Dell Technologies launches new AI Focus Partner Network

Dell Technologies has launched its new AI Focus Partner Network to help partners build their artificial intelligence (AI) practice.

Revealed by the vendor’s chief partner officer Denise Millard during Dell Technologies World 2024, the new program offers tools to partners, giving them access to Dell validated designs, Dell Solution Centres and AI competencies and certifications that will also count towards their metal tier status.

“For partners who are building meaningful AI capabilities, we’re giving them access to Dell validated designs, we’re doing all the engineering, to make sure that those deployments are repeatable and scalable and you don’t have to figure it out on your own,” Millard said. 

“We’re giving you access to Dell Solution Centres where we’re showcasing these AI workloads and use cases and helping our partners build AI labs so we can run PoCs (proof of concepts) to help customers accelerate their AI journey.”

Millard highlighted AI was only as good as the data and strategy that sits behind it.

“Modern workloads require modern infrastructure that’s smart, fast and secure,” she said. “We need you to be investing in the right training and certification to help support the deployment of AI factories.”

Millard also said the vendor’s PowerStore storage platform was gaining massive momentum and that has been propelled to the next level with the launch of PowerStore Prime, which brings the latest capabilities in terms of performance, efficiency, resiliency and multi cloud capabilities.

Millard hinted its partner-first strategy for storage was one of the biggest go-to-market shifts that Dell made and it’s growing significantly. It has a Partner of Record for Storage designation and has now introduced a Partner of Record for Client when partners bring new business for Dell. 

Dell also revealed it was in the final stages of finalising an agreement with VMware, offering VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundation as well as with vSphere on a subscription basis consistent with the policies that Broadcom has laid out.

Additionally, Dell is also enhancing its portfolio with a strategic relationship with Nutanix to offer a cloud infrastructure appliance from the latter vendor, taking stock of VxRail, full lifecycle management, enablement and deployment and will be open to PowerFlex.

Making bets in AI

Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell highlighted the partner ecosystem played an incredibly important role in harnessing AI’s hyper intelligence for productivity, innovation and growth, stating early AI movers were making massive bets.

“We’re focusing our own generative AI initiatives on the things that you care about most: engineering, product quality, support, services, security and supply chain. We are getting faster, stronger, smarter, to be by your side, for what will be both a sprint and a marathon,” Dell told the audience at Dell Technologies World 2024. 

Each industry and each organisation will have its own specific AI requirements and needs, while hinting we’re still in the early stages of LLM training, Dell said. 

“Throughout our ecosystem, there is amazing innovation taking place — domain specific models, integrated reasoning systems, referencing techniques to improve accuracy and of course, multimodal AI  — the rate of innovation is amazing and has accelerated,” he said.

“Eventually artificial intelligence will be at the centre of all of our lives, security, commerce, education, science. and healthcare, advancing progress at breathtaking speeds.”

Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of NVIDIA, said the relationship between the his company and Dell from the ground up was focused on building AI factories and delivering it to the world’s enterprises as a solution. 

He said AI has paved the way for creating a new class of data centres that will be built for a single purpose of manufacturing intelligence at scale.

“The ability for these large infrastructures has completely reinvented computing as we know it, data comes into the AI factory and what comes out of it are tokens and these can be used in all kinds of different applications,” Huang added. “Fundamentally, every company is an intelligence manufacturer.”

The launch of the AI Focus Partner Network follows the launch of the vendor’s AI Factory initiative.

Julia Talevski attended Dell Technologies World 2024 as a guest of Dell.