Dell’s Bill Scannell On AI Partner Opportunity: ‘These Aren’t Small Deals’

“We have to get ahead of this. My ask of everyone here is, ‘Lets figure out where the opportunity is and let’s go out there arm-in-arm together, and win these,’ because the opportunity is immense. I don’t care what’s going on with the economy. We can win big in the market,” Dell’s Bill Scannell tells Dell Technologies Global Partner Summit.

The partner opportunity for generative AI has arrived and it is massive, said Dell Technologies global sales chief Bill Scannell.

“Over the last several weeks we have seen this huge uptick of AI farms popping out of nowhere,” Scannell told a room full of partners at Dell Technologies World 2023 in Las Vegas. “These AI farms, they’re looking to deploy our (PowerEdge) XE 96 server with NVIDIA GPUs. These aren’t small deals. We have deals that are two, four, $600 million, and that is just the beginning.”

Scannell said the opportunity downstream is just as rich as more customers bang the drum for computing power configured to create AI solutions.

“Every one of our enterprise customers is looking to do something with AI,” Scannell said. “These are all $25 million to $50 million opportunities. We have to get ahead of this. My ask of everyone here is let’s figure out where the opportunity is and let’s go out there arm in arm together, and win these because the opportunity is immense. I don’t care what’s going on with the economy, we can win big in the market.”

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Dell’s answer for customers who need an on-premises AI solution is Project Helix. Designed with Nvidia, it brings the computing power needed to run generative AI at the edge, so organizations can create applications for large language models, without adding their data to public data sets.

Dell Co-Chief Operating Officer Chuck Whitten said customers can build their own “purpose-built models applied to private data sets.”

“To do that, they need secure, full-stack solutions,” Whitten said. “That is what Dell and Nvidia have been working together to make. The stacks that we are making are industry tested and they are going to be industry leading. Our view is that ad hoc market solutions are not going to work at scale in generative AI.”

Partners in the room said they see rising demand for AI compute power and expect to see more AI deals won this year.

“There is going to be more opportunity for this,” said Josh Lee, chief technology officer at Dell Platinum Partner VirtuIT, based in Nanuet, New York. “Maybe you don’t sell this exact solution, but this is probably going to give us a better opportunity to actually turn some conversations into deals, just because its more widely available now.”

“I found the remarks on the AI explosion, comparing it to the PC, the Internet and the smartphone to be on point,” said Michael Ambruso, a systems engineer with Dell Titanium Black Partner World Wide Technology Inc. (WWT), No. 9 on CRN’s 2023 SP 500. “I think it is going to be big and it is going to be disruptive as automation always is. However, the observation that we will be seeing specific AI models trained for particular workloads and datasets being used as “co-pilots” really got beyond the hype that ChatGPT is currently generating and kept things realistic.”