For IT professionals, conference season provides an excellent opportunity to gauge the state of technology options and measure their own organization’s progress compared to their peers. With that in mind, Dell Technologies World 2025 presented two important lessons that IT leaders must know as we enter the second half of 2025.
Lesson 1: The generative AI era is underway and your company is likely already behind.
During the second-day keynote, Jeff Clarke, COO for Dell Technologies, shared some insights on the company’s own internal adoption of generative AI technology to help improve productivity among sales, technical support, and engineering. With the assistance of AI, according to Clarke, “individual contributors become as productive as a two-person team.”
Dell’s internal AI adoption can serve as a blueprint for other enterprises. Our research at the Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, found the three most commonly identified primary business drivers for AI — improving operational efficiency (cited by 48%), customer experience (44%), and innovation (42%) — align with the priorities that Dell set forth internally.
For AI, best practices start with quality data and the use case, but often those initial steps can create complexity, stalling efforts. Businesses can often struggle to implement a proper data management strategy and lack definition in their internal processes, making it difficult to define and prioritize use cases for AI.
When I asked Clarke what advice he could provide businesses looking to project potential returns on investment for AI to assist with use case prioritization, his response was to “get busy.”
This is an important takeaway for competitive success in AI. It will likely not come in a “one-size-fits-all” package. Success in AI requires your organization to conduct internal analyses to understand your data and processes and then identify and measure the areas of greatest potential. In addition, the faster your organization starts, the faster it will develop the internal learnings necessary for success.
These steps are essential prior to making a significant infrastructure investment, and help is available. For example, Dell Technologies offers services to help organizations identify the right AI use cases, prepare and clean data for AI, augment models, and provide AI infrastructure options. Dell is also not alone in providing a portfolio of AI services to help. At the event, partners such as Deloitte and Accenture were present to highlight their own portfolios of AI and data services to help organizations get started with AI.
When it comes to infrastructure, the majority (52%) of new AI initiatives are deployed on public cloud services. However, there is a growing interest in deploying AI initiatives on-premises, fueled by concerns tied to data privacy, cost, and control of the architecture. In fact, 78% of organizations identify that they would prefer to run AI applications on-premises.
To serve the demand for on-premises AI initiatives, Dell offers its Dell AI Factory portfolio, announced last year, partnering with multiple accelerator options from NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD. At Dell Tech World last week, Dell announced that it has over 3,000 Dell AI Factory customers.
Outside of Dell, earlier this year, HPE introduced NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE, and Cisco introduced Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. Nutanix also offers its GPT-in-a-Box 2.0 and Nutanix Enterprise AI to help simplify AI infrastructure deployment. In addition, nearly every enterprise storage provider offers validated or integrated AI systems, including Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Infinidat, NetApp, Pure Storage, Vast Data, and WekaIO.
Lesson 2: A growing number of options are available to improve flexibility for hypervisor choice and migration.
Recent shifts in the structure of hypervisor licenses have fueled an increased desire to explore alternatives and renewed concerns over lock-in. With that, Dell launched the Dell Private Cloud and the Dell Automation Platform, which offer validated blueprints for systems from Broadcom/VMware, Nutanix, and Red Hat, simplifying the ability to provision multiple private cloud options.
According to our research, 89% of organizations say the ability to use or evaluate multiple hypervisor and orchestration options is strategic. For years, businesses have focused on consistency to simplify operations. Recent cost increases have shifted the priority to flexibility and ensuring that the business has multiple options.
Dell Private Cloud, however, is just one option helping to simplify hypervisor flexibility. HPE recently announced HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, which leverages technology from HPE’s recent acquisition of Morpheus Data to simplify multi-hypervisor support and self-service cloud consumption. In addition, Nutanix has added support for external third-party storage from Dell and Pure Storage to help simplify the adoption of its AHV hypervisor technology into existing production environments.
Whether your business is focused on AI, exploring private cloud alternatives, or all of the above, you have far more options today than you did 12 or even six months ago. As this space evolves, the options and capabilities will likely only increase moving forward.
Scott Sinclair is Practice Director with Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of Omdia, covering the storage industry.
Enterprise Strategy Group analysts have business relationships with technology providers.
