COLUMN: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Gets The Channel

CRN’s Steve Burke says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang knows that building a strong channel presence is key to scaling his company’s AI business and bringing AI solutions to the enterprise market.

If you want to know just how important the channel is to success in the AI era, there is no one better to ask than Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Huang, who has become one of the CEOs most widely associated with the AI revolution, knows that building a strong channel presence is key to scaling the AI business and bringing AI solutions to the enterprise market.

Huang made the point loud and clear recently in a keynote session at the Sphere in Las Vegas with Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Antonio Neri at which they unveiled the Nvidia AI Computing By HPE partnership, including HPE Private Cloud AI.

Sure, Huang was impressed by HPE’s three-click up-and-running turnkey private cloud service with deep integration with Nvidia. But it is HPE’s global channel reach, he said, that will bring “AI to the world’s enterprises for the very first time.” Huang, in fact, made it crystal clear that HPE’s partner network is a crown jewel that will power the partnership forward.

“This giant go-to-market, this network and ecosystem of partners and service providers, because of this it makes it possible for the first time to bring generative AI to every single company in the world,” said Huang.

His comments are notable because more often than not when there is a huge technology paradigm shift like we are experiencing now with AI, many executives focus just on the technology and give the channel short shrift. The technology ingredients are fundamental, Huang said, but ultimately you also need domain expertise from partners to fuel the AI revolution.

The channel is, in fact, ultimately the difference between success and failure. It is partners with deep vertical expertise and customer knowledge that will provide AI business use case models and the services that will drive huge AI productivity gains and competitive advantages.

C.R. Howdyshell, CEO of Advizex, a Fulcrum IT Partners company that has made a multimillion-dollar investment in building out AI solutions, said the AI market is not for the faint of heart.

Advizex has put a no-holds-barred focus on capturing the AI opportunity, including naming one of its top sales superstars, Steve Kucker, vice president and general manager for high-performance compute and AI. In addition, Advizex has invested in data scientists, business use case experts and is leveraging its Advizex Financial Services arm as well as the talents of sister company AI pioneer Razor. “If you are going to play in the AI space, you need focus and deep technical resources and proven business use cases,” said Howdyshell.

Once both the vendor and partner have made the substantial investment neces- sary to compete in the AI market, Howdyshell said vendors then need to “believe” in the power of the partnership.

“Believe in the partner that makes the AI investment and then back them up,” he said. “If they do, I am sure they will get a return on their AI investment.”

Vendor investment, partner investment and believing in and backing up partners. That’s a sure-fire recipe for channel success.