NVIDIA GTC Reflections

My favorite quote from the show is someone coming up to my colleague Luke and saying, "how did Dell go from a legacy PC maker into an AI leader"? I joked he missed the opportunity to say I don't know but we could do it for you too. The reality is we never were legacy, and AI has shown why Michael Dell's big bet to originally go private and come back again with EMC made perfect sense. The breadth of technology solutions we can bring to bear at solving AI problems would require assembling quite a few technology providers to complete the same task.

Biases die hard

I remember when I first got my job at Dell in truth, I almost blew it. The only thing that saved me was a personal relationship with a former customer who would be my new manager. At the time I was working with a bleeding edge technology at a startup. Storage was boring and dull. Believe it or not I too at one point was a cloud fist zealot. It took me being completely insulted and not having my contributions recognized, and a lucky run in where another client told my soon to be new boss that "I think Nick is ready, his tone and what he is talking about on LinkedIn has changed." With that I went through my interviews and landed the job.

The first couple months at Dell I began to see things that showed me the error in my ways of discounting this company. The storage had a lot of unique data management capabilities that would actually make a difference for end users and storage admins alike. The products growth rate in the high 20s it wasn't that far from what cloud vendors were enjoying. This wasn't a dinosaur shuffling on its way out it was a well-run machine that was going to go places. The startup I had been at even with the most advanced crazy tech still hadn't IPO'ed: EXECUTION COUNTS.

The rise of Generative AI

I had spent the past couple years being one of the loudest voices (even got recognized for 2 years by Onalytica) in cloud, with my takes often running against the tide of popular opinion. What's interesting is the cloud market kind of came to where I was at. Public cloud great lots of good uses, the data center/colos/edge not going away.

With Generative AI however I became increasingly concerned about organizations and their ability to maintain control of their data and how they would be able to incorporate AI into their businesses. I've said since my days driving our data capital campaigns that every company is now a technology company. I was too early with a lot of my messaging. But man is it here now. If data and AI are the most important things to your organizational success going forward how can you outsource them?

Thus I pushed for the phrase Bring AI to your data.

The past 9 months have been a whirlwind of learning, of building, of bringing our customers along and getting them ready for this new era of innovation. Our GenAI days program showed me just how far we were ahead of what the market is experiencing.

NVIDIA GTC Eyes wide open

First, I'll start with this video.

I was in the audience, and we expected a shoutout in the keynote, but my jaw hit the floor with the praise we received. Not because it isn't deserved but rarely do you hear that one company to the next. It continued on into the booth, as shown in the above clip from Michael Dell.

How did we earn such praise? By delivering solutions that meet organizations where they are at and can help them get to where they want to go wherever that Generative AI journey takes them. It's the servers, the storage, the networking, workstations, client devices; and most of all services that can demystify this stuff.

An overnight success years in the making

You hear it all the time... they came out of nowhere. But so often that's a lot of churning and hammering away at things that are going unnoticed. It seems kind of silly to say when you're talking about a $90-100B revenue company. But I don't know how better to put it. That quote at the show to Luke shows the perception gap. One of my favorite responses to our show came from Keith Townsend :

Now we had some great announcements at a show but how cool is it to be noticed for the foundation? Because of the hard work my colleagues and I have already done we're getting noticed. Sure, we're going to keep working and keep innovating, but all those paid dues are getting noticed.

Dell has proven doubters wrong. It has certainly over the 7 years (anniversary next month) I've been here shown me I need to constantly update my expectations of us. When leadership has its eyes set on something I've always seen execution on a level that I haven't in previous employers (now if only I could get that kind of consistency from my Generative AI sketch artist). So hopefully here's to 7 more years for me.