution focused on producing software and the one before that producing electricity, he says, we're now directly manufacturing intelligence.

The bottom line here is that Dell and Nvidia are doubling down on the importance of AI. Huang underlines the importance of "generative AI factories," which can be used to totally reinvent a firm's operational model.

"Every company at its foundation is intelligence," Huang adds, noting that "every company will be an AI company".

Huang describes Dell AI Factories with Nvidia as "the largest AI go-to-market in history," to applause from the audience.

"Only Dell has the ability to build computer networking, storage, integrated with incredible software whether you want it to be air-cooled, liquid-cooled," Huang adds.

All of this revolves around seven new announcements for Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, including new Nvidia NIM microservices and hardware.

At the heart of this is the Dell PowerEdge XE9680L, a new liquid-cooled server rack that can host up to 72 of Nvidia's flagship Blackwell GPUs.

"Only at Dell World do you talk sexy like that," Huang quips, prompting loud laughter throughout the auditorium. On a more serious note, Huang says the aim here is to make AI as easy as possible, even when "giant supercomputers" are necessary for running the latest AI workloads.

What does Huang say we need to do going forward?

"One: modernize a trillion dollars of the world's data centers. Two: build these AI factories, for the rest of the hundred trillion dollar industries. Easy peasy."

Moving on, Dell notes that there are clear barriers to AI adoption. For one, we need  ethical AI development, and to address enterprise concerns.

Green data centers, powered by renewable energy sources and cooled more efficiently are at the core of responsibly and sustainably adopting AI, Dell says.

He also says that governments must adopt an 'AI-first' approach and that Dell stands ready to support the public sector in this aim. If we don't invest in AI, Dell says, we'll miss out on benefits for future generations.

To demonstrate this, we're now being shown a short clip about what Dell calls 'AI for human progress'. Examples include AI for healthcare and the future generations using AI to solve issues in their communities, as well as students leveraging chatbots to train for job interviews.

"We are at the dawn of a new age of cognition," Dell says, thanking his guests today. To illustrate the point and emphasize the potential AI holds for future generations, Dell is joined onstage by McDermott, Hwang, and Huang alongside younger workers representing the next generation of the sector.

And with that, the day-one keynote is finished. Stay tuned for all the latest on the ground throughout the event.

Yesterday's opening keynote with founder and CEO, Michael Dell, set the stage for an exciting few days here in Las Vegas. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made an appearance to discuss the close ties between Dell and Nvidia, and we had a couple of big announcements here regarding the 'AI Factories' work ongoing between the two firms. 

New features are coming to Dell AI Factory with Nvidia. This is an end-to-end solution for enterprise AI deployment that aims to streamline the development and roll-out of AI tools. 

Moving forward, Huang revealed the duo aim to forge closer ties and draw upon their combined software and hardware capabilities to further expand the service. 

This includes new server options for customers that leverage Nvidia's latest chips, as well as greater support for the Nvidia AI Enterprise platform. 

Updates to the AI Factory service weren't the only headline-grabbing announcements, however. 

Dell is very bullish on edge computing right now, and the company is focusing heavily on bolstering its capabilities in this regard. Yesterday we saw five new AI PCs unveiled, which Dell said are finely tuned for inferencing AI models at the edge without placing significant strain on battery life or performance. 

AI PCs certainly are all the rage at the moment, as Microsoft unveiled its own new Copilot+ AI PC brand at its Build conference this week. 

So, what can we expect to see at the day-two keynote this morning? 

Today's session is titled 'Making AI Real', so get ready for a hands-on session with speakers running us through practical, real-world examples of AI innovation. 

Chief operating officer Jeff Clarke will be leading this morning's session, and he'll be joined by a host of Dell customers to give us a glimpse into how they're delivering operational improvements through AI tools. 

In the meantime, why not catch up on all of our coverage from Dell Technologies World so far? There's more to come, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for all of our rolling coverage. 

• Dell doubles down on Nvidia partnership with ‘AI factories’ and models at the edge

• Dell Technologies expands AI ecosystem with Microsoft, Hugging Face support

• All our predictions for Dell Technologies World 2024 (let us know how we're doing so far...)

There's a real buzz here at the Venetian today ahead of the morning keynote and we can expect another packed conference hall ahead of things kicking off!

For the maximum Vegas experience, there's an Elvis impersonator on the ground near the keynote auditorium. That's probably the theatrical peak of the morning, as today's keynote will be far more technical and promises to delve deeper into some of the conference's biggest announcements.

While the auditorium quickly fills with attendees, we're being treated to a live DJ and saxophonist, while a rolling deck of quotes about AI is shown on the stage screens.

These reflect some of what we heard yesterday about restructuring your organization and what Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO at ServiceNow, said around the "human revolution" that will be necessary to harness AI in the enterprise.

"If you're curious and like to learn, there has never been a better time to be alive, to make yourself and your organization smarter and more productive," reads one from Michael Dell, CEO, chairman, and founder of Dell Technologies.

And we're off, beginning with the same video montage as yesterday, covering the potential for AI in the enterprise with the taglines "Make it your own", "Make it sustainable", etc.

Here to take us through all those and welcome special guests onto stage to discuss the real-world benefits of AI is Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and COO at Dell Technologies.

Clarke promises detail on how Dell can help with AI across the course of today's keynote.

"We're going to talk about what we blueprint, what we've learned, and how we can help you deploy AI and take advantage of this enormous technological opportunity we have today."

Before then, we're getting another macro view of what Dell calls the 'AI revolution'.

"Since we were last together," Clarke says, "it's been one hell of a year. There's been no slowing down in generative AI – in fact, I would argue that it's only accelerated."

Clarke says we've not had a breakthrough like this since the industrial revolution, as illustrated by a large graphic of a steam locomotive behind him. The raw material driving this revolution, we're told, is information and the new machines are hardware like GPUs.

AI factories to harness the 'AI revolution'

The main transformation that IT leaders will have to handle is that "AI workloads require a vastly different computing architecture". Dell believes that its AI Factory approach is the solution here.

What is an AI factory? Clarke says these are combinations of services, open ecosystems, and infrastructure that turn data into something useful, particularly when it comes to leveraging insights that were previously undiscoverable.

"We're moving from what has been, historically, a computational output to more of a cognitive response with context and reasoning."

Dell has five core beliefs related to AI:

• Data is the differential that should drive businesses, as 83% of all data is on premises and 50% is generated at the edge
• AI will move to the data and not the other way around
• There is no one-size-fits-all approach here, as AI will need to adapt from edge computing to the hyperscale
• Firms will need to use open, modular infrastructure to use AI
• The sector needs an open ecosystem to take advantage of these powerful new technologies

The Dell AI Factory comes in all shapes and sizes, Clarke says, ranging from models run on Dell's Precision workstations all the way up to a data center containing "hundreds, if not thousands of Dell PowerEdge XE9680Ls" each of which contains up to 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.

"Accelerating computing is the table stakes," Clarke says, adding that Dell has a key role to play here with its ability to deploy solutions at scale and to match the performance per dollar that businesses need.

Clarke is now warning the audience about the immense compute demands AI will drive in the coming years. He says the number of flops to meet AI compute by 2027 will be measured as 27 followed by thirty zeroes.

"By 2030, only 10% of the compute demand will be for training and the rest will be for inferencing," he says. By the same date, he adds, 390 GW of additional power generation will have to come online to match AI data center demand.

That's a lot to consider, but it's time to consider all this with real-world examples. Here to explain more is Charlie Kawwas, president, Semiconductor Solutions Group at Broadcom.

"Networks in today's data centers are the bedrock of the data centers we built over the past three decades," says Kawwas.

As we move toward the true potential of AI, Kawwas says, we will need upwards of a million GPUs. He compares networking to the brains of the operation and data to the heart.

"I believe to scale up to that level, to have the brain and the heart, we will need an open ecosystem," Kawwas says, 

Kawwas now shows off the new 5 nanometer, monolithic die Tomahawk 5 chip which is present within Dell's PowerEdge XE9680. Describing it as "unique," Kawwas explains that it delivers the lowest latency while also achieving excellent energy efficiency for lower running costs.

The chip works hand in hand with Broadcom's new NIC ethernet switch, which delivers 400GB/sec bandwidth.

"We, all of us, are very lucky to be living in this inflection point," Kawwas adds. Over the next three years, he says, we'll see more power and performance from "bigger, meaner GPUs".

"On the front-end networking, it's going to stay Ethernet which isn't going to change – if anything, it'll get faster," Kawwas projects, noting that speeds of 800Gbits/sec or 1.2Tbits/sec are achievable. He also says that while the new PowerEdge server uses PCIe generation five, by next year we'll already be on generation seven.

Lots of detail here, with a show-and-tell from Kawwas as he brings hardware onto the stage to show the work Broadcom is doing in collaboration with Dell. He's now showing off a new chip, which through four chips co-packaged with the Tomahawk 5, replaces the need for 400 native transceivers, which can cut power draw by as much as 70%.

Overhauling infrastructure

Having taken in some fabric advances, Clarke says we're now moving onto Dell Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG). Here to run us through all of this is Arthur Lewis, president, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies.

"With our AI Factory, we sit at the very center of the AI revolution," Lewis says, segueing into some of the specific compute advances made at Dell Technologies World 2024.

Focusing on the XE9680L, Lewis says he's incredibly excited by the potential of the new liquid-cooled hardware solution.

"Leveraging our decades-long leadership in liquid cooling, we have improved the energy efficiency of the XE9680L 2.5x," Lewis says. He notes that the 12 PCIe slots on offer support 400Gbits/sec ethernet, which is a market-leading level of throughput.

It doesn't stop there, Lewis says. Dell has also revealed a number of rack-scale solutions for the XE9680L, including the 100KW design shown off in yesterday's keynote that can support up to 72 Nvidia Blackwell 200 GPUs.

With one eye on the horizon, Dell has also unveiled a rack solution for the Grace Blackwell 200 superchip, along with the x86 innovations from Intel.

Paying credit to Broadcom with its Tomahawk 5 and Thor 2 hardware offerings, Lewis says this will help Dell meet the 300x increase in data throughput demand driven by AI workloads.

Moving swiftly onto hardware, Lewis emphasizes the capabilities of the new PowerScale F910, Dell's flash storage NAS solution for leveraging data at the speed and scale needed for AI performance. It comes complete with PCIe generation five, as well as 24 NVMe SSDs.

Next year, we're told, Dell will unveil Project Lightning, a new parallel file system for unstructured data which will deliver 18.5x more throughput and 20x more performance compared to competition.

Lewis says an open ecosystem is at the top of customer demands, as businesses want flexibility on how and where they run models. 

Dell is working on this with its partners and to tell us more about this, we're now welcoming Ihab Tarazi, SVP and CTO, AI and Compute, Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies, to explain more.

Noting that open source innovation is key in the AI space, Tarazi has also welcomed Sy Choudhury, director, AI partnerships at Meta to the stage.

Speaking on the release of Meta's open LLM Llama 3, Choudhury says that Meta seeks to democratize the AI market as "that helps all of us". This applies especially to safety benchmarks, he says, as the community can collaborate on finding errors and unwanted outputs.

Choudhury also highlights the "very permissive" licence for Llama 3, which he says lets businesses use it how they want and to fine-tune it on their own data.

Tarazi asks Choudhury what the numbers associated with Llama 3, such as being trained on 15 trillion tokens or its 8,000 token context window, means for users.

"Compared to a year ago, you're seeing better reasoning, more accurate responses, better multi-term conversations, and frankly better coding abilities," Choudhury responds.

Choudhury says there's a great deal of flexibility in deploying Llama 3, from fine-tuning to the more advanced use of vector data for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which can help tailor responses to a company's data and identity without having to shift data around.

"As you're building your AI Factory, along with Dell and other partners, you're able to have your data and your model in your AI Factory," Choudhury says.

We're moving swiftly on, discussing open models in a broader sense. With this in mind, Tarazi is now welcoming Jeff Boudier, head of product at Hugging Face, to the stage.

Hugging Face now hosts over one million models, Boudier says, all of which enterprises can "truly own and host themselves in their own secure environments, without compromising customer data".

One of the biggest hurdles to AI adoption is getting models from a repository to an on premises production deployment, as IT teams have to deal with comntainers and quantization.

To address this issue, Dell has partnered with Hugging Face on Dell Enterprise Hub, a new portal on Hugging Face for easy deployment of models in the form of ready-to-use containers.

To illustrate how easy the solution is to use, we're being shown a demo in which a Dell Enterprise Hub user browses a catalog of models on the portal. Each model card represents a container with a model pre-optimized for Dell hardware and users can filter by the specific hardware they use or even by model licence type.

"This only takes a few clicks," says Tarazi.

Dell's focus on AI PCs 

More on Dell's AI PCs now, with the firm having rolled out NPU-driven AI support across its portfolio including its XPS, Latitude, and Precision lines. Here to explain more is Sam Burd, president, Client Solutions Group at Dell Technologies, along with  Dounia Senawi chief commercial officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP, to give an example of how AI PCs are already being used.

Senawi says there's great porential for AI to be run at the edge on individual devices:

"We see this as the future and we really want to lead." 

Deloitte has used AI PCs to empower its developers with on-device code completion using the Llama 7B lightweight model. "We saw great additional results in process and quality speed, productivity, reduced errors, and improved privacy and security," says Senawi.

We're moving along quickly once again, as Burd thanks Senawi and reminds us that Dell unveiled five AI PCs in yesterday’s PCs. Each comes with the new Copilot Key for launcing Microsoft Copilot.

Here to explain more when it comes to Copilot on PCs is Matt Barlow, corporate VP, Windows Marketing at Microsoft.

“Finding things on PC is really difficult,” says Barlow, explaining how Microsoft’s ‘Recall’ feature which logs user activity for AI recollection can help users be more productive. He gives the example of using Recall to find his flight itinerary and even finding a specific slide within a deck.

The speed of AI with McLaren Racing

Clarke is now back on stage and promises that althoigh the keynote has run a little overtime – for those who are counting – "we're saving the best till last".

I've written "we're moving along quickly" a few times in today's live blog already, but here it becomes literal as we welcome Zak Brown, CEO at McLaren Racing to the stage.

"We have a factory to make the race car and we have an AI factory that helps us 

Brown explains that the world of racing is measured in "the smallest of margins," with 2.6% separating the best from the worst. Each racing weekend, McLaren runs around 500 race simulations, powered by Dell infrastructure, with sensors on the car feeding millions of data points to McLaren's compute.

"Everything points to performance, whether that's our HR, our marketing team, our commercial department, because there's now a cost cap in F1 so where we used to be able to spend our way out of a problem we now have to be unbelievably efficient with everything we do."

McLaren is already working on its 2026 car, which Brown says will be its most "AI-driven" car ever.

An AI 'blueprint' across Dell's AI Factory approach

To round off, we're zooming out – way out – with an expansive blueprint of all the announcements made at this year's event. 

"The entire discussion has been a blueprint of how we make AI Factories an extension of our partnerships, open and modular infrastructure to build AI systems and solutions for all of you," Clarke says.

"It's about Dell AI Factory making it easy for you."

And with that, we're finished with the day-two keynote at Dell Technologies World 2024. Keep an eye on ITPro as we continue to bring you the latest from the conference, including in-depth analysis of the announcements.

Dell Technologies has announced added features for its shared AI solution with Nvidia, alongside a number of added compatibility features for Nvidia hardware as the two companies draw even closer ties together.

In the opening keynote of Dell Technologies World 2024, held this year at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang was welcomed onstage to loud applause from the crowd and much hype by Michael Dell, founder and CEO at Dell Technologies.

The pair shared the stage to announce new features for Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, the end-to-end solution for enterprise AI deployment. As part of the move, Dell and Nvidia will combine their software and hardware capabilities to flesh out the service, with new offerings including servers that use Nvidia’s latest chips and support for the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform.

The concept of an 'AI factory' was repeatedly defined throughout the first day of Dell Technologies World and in essence refers to the processes, technology, and infrastructure necessary to use AI.

Across the wave of announcements, Dell and Huang made it clear that their respective companies are looking to play into one another's strengths to form the ideal factory structure. Where Dell's infrastructure is in prime position for enterprise use, Nvidia has a hardware or software solution to accelerate AI training and deployment.

“This partnership between us is going to be the first and the largest generative AI go-to-market in history,” Huang said.

“Only Dell has the ability to build compute, networking, storage, innovative and incredible software, air-cooled or liquid-cooled, bring it to your company and help you stand it up with professional services.”

Achieving an edge with Nvidia

Both companies have taken something of an indivisible approach to AI, where Dell and Nvidia enable and empower the other to perform better and deliver fuller services. An example of this can be found in the new availability of Nvidia's AI software platform, Nvidia AI Enterprise, as another facet of Dell AI Factory.

Dell customers will now be able to deploy Nvidia AI Enterprise through Dell NativeEdge, the company’s multi-cloud solution for edge workload management and oversight, allowing for a range of Nvidia tools to be easily deployed where a customer so chooses.

This includes NIM microservices, the firm’s catalog of ready-made cloud native containers that help developers speed up AI deployment, or the transcription and translation microservice Nvidia Riva.

At Nvidia’s GTC conference in March 2024, Michael Dell first unveiled the Nvidia AI Factory in partnership with the chipmaker. The announcements made at Dell Technologies World 2024 build on this initial reveal, with more support for Nvidia hardware and networking alongside further infrastructure and service support by Dell. 

“We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Nvidia in this journey,” said Michael Dell. “It’s built on our decades of collaboration – we’re giving customers an ‘easy button’ for AI.”

Dell continues to aim for the widest possible access to AI for its customers, a concept the firm has said is central to the idea of the ‘AI Factory’. 

In a Q&A with the press after the keynote, Jeff Clarke, COO at Dell Technologies, stated that Dell aims to provide its customers with ‘AI factories’, plural, across the wide range of environments that can benefit from edge computing.

“We’ve got this broad ecosystem of software, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), closed and open large language models (LLMs), small and large LLMs, PCs and edge devices, data centers for training and inference. Put all that together, you’ve got yourself an AI factory,” said Dell.

There’s no requirement for customers to use Nvidia hardware when they construct their own AI factory, nor to adopt specific Dell-supported models such as Llama 3. But when it comes to tackling most hardware-intensive workloads on the market, or deploying competitive AI models at the edge, it’s clear Dell places immense value on its partnership with Nvidia.

PowerEdge servers, running on Nvidia GPUs, are a core element in another new solution that comes as part of the AI Factory approach: Dell Validated Design for Digital Assistants. 

Through this, Dell aims to provide its customers with the platforms, services, and infrastructure necessary to deploy generative AI digital assistants for customer-facing or internal tasks. Customers will leverage guidance from Dell, including advice on the Dell best compute for the task, as well as tailored development like AI avatar customization.

Dell emphasized the value that chatbots for customer service can bring, most notably in improved end-user experience. John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies, gave ITPro the example of the City of Amarillo, which has used digital assistants to improve the accessibility of its community services.  

Through the deployment of an LLM, the local government was able to ensure residents can access digital services in their own language – a task previously thought too difficult as across the region 62 languages and dialects are actively spoken.

Nvidia hardware on Dell’s newest servers

As part of Dell Factory with Nvidia, Dell customers will be able to make use of the new PowerEdge XE9680L server, which is based on Nvidia’s new Grace Blackwell family of GPUs. Inside, the server contains eight GPUs in an ultra-dense architecture, each of which is cooled using direct-to-chip liquid cooling which Dell says delivers 2.5x better energy efficiency.

“We’ve had a ton of success with the XE9680 with Hopper and now we’re super excited to bring the XE9680L with direct liquid cooling so it goes from a 6U to a 4U form factor so we can put 72 of your B200 Blackwells in one rack,” said Dell.

Speaking reflectively as Dell celebrates its 40th anniversary year, both Dell and Huang emphasized how the previous four decades of innovation will form the backdrop for the exciting developments they see in store as their respective companies continue to collaborate.

“When we first met, almost 28 years ago, Dell made PC one-click easy. You could build your own PC, build it, and color it how you like, you made it easy to buy and sell. And now we're going to take this to a whole new level. 

“These systems are incredible. These are giant supercomputers that we are going to build at scale, deliver at scale, and help you stand it up at scale. So what appears to be an incredibly complicated technology – and it's a very complicated technology – we’re going to easy for all of you guys to enjoy.”

With the likes of the XE96890L, Dell is setting the groundwork for training and inferencing even the largest and most demanding LLMs on the market, as well as preparing for what it anticipates will be a widespread adoption of AI models for edge computing.

Dell Technologies has announced a slew of new options across its AI ecosystem, driven by expanded partnerships with some of the biggest players in the AI world.

A key plank of Dell Technologies’ pitch for its AI ecosystem is helping customers bring AI to their data rather than the other way around, through the use of on premises deployment of smaller language models.

With this in mind, the firm has announced Dell Enterprise Hub, a new portal on Hugging Face, the open source platform for machine learning (ML). This allows customers to deploy popular open source large language models (LLMs) via Dell’s on-premises infrastructure, alongside dedicated containers and scripts to integrate AI within their ecosystem.

Dell is Hugging Face’s preferred infrastructure provider to support the deployment of open source generative AI models, with models on the platform optimized for enterprise adoption on the tech giant’s hardware.

Customers looking to leverage validated models on Hugging Face can do so with assistance through Accelerator Services for Dell Enterprise Hub, a new service that will see Dell provide advice on model choices depending on business needs and work to reduce time to value for LLM deployment.

Continuing its collaboration with Meta, Dell has also announced support for the company’s most powerful LLM, Llama 3. Dell stated that its PowerEdge XE9680 is optimal for running the most powerful 70 billion parameter version of the model, which is competitive with other models such as Google’s Gemini Pro 1.0 while being free and cheaper to run.

As with its Hugging Face partnership, Dell will provide its customers with guidance on  leveraging Llama 3 within their environment and work with them to fine-tune the model for better performance using Dell infrastructure.

Dell announces closer ties with Microsoft and streamlined AI adoption

Across the announcements, Dell says it aims to make enterprise AI adoption as smooth as possible via a turnkey process. This also applies to its existing connections with Microsoft Azure, which Dell is expanding to include more Microsoft AI services.

Dell has also announced an improvement to Apex Cloud Platform with Microsoft Azure, through which customers can harness Microsoft Azure AI features within their on-prem environment with the same API connections as in Azure. 

In a call with assembled media Varun Chhabra, SVP infrastructure systems group marketing at Dell Technologies, gave example use cases such as language translation, document intelligence, and computer vision being realized through Azure AI but closer to customer data.

Another new announcement connected to Microsoft is Dell Services for Microsoft Copilot Solutions. This builds on Dell’s existing generative AI services catalog in offering customers professional services to prepare, deploy, and scale Microsoft Copilot products such as Microsoft Copilot for Security or GitHub Copilot. 

Once Dell customers have rolled Copilot out, Dell will provide ongoing sessions to help workforces grapple with the tool and to help businesses meet their goals.

“Our approach with Copilot goes well beyond the readiness of the technical environment and implementation,” Chhabra said.

“Our services capabilities here also help customers to make sure that their data is secure, as well as knowledge workers are primed to fully utilize them. The way we do this is we first help customers assess the environment they’re working in, to identify their user requirements as well as their mapping needs for data.”

Rory Bathgate is covering Dell Technologies World 2024 between 20 and 24 May. Stay up-to-date with live coverage of all the announcements and more on ITPro.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been just one year since the last Dell Technologies World event, given the innovation and breadth of tech sector announcements that have happened in the interim.

Generative AI, which has come to dominate conversations across markets, had only been in the limelight for six months at the time of last year’s event. Now, with a clearer view of the possibilities of the technology – but also the continued anxieties of many businesses when it comes to AI adoption – Dell Technologies is in a prime position to make the most of the AI boom through concrete commitments.

There’s also lots to look forward to with Dell’s hardware and infrastructure, as the firm continues its years-long collaboration with Nvidia. With these hopes in mind, I’ve pulled together some of my top hopes and expectations ahead of Dell Technologies World 2024.

1. Doubling down on Apex expansions

Dell Apex, the company’s anything as a service (XaaS) platform, has gone from strength to strength in recent years and continues to be a cornerstone product for the company around which its many services orbit.

At Dell Technologies World 2023, the firm unveiled its largest-ever expansion of Apex and in my conversations with Dell executives it was clear that the company sees incredible value for its customers in the Apex multi-cloud approach. 

One of the key tenets of Dell Technologies World 2023 was ‘multi-cloud by design’, especially in the context of firms looking to continue modernization efforts or embrace the benefits of AI.

It’s reasonable to assume that Dell will seek to continue on this trajectory at its 2024 event, with additional support for customers looking to harness the benefits of multi-cloud. I’d specifically be looking for Dell to take this further by expanding the connections it made with public cloud providers in 2023 through Apex Cloud Platforms. 

This service aims to help customers with DevOps and modernization efforts across hybrid cloud environments in partnership with Microsoft Azure, Red Hat's OpenShift platform for Kubernetes, and VMware.

When it comes to platform oversight, there’s also potential for Dell to inject more AI into the Apex platform in the form of an AI copilot or assistant similar to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Agents. It may be early days for this yet, but depending on the maturity of a customer’s data, the conversational capabilities of generative AI could make multi-cloud oversight easier.

2. AI infrastructure with strong Nvidia backing 

Anyone who attends a tech conference these days can expect to be peppered with AI announcements and jokes. In the Dell Technologies World 2023 keynote, audiences were given the running gag of ‘ChatDTW’, a riff on ChatGPT, as a comedic backing to the more serious announcements made around AI.

Dell’s relationship with Nvidia has been integral to its wider AI approach. The Firm partnered with Nvidia for on prem generative AI, with Dell providing optimized hardware such as its PowerEdge XE9680 powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs and Nvidia including pre-trained models and frameworks.

In July, two months after Dell Technologies World 2023, Dell Validated Designs for Generative AI with Nvidia and in October 2023, Dell added model tuning features to Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with Nvidia via a new Model Customization strand.

It’s already clear that Nvidia will play a similarly big role at this year’s event with Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia, scheduled to make an appearance during the day-one keynote

At Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in March, Dell announced a new service known as Dell AI Factory with Nvidia and further news on this will almost certainly form the backbone for Dell’s AI news at the event.

Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is an end-to-end solution for AI adoption and deployment, rooted in Dell’s compute, storage, and services offerings alongside Nvidia’s infrastructure and networking fabric.

There’s plenty of scope for Dell to provide greater assurances for its customers looking to implement AI here, from those questioning how to deploy open source AI models to businesses assessing the pros and cons of chatbots for customer service.

I’d be surprised if, in direct connection with this, we didn’t hear more about Dell’s modern data lakehouse solution. First announced in its September 2023 partnership with Starburst, this aims to help customers federate their data in preparation for AI and machine learning (ML) as well as more easily leverage insights through big data analytics.

Last year John Roese, president and global CTO at Dell Technologies, told ITPro that customers were still grappling with getting their data in the right place and understanding that unstructured data is better for large language model (LLM) training.

The day-two keynote, typically reserved for the nuts-and-bolts explanations of the event’s biggest announcements and further detail on more developer-focused news, is titled ‘Making AI Real’. 

Throughout the one-hour session, audience members can expect to hear from representatives at Hugging Face, Microsoft, Meta, and McLaren Racing with an aim to “showcase powerful new technologies to make the promise of AI a reality for you and your business”.

Do I detect an attempt to assuage lingering industry suspicion here? In January, we heard that 83% of UK businesses don’t plan to use AI in the short-term and C-suites continue to weigh up the various reasons to be excited or worried about AI, the expected ROI of generative AI, and a fear of missing out on the technology.

With its AI infrastructure and pipeline for AI deployment already more fleshed out than this time last year, Dell can use the day-two keynote to champion concrete examples of its customers more easily embracing the technology.

3. Key security and edge updates

One of my final and potentially less likely hopes for Dell Technologies World 2024 is a detailed update on ‘Project Fort Zero’, the firm’s proposal for an end-to-end zero trust system that could 

There’s been little word on the project since then, though Dell did state at the time that it was part of a multi-year security approach. If the US Department of Defense (DoD) does validate the project soon, it could be a powerful boon for firms in sensitive industries looking for a platform that comes with specific security guarantees.

Dell has real pedigree when it comes to edge computing solutions, with its multi-cloud Dell NativeEdge platform having been hyped last year as a solution for firms aiming to expand their edge operations with centralized oversight. 

Last year, much was made of the potential of deploying AI at the edge for low-latency operations and in the year since we’ve seen small models such as the 8B parameter Llama 3 or Google’s Gemma models demonstrating the value of smaller models. An announcement that brings NativeEdge together with these lighter, more easily deployed models could make all the difference in fields such as smart manufacturing.

Rory Bathgate will be covering Dell Technologies World 2024 between 20 and 24 May. Stay up-to-date with live coverage of all the announcements and more on ITPro.

Dell has contacted customers warning of a data breach containing purchase information related to 49 million individuals.

The technology giant said it was currently looking into a security incident involving a Dell portal, which contains a database storing “limited types of customer information” linked to recent purchases of Dell products.

Its investigation indicated the information compromised in the breach was limited to customer names, addresses, their Dell customer info, and product information related to their purchase.

Dell said it immediately implemented its incident response procedures once it was aware of the breach, taking a number of steps to contain the incident and notifying law enforcement.

Financial or payment information, email addresses, and telephones, were not included in leaked data, according to Dell, who claimed there was not a “significant risk” to customers as a result.

On 29 April 2024, open source intelligence resource Daily Dark Web reported a threat actor with the name ‘Menelik’ was selling access to a database containing 49 million customer records on a hacking forum hosted on the dark web.

The listing stated that the database for sale contained information related to systems purchased from Dell between 2017 - 2024, and the countries with the most systems included in the breach were the US, China, India, Australia, and Canada.

Around 7 million entries were related to individual or personal purchases, with 11 million pertaining to consumer segment companies. The rest of the information was linked to enterprise customers including partners and schools.

The type of information Menelik stated was included in the compromised database aligns with what Dell said was exposed in the data breach disclosed on 9 May. 

Notably, however, a twitter account dedicated to providing intel on dark web activity, DarkWebInformer, claimed the listing created on the underground forum no longer exists, but suggested the post may still be legitimate.

ITPro contacted Dell for clarification on whether this data was the same, but at the time of writing the company has yet to respond.

Why Dell customers should be wary

Although Dell claimed it did not consider the incident exposed its customers to ‘significant risk’ as the leaked data did not include particularly sensitive information like email addresses, phone numbers, or financial data, it did advise customers to exercise caution.

Dell’s breach notification recommended customers impacted by the incident to take steps to protect themselves against social engineering attacks using information compromised in the breach, providing tips on how to detect tech support scams in particular.

The threat from social engineering attacks has grown in recent years, in April IT security specialist Zscaler reported it had blocked around 2 billion phishing attempts in 2023, marking a 60% increase year on year (YoY).

Cloud storage provider Wasabi Technologies has announced a new collaboration with Dell to provide customers with affordable hybrid cloud solutions.

The flexible offerings cover backup and data protection and have been designed to help customers optimize their data management processes while reducing their overall costs.

Dell’s PowerProtect Data Domain appliances now natively tier data to Wasabi to create a complete data protection solution for on premises storage with long-term cloud retention, while Wasabi also now integrates with Dell NetWorker CloudBoost to provide existing Dell customers with long-term retention in the cloud.

Formed via Dell’s Extended Technologies Complete (ETC) program, Wasabi said the collaboration will provide increased efficiency, security, and scalability while extending its reach across the customer base of a prominent industry leader.

"Dell is a clear industry leader with a broad and deep portfolio of transformative technology,” said David Friend, co-founder and CEO at Wasabi. "This collaboration will extend the reach of Wasabi's cloud storage to a broader audience, catering to users in search of dependable, economical solutions for safeguarding their data archives over the long haul."

Wasabi’s offerings now have validation for products from Dell’s Data Protect Solutions (DPS) group as well as its Unstructured Data Solutions (UDS) group. 

Wasabi said the integrations address the operational and financial challenges businesses are experiencing due to exponential data growth, with conventional on-site storage solutions becoming frequently overwhelmed by data sprawl and first-generation cloud storage services being too expensive and complex.

By combining with Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio, users can now send data directly from PowerProtect to Wasabi cloud object storage for long-term retention as well as tier-deduplicated data to the cloud without necessitating a second cloud gateway or virtual appliance. 

Ultimately, customers can automate the process of offloading aging data automatically to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage directly from PowerProtect to help drive down total cost of ownership (TCO) and optimize resource allocation and data lifecycle management.

Commenting on the collaboration, Dave McCarthy, research vice president at IDC, said the combined offering presents a “powerful solution” for those looking to get a grip on their data growth. 

"Organizations need a hybrid cloud infrastructure that is efficient and cost-effective, and that has the ability to scale with them during their data management journey,” he said. “This collaboration meets these challenges head-on."

Beginning life back in 2016 as a SaaS (software as a service) platform for proactively cloud managing and monitoring Dell's enterprise storage arrays, CloudIQ now encompasses virtually every infrastructure product on its books. Dell's PowerEdge server portfolio was brought into the CloudIQ fold in 2022 and this year sees a heap of new features including PowerFlex pool details, enhancements to the Cybersecurity services, adding alerts for urgent and recommended PowerEdge updates to the home page, and facilities for scheduling them at convenient times.

Our testing lab uses a lot of PowerEdge systems and in this review, we focus primarily on the CloudIQ services available for server management. A feature that will undoubtedly appeal is CloudIQ is free with the only main requirement being that each device must have a valid Dell ProSupport or higher service contract.

There is one other requirement that differentiates CloudIQ from HPE's Compute Ops Management (COM). The latter's ProLiant Gen10 and 11 servers can communicate directly with the COM portal account whereas CloudIQ requires each site to have a local instance of its OpenManage Enterprise (OME) virtualized app which functions as a telemetry collector.

An advantage of Dell's approach is CloudIQ can manage all PowerEdge servers going back to Gen13 with iDRAC8 – COM requires HPE's on-premises OneView app to access ProLiant Gen9 and lower models with iLO4 controllers. CloudIQ is also capable of gathering a lot of valuable information about the status, system performance, and security posture of Dell's servers.

Dell CloudIQ review: Cloud deployment 

Your first job is to install on-premises instances of OME and update them to v3.10 to support CloudIQ's Cybersecurity plus server maintenance and firmware update operations. We run OME v3.10 in the lab on a Windows Server 2022 Hyper-V host and Dell also offers a VMware download.

Another bonus is you only need the free base version of OME for CloudIQ integration. This provides plenty of useful features including server discovery and inventory, firmware updates and baseline management, driver compliance, monitoring, and alerting.

It only takes a few minutes to create a secure CloudIQ account and then you add the plug-in from the OME web console and register it using your site ID and the generated access key and PIN. The last job is to access the plug-in from the OME console, give it a friendly name, and enable Cyber security data collection and remote management. Access controls are tight as you can decide precisely which OME systems and groups CloudIQ users can initiate remote management jobs for.

Dell CloudIQ review: PowerEdge management features

The OME plug-in sends encrypted telemetry data on all managed systems every 15 minutes and you can run manual syncs from OME as well. The CloudIQ portal opens with an informative widget-based dashboard providing an overview of connected systems and OME collectors, system health, urgent and recommended update status, detected Cyber security risks, alerts, and open service requests.

The Monitor page showed all our PowerEdge systems and selecting one from the list furnished us with a wealth of information about it. Health monitoring can be configured to show the server's status over custom periods going back years while the Inventory tab reveals all hardware details including device cards, CPUs, memory, network adapters, and storage controllers.

CloudIQ applies compliance reports to all or selected systems to determine what BIOS, firmware, and driver versions are required and you can view those currently installed for every component and if there are critical and recommended updates. Click on the system updates link and you can browse available upgrades for each managed server, make your selections, and run an immediate update or schedule them to run when required.

Update progress can be monitored from the portal's Jobs page although you can ignore the default estimated run time of 5.5 hours as we found all our jobs took 10 minutes at most. Server power can be remotely controlled directly from the portal which also provides links to the OME and iDRAC web consoles but Dell hasn't updated its CloudIQ mobile apps which don't currently support PowerEdge servers.

Dell CloudIQ review: Carbon footprints and Cyber security

CloudIQ's server performance viewer is a winner as it presents graphs of CPU, memory, and system utilization over the past 24 hours along with more for CPU and system inlet temperatures, airflow in cubic feet per minute, and overall power consumption. Introduced late last year, CloudIQ now uses predictive analytics on historical PowerEdge server performance trends to help businesses plan for server upgrades and workload migrations.

Carbon footprints are calculated for each managed server with the portal showing the total carbon emissions in CO2e (kg) and energy usage in kWh for the current year along with energy trends. A graph shows carbon emissions per month and selecting a server from the list below allows you to drill down, see its energy consumption and carbon emissions for the past seven days, and view a forecast.

The Cyber security feature applies evaluation plans and templates to servers that check for a wide range of potential risks. All our servers received multiple Cyber security alerts as amongst many other things, we didn't have secure boot enabled, our iDRAC admin passwords weren't strong enough, SSH access was available, their USB ports were all enabled, SNMPv3 wasn't configured – you get the idea.

Dell CloudIQ review: Is it worth it?

Of course, it is – it's free. CloudIQ is ideal for Dell-centric environments as it provides a single cloud portal for proactively monitoring and analyzing their entire infrastructure including network devices, storage arrays, data protection systems, and, of course, PowerEdge servers. 

Deployment is undemanding and the highly informative portal will undoubtedly improve productivity and help troubleshoot complex issues such as the potential impact of server and storage array performance on VMware workloads. The Cyber security service will keep systems hardened against intruders and as big PowerEdge users, we were impressed with the server performance monitoring services, automated update tools, predictive analytics, and forecasting features.

Dell CloudIQ requirements

Dell Technologies and CrowdStrike have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to deliver AI-based security technologies via Dell’s managed detection and response (MDR) service.

Available now as a direct solution and via channel partners, Dell’s MDR service now features CrowdStrike’s AI-native Falcon XDR platform to help customers successfully tackle evolving security threats.

By combining Falcon with its own security operations experts and proactive threat hunting capabilities, Dell said customers now have access to the capabilities they need to tackle modern challenges across multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments.

“Working with industry leaders like CrowdStrike is critical to delivering choice and flexibility to customers in a very fragmented and complex security landscape,” explained Mihir Maniar, vice president of infrastructure at Dell’s edge and security services portfolio.

“Customers need scalable, outcome-based security solutions to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats.

“The combination of MDR and the CrowdStrike platform empowers customers to exponentially reduce threat exposures, detect and respond to incidents, and recover applications and systems.”

Powered by CrowdStrike’s Security Cloud and AI technology, the Falcon XDR platform draws from real-time attack indicators, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft, and enriched telemetry to provide protection across the enterprise.

From a single unified hub, the offering works to provide users with accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, threat hunting, as well as prioritized observation of vulnerabilities.

Last year, Dell integrated the platform into its SafeGuard and Response offering to bolster the scope of its threat management capabilities. Now, the pair’s expanded partnership aims to further clamp down on evolving cyber threats as organizations continue to battle against the growing cyber security skills gap.

“The Falcon platform has quickly become the market’s cybersecurity platform of record,” commented Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike.

“By expanding our strategic alliance with Dell to power their MDR services, we’re gaining access to more customers to bring them industry leading protection.

Ultimately, CrowdStrike said the combined offering will deliver a holistic, intuitive managed security solution that will reduce complexity and act as a “force multiplier” for IT and security teams.

“Together with Dell, we see a significant opportunity to give all customers – from large enterprises to mid-market organizations and SMBs – the best security outcomes: stopping the breach, consolidating point products and driving down costs,” Bernard added.

Dell and Nokia have extended their strategic partnership in a move that aims to advance open network architectures in the telecom ecosystem and private 5G for businesses. 

The agreement will see the pair share their respective expertise and solutions, including Dell’s infrastructure offerings and Nokia’s private wireless connectivity capabilities.

Dell will become Nokia’s preferred infrastructure partner for its AirFrame servers, with Nokia to offer Dell technology as part of its telecom cloud deployments.

The companies said they will gradually help transition existing AirFrame customers to Dell’s infrastructure portfolio, which includes the tech firm’s PowerEdge servers for modern telecom network workloads.

In the other direction, Dell will pair Nokia’s Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC) private wireless solution with its edge operations software platform, NativeEdge, in a move it said will provide customers with a comprehensive and scalable solution for enterprise use cases at the edge.

“Through our collaboration, Nokia and Dell Technologies will harness each company’s expertise and expanded distribution to simply and quickly scale modern telecom networks and private 5G use cases,” commented Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager at Dell’s Telecom Systems business.

“With our decades of digital transformation experience, we’re ready to work together with Nokia’s customers to continue their network cloud transformation journey on the industry’s top selling compute platform.”

In addition to the immediate developments, Dell and Nokia said they also plan to collaborate on application and platform testing in the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, as well as certify workloads on Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks that support Nokia Cloud offerings.

The pair will also continue to collaborate on OEM engagements, they added.

Nishant Batra, Nokia’s chief strategy and technology officer, said the expanded collaboration efforts will ensure that both companies are more flexible and better equipped to meet customer’s future needs.

“Dell’s digital transformation expertise and global scale, services and support will provide a seamless transition option for Nokia AirFrame customers, and Nokia’s vast experience in the design, deployment, and operation of high-performance public and private mobile networks will provide Dell’s customers with a comprehensive, scalable private wireless solution,” he explained.

“In line with our technology strategy, our continued collaboration with Dell will help address the future needs of our customers brought on by the increasing demands on networks and provide solutions to help communications service providers scale modern networks to the cloud.”

The US government has announced another slice of funding to boost the market for Open Radio Access Network technologies (Open RAN).

The $42m will fund a project by a consortium of telecoms companies, universities, and tech suppliers to build a test, evaluation, and R&D center in Dallas and another site in the Washington, DC area.

The center will focus testing on network performance, interoperability, security, and support research into new testing methods. The aim is to make industry-standard testing more available to new market players – both in the US and elsewhere.

Mobile operators usually have to choose a single supplier for the technology across an entire mobile site, from radio antenna, baseband units, through to servers and software. The idea of Open RAN is to make it more possible to mix-and-match between different vendors’ equipment, potentially lowering costs and boosting network roll-outs.

“Operators have historically been major proponents of Open RAN because they prefer greater vendor choice and easier equipment interoperability. Some operators, for example Japan’s Rakuten, see Open RAN as a key part of a shift to a more modern, virtualized architecture, which makes innovation quicker through greater usage of software,” Ian Fogg, director of network innovation at CCS Insight told ITPro.

“Also, challenger network vendors have been drivers of the technology too because they see Open RAN as a mechanism to use to grow against the large established network vendors — many of these challengers are headquartered in the US," he said.

The funding was announced by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). “Spurring innovation and competition in wireless technologies is vital to US economic and national security,” said US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

“These grants are supporting facilities and advancing research that will unlock new opportunities for America to lead in the global telecommunications market, strengthen our supply chains and drive down costs.”

By investing in this strategy of creating interoperable 5G network technologies, the US government hopes that it can give US companies a chance to catch up with their Chinese rivals – particularly Huawei – when it comes to network infrastructure.

“5G is a dynamic technology, but today’s market for wireless equipment is static and highly consolidated,” said NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson.

With the latest grant NTIA has awarded $140 million from its Wireless Innovation Fund, a 10-year, $1.5 billion program aimed at supporting the development of open and interoperable wireless networks.

AT&T and Verizon will lead the project, while Japanese telecommunications company NTT DOCOMO and India’s Reliance Jio are described as “unfunded” founding members of the consortium.

Also involved are the University of Texas at Dallas, Virginia Tech, Northeastern University, Iowa State University and Rutgers University. There are also a lot of tech companies involved, including Microsoft, Nokia, Radisys, Airspan, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Rakuten, Samsung, Mavenir, VMWare, RedHat, Wind River, Ciena, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Amdocs, Keysight, and VIAVI.

“Evaluating how different products integrate with one another is a crucial part of facilitating the more diverse vendor ecosystem that many in the industry and government envision. Operators need to have confidence that different vendors’ products will work together at scale before adding them to their network,” said Robert Soni, VP of RAN Technology, AT&T.

In December, AT&T said that it was working with Ericsson to deploy Open RAN products at its cell sites and said it planned to move 70% of its wireless traffic to open infrastructure by 2026.

Earlier this month Verizon said it has now deployed over 130,000 O-RAN capable radios, while in the UK Vodafone has also started the installation of OpenRAN equipment for 2,500 sites across Wales and the south west of England, using it to replace Huawei technology.

Last month the administration awarded $80m across six other projects also aimed at new testing and evaluation facilities, as well as research and development projects focused on advancing cybersecurity, automation, energy efficiency and improved testing.

According to tech analyst Counterpoint Research, Open RAN network investments have increased steadily in recent years, largely by greenfield network operators in the Asia-Pacific and North American. But after rapid network build-outs, these operators are looking to lower capex spending and focus on network monetization.

And many network operators remain very cautious about additional investments in 5G infrastructure, particularly Open RAN, due to the uncertain macroeconomic climate, the analyst firm said.

As a result, Counterpoint Research expects that the Open RAN market will stagnate during this and the next year, before picking up again in 2025.

Dell Technologies has announced the promotion of Ian Heath to channel and distribution lead for the UK, effective from April 1. 

The experienced Dell veteran replaces Rob Tomlin, who will depart the company after five years at the helm of its channel business. Heath will work with Tomlin on a transition between now and April, the firm said in an announcement.

Heath steps into the role having spent the last four years leading Dell’s EMEA Cloud Partners business, where he was responsible for building alliances with global and pan-EMEA cloud service providers, telecom providers, and multi-cloud partners. 

Over a ten-year spell at the company, Heath has also managed the firm’s UK public sector business and led its UK alliances team.

Now, in his new role as UK channel chief, Heath is tasked with driving growth and building new opportunities through the 2024 iteration of its partner program.

"I'm delighted to lead Dell Technologies' channel business in the UK,” Heath commented. “My experience has taught me how essential partners are to our business; it takes an ecosystem of suppliers and solution providers of all types to deliver on the promise of digital transformation."

“At Dell, we have an ingrained recognition that when we work together with partners, we innovate faster for our customers.”

Dell partner program overhaul

Announced earlier this week, the 2024 Dell Technologies Partner Program offers a tiered structure that the company says places a greater focus on collaboration, acquisition, and investment in critical growth areas. 

The initiative now includes three new competencies to better align with changing customer priorities: Data Science & AI, Edge Solutions, and Sustainability & ESG.

Among its updates, the program introduces higher profit potential for Dell’s APEX infrastructure offerings, increased Client+ and ProSupport Plus earning potential for partners, while the firm’s Project Harmony professional services initiative now becomes Partner ProServices.

Additionally, Dell’s software-defined infrastructure offering, PowerFlex, now offers a stackable 4% rebate kicker on New Business and Competitive Swap incentive opportunities for partners that invest in and hold the PowerFlex Design 2023 Certification.

As UK channel and distribution lead, Ian Heath is tasked with driving Dell’s strategic priority areas outlined in the program, which include growing and modernizing its core business, building new market opportunities, strengthening collaboration, and streamlining the partner experience.

“As we launch the 2024 Partner Program, I look forward to working with Ian and the incredible ecosystem of channel partners and distributors within the UK to unleash innovation, drive mutual success and ultimately deliver for our customers,” commented Alexandre Brousse, Dell’s head of channel for EMEA.

“We have unwavering confidence in the power of partnership and are resolutely focused on collaboration through our Partner Program and Partner-First Strategy for Storage. Ian's relationship-centric approach and deep knowledge of the UK market will be fundamental to capturing new growth, driving impact, and extending our leadership."

AI PCs have rapidly emerged as a key industry buzzword in recent months, with leading stakeholders going so far as to describe AI-capable devices as the “future of computing”. 

Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger made this bold statement at the chip giant’s AI Everywhere conference in December 2023, suggesting that AI PCs will be the “star of the show” in 2024 and beyond, providing users with vital AI-powered capabilities aimed at boosting productivity.

Given Intel has a vested interest in promoting this viewpoint as a major manufacturer, Gelsinger’s comments are hardly surprising. However, they do highlight what has been a rapid shift in focus across the industry in recent months.

Generative AI has taken the world by storm, but its use has typically been limited to cloud-based environments. Generative AI-infused hardware is the obvious next step in this evolutionary path.

Industry analysts seem to agree on this, with many bullish on the prospect of AI PCs in coming years. Recent research from Canalys, for example, noted that the emergence of AI-capable devices marks a “watershed moment” for the PC industry, and one that is likely to “reinvigorate the market and transform user experiences”.

In 2024, Canalys predicts that 19% of PCs shipped globally will be AI-capable. This initial, tentative flow of AI PCs into offices worldwide will rapidly develop into a torrent over the course of the decade, however.

By 2027, the consultancy expects 60% of PCs shipped globally to be AI-capable, with much of this growth initially driven by commercial adoption in 2024 onwards.

AI PCs could be a silver bullet for sluggish industry growth

The emergence of AI PCs and heightened business interest in this new frontier comes at a perfect moment for the PC industry, which has experienced a significant deceleration over the last two years. 

Research from Canalys in January 2023 revealed the global PC market witnessed a “record decline” in the last quarter of 2022 - the biggest decline since the consultancy began tracking shipments in the 1990s, no less.

The market also experienced two consecutive quarterly declines of over 30% in 2022, highlighting the fact this wasn’t just an abnormality; both businesses and consumers curtailed spending on this front due to deteriorating economic conditions.

Major manufacturers, including Dell, Lenovo, and HP, were among the worst hit by this decline, with all three recording extremely concerning nosedives in shipments across 2022 and early 2023.

But AI PCs could offer a much-welcomed reprieve for struggling manufacturers, presenting them with a prime opportunity to capitalize on new revenue streams and to overcome a record-breaking slump.

The aforementioned firms have all signaled their intention to pounce on the AI PC craze in recent months, with HP in particular viewing this as a key battleground with industry competitors.

In October 2023, HP chief executive Enrique Lores told attendees at the firm’s ‘Imagine’ conference in Palo Alto that the “age of AI will create a new kind of PC”.

Speaking to ITPro at the time, Alex Cho, president of personal systems at HP, said the confluence of AI and the era of hybrid work has created the perfect conditions for the rise of this new type of device and a new era of computing.

In providing more powerful, AI-infused devices, businesses can supercharge productivity and reap long-term rewards.

“Tomorrow, everyone will experience the full potential of AI, as the PC goes from personal computer to the personal companion,” he said.

More recently, CES 2024 offered a glimpse into this current industry focus, with the consumer electronics conference utterly saturated with AI device announcements.

Dell, for example, unveiled a laptop that included a dedicated Windows Copilot key. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s decision to make the biggest change to its keyboard setup in more than two decades underlines the long-term intent here.

Much like its core product offerings, AI tools will be woven into the very fabric of the devices we use in years to come, and it’ll all be at the click of a button.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Dell Technologies have both announced UK supercomputer projects as part of a UK government initiative on artificial intelligence (AI) and exascale computing.

The UK government will invest £225 million in a joint project between HPE and the University of Bristol called Isambard-AI, which will become the most powerful supercomputer in the UK when it’s turned on in 2024.

Isambard-AI will be capable of 200 petaflops of performance under the Top500’s Linpack benchmark – around ten times that of the current fastest UK supercomputer, ARCHER2. It will also be capable of 21 exaflops of AI performance for training frontier generative AI models, such as new and advanced large language models (LLMs).

A further £75 million has been awarded to Dell Technologies, which has collaborated with Intel and the University of Cambridge to produce the Dawn supercomputer, which has been deployed and will be fully running in the next two months. The trio claim that it’s the UK’s fastest AI supercomputer at present.

Isambard-AI and Dawn combine to form a supercomputer cluster as part of the AI Research Resource (AIRR), a facility for AI research and innovation created through a £300 million government investment. 

Once the AIRR is fully operational, the UK will host some of the most powerful supercomputers not only in Europe but the world. Through this funding and the UK’s AI Safety Summit, the government has attempted to legitimize the UK’s place as an international research hub.

The Universities of Bristol and Cambridge will each host part of the cluster, with a phase 2 for Dawn expected in 2024 that will increase its performance tenfold.

"Today's announcement of the UK’s major investment in AI supercomputing underscores its commitment to taking a global leadership position in AI,” said Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC, AI and Labs at HPE. 

“The Isambard-AI system will harness world-leading supercomputing, including high-performance networking co-developed at HPE's Bristol labs, to provide the performance and scale required for compute-intensive AI projects. We are proud to partner with the UK Government and the University of Bristol to give UK researchers and industry access to Europe's largest AI system for open science."

Unlike HPE with Isambard-AI, Dell has not yet released expected performance numbers for Dawn, but will do so at the Supercomputing 23 conference, held from 12-17 November 2023 in Denver, Colorado.

The supercomputer has been formed from PowerEdge XE9640 servers, which contain Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators. In Dawn, Intel has a chance to prove the power of its GPUs in comparison to Nvidia’s sought-after AI chips, in its goal to achieve AI hardware dominance by 2025.

“Collaborations like the one between the University of Cambridge, Dell Technologies and Intel, alongside strong inward investment, are vital if we want compute to unlock the high-growth AI potential of the U.K,” said Tariq Hussain, head of UK public sector at Dell Technologies. 

“It is paramount that the government invests in the right technologies and infrastructure to ensure the UK leads in AI and exascale-class simulation capability. It’s also important to embrace the full spectrum of the technology ecosystem, including GPU diversity, to ensure customers can tackle the growing demands of generative AI, industrial simulation modeling and ground-breaking scientific research.” 

Isambard-AI is being built using HPE’s Cray EX supercomputer, hosting 5,448 of Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips connected using HPE Slingshot 11 interconnect technology. It will also be capable of almost 25 petabytes of storage using the Cray Clusterstor E1000.

HPE says that Isambard-AI will be optimized for AI data and will be housed in a self-cooled data center at the National Composites Center at Bristol and Bath Science Park. Excess heat will eventually be used to heat nearby buildings.

Once fully operational, the AIRR cluster will push the UK closer to its exascale goal and drive research in fields including climate modeling, AI, future energy systems such as fusion, and frontier science.

The global PC market is expected to rebound in the fourth quarter of 2023 as the beleaguered industry begins a return to growth. 

Worldwide PC shipments totaled 64.3 million in the third quarter of 2023, according to analysis from Gartner, marking a 9% decrease compared to the same period last year and the eighth consecutive quarterly decline. 

However, the consultancy said that there is ample evidence that the lengthy slump has finally “bottomed out” and that a return to growth can be expected in the coming quarters. 

Mikako Kitagawa, director analyst at Gartner, said heightened demand in several industries points to a revival for the market, but warned enterprise demand is still lagging.  

“Seasonal demand from the education market boosted shipments in the third quarter, although enterprise PC demand remained weak, offsetting some growth,” he said. “Vendors also made consistent progress towards reducing PC inventory, with inventory expected to return to normal by the end of 2023, as long as holiday sales do not collapse.”

“There is evidence that the PC market’s decline has finally bottomed out,” Kitagawa added. 

Major suppliers still feeling the pinch

The global PC space remained largely unchanged in terms of market share during the last quarter, Gartner found, with several major suppliers reporting poor results. 

Apple's shipments declined sharply compared to a year ago, the consultancy said. 

This was, in part, due to its shipment volumes increasing significantly across Q3 2022 after supply disruptions eased in the wake of the pandemic. 

Dell also reported a sixth consecutive quarter of shipment decline. This continued decline was largely influenced by weak enterprise PC demand. 

Other major suppliers, such as Lenovo and HP, did report promising results during the previous quarter, however. 

Although Lenovo recorded yet another year-on-year decline in shipments, this was limited to a single-digit decrease, Gartner said. 

The promising results from Lenovo come amid a period of heightened optimism for the supplier, which anticipates a return to pre-pandemic sales volumes in the coming year.  

In August, the firm said it believes it is “well-positioned” for a year-on-year recovery in the latter part of 2023 and early 2024. 

HP was the only vendor to report year-on-year growth during Q3 2023, Gartner said, with shipments increasing across all regions. 

“The good news for PC vendors is that the worst could be over by the end of 2023,” said Kitagawa. 

“The business PC market is ready for the next replacement cycle, driven by the Windows 11 upgrades. Consumer PC demand should also begin to recover as PCs purchased during the pandemic are entering the early stages of a refresh cycle.”

Looking ahead, Gartner projects that the global PC market will experience 4.9% growth across 2024 across both the business and consumer segments. 

Dell Technologies has unveiled new features for fine-tuning generative AI models within its AI solutions and a new multi-cloud data lakehouse to help businesses harness their data more effectively.

Through Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with Nvidia for Model Customization, the firm will help customers tailor pre-trained models to be more effective for their use cases, or meet sector-specific demands.

“Over one-third of enterprises are already considering building their enterprise-specific LLMs,” said Carol Wilder VP ISG, cross-portfolio software and solutions at Dell.

“They’re already finding that their pre-trained models are not sufficient for their success, they’re having to customize those models.”

Dell has also committed to providing customers with guidance and examples for deriving value from tuning and prompt engineering through Dell Professional Services for Generative AI. 

Through its partnership with Nvidia, Dell will continue to provide customers models via Nvidia NeMo through Dell Validated Designs for Generative AI, and its preparation, implementation, management, and education services have been updated to include information and assistance on fine-tuning. 

Preparing data is key to fine-tuning, and to meet this need Dell and data analytics firm Starburst have announced a new modern data lakehouse solution. The partnership follows a previous announcement at Big Data London 2023 in which the two firms committed to collaborating on data lakehouse technology. 

The data lakehouse solution will be open and sit on top of existing data sources across a customer’s hybrid environment, powered by Dell Object and File Storage, Dell PowerEdge,  and Starburst's own platform. 

“Many of our customers feel like they’re on a treadmill where they need to consolidate all of their data in one place before their data scientist can start to use it,” said Greg Findlen, SVP ISF, data management at Dell. 

“With this solution, customers can leverage the data where it exists and as their data scientists are using that data they can also get a better understanding of what data is the most important to consolidate.”

“The number one priority is accelerating how quickly the data science teams and the AI developer teams can get access to that data from across the organization.”

Clear data structure requirements

At Dell Technologies World 2023, Dell global CTO John Roese told ITPro that firms need a clear structure for their data in order to make the best use of large language models (LLMs), and branded the lack of awareness around this issue “disturbing”. 

Findlen clarified that the firm seeks to create a fully integrated set of tools for data management so that customers do not have to manually draw together technologies.

This modern data lakehouse solution will be made available in H1 2024. Dell has no plans at present to release the software through a preview or beta.

Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with NVIDIA for Model Customisation will be made available globally through Dell’s traditional channels, and will also be made accessible through Dell APEX from the end of October. 

Benefits of fine-tuning

Inferencing refers to the process through which a pre-built model reacts to information a company gives to it. For example, a model can infer context from a company’s knowledge base and use that information to respond to user inputs in a way consistent with its training. 

Customization and fine-tuning involve developers having an understanding of how a pre-built model works, and running it through additional rounds of training based on new data to improve its performance at a given task. 

This can be used to help make models more efficient, or accurate at producing company-aligned outputs. If a company used a specific in-house programming language, it could train a pre-built code generation model to become more effective at producing code in that specific language. 

Meta used fine-tuning to produce a Python-specific version of its code completion LLM Code Llama, named Code Llama — Python. It trained Code Llama, itself created through training Meta’s LLM Llama 2 on 500 billion tokens of code and programming information, on an additional 100 billion tokens of Python data. 

In August, OpenAI announced that developers could now fine-tune its LLM GPT-3.5 Turbo, and that fine-tuning for GPT-4 would be made available in the final months of 2023. 

Dell's XPS 13 series laptops, longtime stalwarts of the upmarket compact business laptop scene, have looked the same for several years. Like the XPS 15 and XPS 17, they followed a standard design, albeit with trademark carbon fibre-covered decks. 

Then in spring 2022, Dell threw its design language out of the window, forked the XPS 13 range, and tried a different path with the XPS 13 Plus compact laptops. Both ranges still feature a 13.4-inch display, but the base XPS 13 has lost the carbon fiber the larger models use and now runs on Intel's 12th generation lower power U-series chips, while the XPS 13 Plus devices get the latest Raptor Lake 28W P-series processors. The XPS 13 Plus machines also now look quite different from the XPS 13 laptops, with a bold and unique design for the keyboard deck. 

Dell XPS 13 Plus: Design

With the lid closed, the Dell XPS 13 Plus doesn't look or feel that different from the basic XPS 13 range or the majority of compact premium laptops. With none of the inspired design touches that make the Asus Zenbook S 13 such a looker, it's rather plain. 

The build quality is a little special, though, because Dell has used high-grade aluminium for both the lid and body, making them immune to twisting and bending. The finish is also immune to greasy fingerprints.

Open the XPS 13 Plus up – a perfectly balanced one-finger operation – and you'll find a screen that takes up 92% of the lid with impressively thin bezels of just 4mm at the sides and 5mm at the top and bottom. Below it sits a unique keyboard design which I'll discuss later.

For such a solid machine, the XPS 13 Plus is surprisingly light at just 1.26kg and very compact at 295 x 199 x 15.3mm. I don't see how you could make a sub-14-inch laptop much smaller. For comparison, the doyen of ultra-compacts, the MacBook Air, weighs 1.24Kg and measures up at 304 x 215 x 11.3mm though it does have a slightly larger 13.6-inch display.

Dell is following Apple in the trend for minimal physical connectivity: All you get are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one on each side at the back, one of which you will need for charging.

There's not even a 3.5mm audio jack, something even Apple offers in its MacBook Air though the now almost universal reliance on Bluetooth to connect earphones to smartphones arguably lessens the impact of this design choice. Dell does bundle 3.5mm audio and USB-A adaptors, but I would still suggest investing in a good Type-C dock.

You can remove the base panel from the XPS 13 Plus without too much trouble, but you'll be wasting your time. Everything is soldered in place, with the exception of the SSD. An Intel AX211 card manages wireless communications, which supports 6Ghz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

Dell XPS 13 Plus: Keyboard, Touchpad and Webcam

The keyboard design – called Zero-lattice by Dell – runs edge-to-edge and provides the largest keys possible on a laptop this size with minimal gaps between each keycap. Above the keyboard are 15 always-on illuminated symbols on a capacitive touch bar – shortcuts for common functions such as print screen, volume, display, and keyboard illumination, and play/pause.

Tap the Fn key, and the middle 13 of these symbols vanish to be replaced with backlit F1 to F12 icons. You can use the Fn-Lock to have the function key icons rather than the symbols as the default. Below the keyboard three is an uninterrupted, full-width sheet of glass. So much for the aesthetics – which are stunning – but does it all work?

The keyboard itself is a delight, with plenty of travel and clean and positive typing action. The sheer size of the keycaps (20mm square by my measurement) means even the most inaccurate typist should hit the right keys most of the time. 

The capacitive buttons above the keyboard are a game changer, too: tapping the icon for Volume Up or Brightness Down is faster and easier than searching for it on a graphically crowded Fn keycap and pressing Fn + the relevant key.

The invisible touchpad takes some adjusting to because there's no visual reference to where  it starts and finishes. Give it a few hours, though, and the location becomes intuitive. Once you've crossed that bridge, it's nigh-on perfect; smooth, tactile and quiet. The click-action is pretty shallow but also very positive and clean.

There is a power button with a built-in fingerprint reader in the top right corner of the keyboard, but my device had the lid-up power-on option enabled in the BIOS. When you open the laptop, the Windows Hello IR camera scans your face and logs you in.

The keyboard has one small issue; the backlight. White-behind-white backlights can create contrast problems, and the XPS 13 Plus is no exception; the backlight is only useful in very low-light environments. Thankfully, the black keycap markings are very easy to read in most lighting conditions, so you shouldn't need to use the backlight until things get genuinely dim. One way around this problem would be to buy the Graphite model with a grey keyboard. 

The 720p is the Achilles heel of the XPS 13 Plus. Image quality is poor in anything other than perfect light and isn't what I'd call great even then. The 1080p webcam in the Zenbook 13 S leaves the Dell in its dust. 

Dell XPS 13 Plus: Display

The 13.4-inch display OLED touchscreen (made by Samsung) is a masterpiece. The 3,546 x 2,160 resolution gives a super-crisp 310dpi pixel density while the peak brightness is impressive – for an OLED panel – 380cd/m2. The contrast ratio is effectively infinite thanks to the inky zero luminescence blacks.

The display covers gamut volumes of up to 163.9% of the sRGB, 116.1% of DCI-P3 and 112.9 Adobe RGB. It's colour-accurate, too, with a Delta E variance of just 0.34.HDR performance is top-class. With Windows in HDR mode, peak brightness jumps to 555cd/m2 from a small (<10%) screen area.

HDR performance is spectacular, with colors really popping and superb saturation. My usual suite of 4K HDR test videos has never looked more impressive on a laptop. If I had to find fault with the screen, I'd point out that the refresh rate is a humdrum 60Hz, but on a productivity laptop, that's not really an issue.

Dell XPS 13 Plus: Specs and Performance

The 12-core Core i7-1360P processor is one of the most well-balanced members of the Raptor Lake family, with eight 'efficient' and four 'performance' cores and a maximum Turbo clock of 5GHz performance. It's powerful but efficient.

Our review unit's 16GB of quad-channel DDR5 RAM certainly didn't hurt its benchmark results, but you can specify 32GB of memory if you want even more performance.

The XPS 13 Plus – at least in this specification – has enough power to handle most day-to-day productivity tasks. The 4K media benchmark score of 352 comfortably outclassed the Zenbook S 13, which is itself no slouch and scored 194, and the M2 MacBook Air, which scored 201.

Without a discrete GPU, the XPS 13 Plus depends on Intel's Iris Xe chip for graphics work. Rendering a 5-minute 4K video clip in DaVinici took 3 minutes and 5 seconds, which is not at all bad for a laptop in this class.

The industry-standard PCMark 10 Office and 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks produced scores of 5,698 and 1,992 from the XPS 13 Plus, comfortably ahead of the Zenbook S 13's 5,371 and 1,589. The Samsung SSD in the XPS 13 Plus proved a solid performer recording sequential read and write speeds of 5,120MB/sec and 2,918MB/sec, respectively.

Dell XPS 13 Plus: Battery Life

Our usual test is to set the screen brightness at 170cd/m2, disable wireless connectivity, and run a video in VLC until the lights go out. The XPS 13 Plus lasted for 7hrs and 45mins. That is three hours less than the Zenbook S 13 managed but not a disgraceful result for a laptop with a 52Wh battery and a 3.5K OLED display.

As always, the M2 MacBook Air can do much better than this, running for 17 hours before the lights went out but by Windows (rather than Windows on ARM) standards, but you can still get a full day of graft out of the XPS 13 Plus without recharging. Incidentally, the bundled 60W USB-C charger is a very small and lightweight affair.

Dell XPS 13 Plus: Price

This incarnation of the XPS 13 Plus will set you back £1,595 with Windows 11 Pro and Intel's vPro platform or £1,499 with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS though you can pay as little as £1,199 if you opt for the FullHD non-touch screen, Core i5 model with just 8GB of RAM. 

Comparing broadly similar specifications, the Asus Zenbook S 13 costs £1,499 (direct from Asus and including a £100 discount) while the M2 MacBook Air will lighten your wallet to the tune £1,649 for a machine with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, the latter a must-have given how pedestrian the 256GB SSD is.

Considering that the Dell XPS 13 Plus has a much higher resolution display than either the Asus or Apple laptops, and has a touchscreen, and a more powerful CPU, it's difficult not to regard the Dell as pretty good value for money. Of course, the Asus counters that with a superior selection of I/O ports, while the Apple has a much better battery life.

At the end of the day, all three are fine laptops, and your decision may come down to whether or not you think the XPS 13 Plus keyboard deck is a triumph of design over function or vice versa. Bauhausian quibbles aside, I like the keyboard, trackpad, and capacitive buttons on the XPS 13 Plus, so it would be my choice.

FAQs

Dell XPS 13 Plus Specifications