Dell Technologies just held its annual DTW conference in Las Vegas, and, as one would imagine, AI was in sharp focus. However, tuning in a little more carefully, there was quite a bit to glean about a portfolio of solutions and services that positions the company well in an IT market trending away from a “build it yourself” mindset.

I’m going to dig into some of Dell’s announcements and how the company has subtly emerged as a vendor that no longer simply sells servers and storage boxes but instead delivers technical and business outcomes — a shift that may be obvious to Dell itself, but perhaps not to the marketplace.

The Shifting Enterprise IT Organization Requires Change from Vendors

Before getting into what was announced, it’s worth spending a moment on the generational shift in enterprise IT that directly impacts how companies like Dell build, position, sell, and support their products. The “youthification” of enterprise IT is not simply a generational shift; it’s a generational chasm. Consider this: the mean age of an IT professional is 36 years old — squarely in the millennial age range. Meanwhile, the mean age of the enterprise CIO is mid-50s — a GenX-er pushing the bounds of boomerism.

This age difference is not just about experience. It’s about an IT team that came of age in an app-driven world managed by a leadership team still steeped in traditional siloed specialties working independently.

While there has been a slow-moving trend to tear down these IT silos — largely driven by cloud technology and this youth movement — AI is, in fact, the killer app. Generative and agentic AI have forced us IT leaders with boomer behavioral tendencies to realize that embracing the millennial mindset is critical to achieving success. This means thinking in terms of deploying solutions, not building your own environment from the ground up.

Keep this backdrop in mind as we dig into the specifics of Dell’s announcements at DTW 2025.

AI Factory 2.0: A Focus on Simple and Broad Support

Dell announced its AI Factory a year ago at DTW 2024. The thrust of that announcement was to remove as much of the friction around implementing AI as possible. This meant a combination of hardware and software from Dell, NVIDIA, and the rest of the AI ecosystem, wrapped in services from Dell and its partners to help organizations take their first steps toward effective enterprise AI.

At DTW 2025, the company debuted its AI Factory 2.0. A key part of this is the PowerEdge XE9785, an AMD EPYC-based server that will support both the AMD MI350 AI accelerator and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs. This air- or liquid-cooled AMD-based server rounds out Dell’s portfolio, as it initially supported NVIDIA with Intel Xeon.

Interestingly, Dell AI Factory 2.0 also supports Intel’s Gaudi 3 accelerator. While I don’t see Gaudi as a serious competitor on the AI training front, Intel has shown good price performance for AI inference. And if you buy into the idea that Intel will play the AI game with whatever replaces its canceled Falcon Shores AI accelerator, then starting on Gaudi for some fine-tuning and inference makes sense.

Perhaps the most interesting reveal was Project Lightning, Dell’s parallel file system. A core part of Dell’s AI Factory, Project Lightning optimizes storage to deliver the necessary performance in feeding the AI machine. Sitting on a storage platform like PowerScale, it can keep tens of thousands of GPUs fed.

I’ll say more about this in my conclusion below, but my biggest takeaway from the event aligns with the shifting IT landscape that I described above, where app-driven, point-and-click simplicity is critical for a workforce that is more focused on driving outcomes and less interested in command lines and tinkering. In this context, I especially like the Project Lightning announcement, which really demonstrates how Dell is focused on delivering solutions that start at the lowest levels and extend up through the AI stack without introducing complexity to the folks tasked with supporting these environments.

Storage Is the Data Foundation

Dell is the number-one storage provider — and it isn’t even close. And while Dell does have strong challengers such as NetApp and Pure Storage, the company has not taken its foot off the gas in terms of innovation.

Project Lightning is a great example of this innovation. While many market leaders might leave this kind of innovation to the likes of VAST Data or WEKA — the up-and-coming market disruptors — Dell has leaned into delivering the high-performance Dell AI Data Platform over time. While this started with the AI Factory, it expanded with the Dell Data Lakehouse and now includes this all-up solution.

In the Dell AI Data Platform, the underlying storage platforms ObjectScale and PowerScale will be layered with the Project Lightning parallel file system, which will house Dell’s analytics/AI platform, the Dell Data Lakehouse. The combination of this data lakehouse with a parallel file system and its global namespace on top of these finely tuned storage servers should amply deliver the performance and scale critical to AI success.

Once again, the infrastructure is highly performant. However, the value-add comes from the software stack — the parallel file system and data lakehouse — which are tightly integrated for better performance. Looked at another way, the value-add comes from the packaged solution, which is easily deployed and managed, enabling the IT professional to focus on higher-value tasks rather than be trapped in a storage administration role.

An Acquisition in Action: Private Cloud Powered by Dell Automation Platform

Something that may have flown a bit under the radar is what Dell is doing with its Private Cloud solution. Here’s the setup. You are an enterprise IT organization that wants to provision or re-provision your PowerEdge and PowerStore environment quickly. With the cloud-based Dell Automation Platform (a free tool), an IT administrator can deploy truly just by pointing and clicking. The selected blueprint (as Dell calls it) is pulled down and installed on the target server.

Once the cloud environment is provisioned, Dell’s AIOps product helps ensure it runs optimally and securely. Cloud provisioning, orchestration, and management are all performed without requiring IT resources.

The obvious use case for Dell’s Automation Platform is for those looking to migrate away from VMware, for whom a multi-hypervisor environment may represent a new reality. Dell Private Cloud should be ideal for this. However, we do live in a world where the multi-hypervisor environment is already a reality. Being able to manage all of these environments from one platform makes life much easier for an IT organization that is already stretched thin.

Here are a few more thoughts on what Dell announced with the Private Cloud powered by the Dell Automation Platform:

• This is an example of an acquisition (Cloudify, 2023) leveraged to deliver value across the portfolio. How many times do we read of some startup being acquired by a company, yet we never really see how that acquisition is folded into the broader technology stack? Kudos to Dell for bucking that trend.
• Right now, VMware is the only cloud stack supported by blueprints in the Dell platform. Going forward, it is important for Dell to create Nutanix and Red Hat blueprints (in that order).
• There is a bigger Dell management play at work here. I would love to see a single management console from Dell where I can go in and launch certain element managers independently — with a big dashboard that displays status.

Adding It Up — We Need to View Dell Differently

There was a time when Dell Technologies World was all about the latest and greatest infrastructure across compute and storage. Dell was thought of as a fast-following — albeit very large — infrastructure player that nailed supply chain management.

Dell is still good at both of these. However, to think of the company today only as an infrastructure provider is wrong. This is a company that has transformed itself into a full-stack solutions provider. It now focuses on solving the challenges in IT where the transition from “fix what’s broken” to “consult and empower” is critical for success. Further, Dell is designing solutions that are positioned, sold, consumed, and managed in a way that meets the needs of the CIO and consumed in a way that the modern IT professional expects — very much in line with the evolution of IT that I described above.

Dell has evolved into a solutions company, but more than that it has put a big focus on customer success through its own professional services organization and its global systems integrator channel. Especially in this age of AI — where IT modernization is a prerequisite for success — Dell is not only building solutions, but helping organizations drive to outcomes by investing in the tools, people, and partners to make this happen.

This is not the same Dell of a few years ago. It has undergone its own transformation, making it better equipped to support organizations going through their modernization and AI journeys. I think this experience makes Dell a better adviser as it applies its own lessons learned to shape its offerings for customers.