Dell TechWorld 2023 — Security, AI And Multicloud – Forbes

I spent the last few days in Las Vegas attending Dell TechWorld (DTW) and am happy to report I’ve returned home to Dripping Springs, Texas, no poorer due to gambling. I’m also pleased to report that Dell TechWorld was worth the trip and time away. In addition to catching up with old colleagues and friends, there was much news regarding Dell’s strategy and vision.

As with most conferences, DTW had a theme. This year, it was technological innovation is the key to human progress. Based on this theme, the company focused on addressing what it sees as five significant challenges in the enterprise:

• The future of work — Managing the remote workforce
• Multicloud — While this may seem like an overplayed term, the challenges are real.
• AI — Technical, ethical and operational barriers to adoption
• Edge — Like Multicloud, this is talked about often but still encounters lots of challenges.
• Security — It should baked into everything—every device, every server, every environment.

While there is much to discuss across all of these areas, in this piece I will dive deeper into my three biggest takeaways and what I think of Dell’s overall approach, vision and strategy.

Some events stand out for the right reasons; Dell DTW is one of them

Before getting into my analysis, I want to give the Dell analyst relations (AR) team recognition for putting on a wonderful event. I am on the road nonstop this time of year for conference season, so I see lots of good, bad and average events. DTW 2023 was amazingly well run, and I know that the folks who helped make it so don’t ever get credit. So for my AR contact, Beth Williams: thank you for making this such a pleasant learning experience. And to AR leader Erin Zehr: you and your team are rock stars.

Security: Big leaps forward

I’ve traditionally considered Dell’s security messaging adequate, albeit not exactly impressive. While others in the market have made a lot of noise around their security capabilities, Dell has quietly gone about building a solid security portfolio and partnerships.

In March 2023, Dell opened its Zero Trust Center of Excellence (CoE) at DreamPort, the US Cyber Command’s premier cybersecurity innovation facility. The function of this CoE is to allow customers to test their environments against the U.S. Government’s zero-trust security specifications. This is a real and practical value-add for IT and information security professionals to drive the highest levels of protection across their organizations—something I would have jumped at the opportunity to use when I was in IT.

At DTW, Dell took it one step further by announcing Project Fort Zero, an end-to-end validated zero-trust solution for Dell customers to deploy. With this initiative, Dell is bringing together over 30 of the leading cybersecurity companies in the market to help establish a zero-trust environment that adheres to the U.S. government’s mandate.

Here’s what I like about what Dell is doing. It uses its market influence to enable its customers to deploy a true zero-trust environment. And it is doing so through a consortium approach, where companies have a real incentive to work together to deliver a complete solution. More to the point, Dell understands that neither it nor any other company can be the only answer for zero trust. This is a team effort, and to its credit Dell is pulling together the players.

AI: It’s everywhere

Surprising nobody, AI was a major focus area for Dell at DTW. It was part of every keynote, every group breakout and every discussion. And for good reason. During one keynote, Dell’s Co-COO, Chuck Whitten said that AI might be the most significant technological innovation since the PC, the internet and even the smartphone (gulp). And when one thinks about the impact AI is having and will have—on our lives, our economy, on everything—his statement makes sense.

More precisely, the conversations at DTW focused on generative AI (sick of hearing about ChatGPT yet?). By everybody’s estimate, generative AI is going to change the way we work and the way we live. And because of this, organizations of all sizes are looking at ways to implement such an environment.

The challenge? Training a large language model (LLM) for your specific needs. Let’s say you’re a big sporting goods chain and want something like ChatGPT to serve as a shopping assistant for your customers. When a customer searches for a “driver,” you want them to find a long golf club—not a construction tool. Likewise, if a customer wants to find a “bat” for their promising baseball player, you don’t want the search to return something about the Mexican free-tailed bats that live in Austin. Now think about how you would apply this to a law firm sifting through millions of digitized pages of case law, briefs and so on. Or a pharmaceutical company whose inputs span drug discovery, clinical testing and safety reporting. This is where the concept of training domain-specific LLMs comes into play. It’s all about context and relevance.

So, what did Dell Announce around AI at DTW? Well, a few things. But I will focus on what I found super compelling: Project Helix, which is a partnership between Dell and Nvidia to deliver a full-stack generative AI solution to its customers. Think curated generative AI for specific customer needs. Major law firm? Health care provider? Sporting goods store? Dell and Nvidia will deliver a pre-trained model and the tools needed to easily further optimize it.