The world evolves when ideas come along that are so powerful that they spawn entire ecosystems of innovations.

And as a result, says Dell CEO Michael Dell, new industries and endeavors emerge and new opportunities are unleashed for the enterprise.

“Right now we have more power than ever before to turn ideas into innovations that fundamentally improve our businesses, life, the entire world,” Dell said in an opening day keynote at Dell Technologies World this week.

Today, several cutting-edge potentially world-changing technologies sit at the cusp — including generative AI, edge computing, zero trust, 5G and multicloud ecosystems.

Dell is broadening into all of these areas through a spate of new products, platforms and collaborations. The tech giant made several announcements around these evolving technologies at Dell Technologies World this week. Here are five key takeaways.

1.Multicloud world gets real at Dell Technologies World

Multicloud is the end goal for many enterprises — but achieving (and managing) it can be difficult as environments become increasingly sprawled and unwieldy. Dell, as its namesake CEO puts it, aims to “make multicloud real” and “turn the idea of multicloud into real innovation.”

To support enterprises in this endeavor, Dell has announced the following:

An expansion of its Dell APEX cloud platforms through collaborations with Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware.

Dell APEX storage for public cloud (the next generation of Project Alpine), a portfolio of software-defined, customer-managed storage offerings that bring Dell’s performance, scale and cyber resiliency to major hyperscalers including AWS and Microsoft Azure. This includes new management tools that centralize management activities across clouds in the Dell APEX Console.

Dell APEX compute to help customers with the challenges of infrastructure ownership and upfront budgeting and simplify cloud experiences. Enterprises can order secure, scalable bare metal compute resources that support their operating system or hypervisor for virtualized or container-based environments.

In a pre-recorded interview presented at the day-two keynote, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pointed out that, “what customers really want is the seamlessness of edge and public cloud coming together.”

This allows enterprises to deploy sensitive workflows when and where they want with a seamless control plane, he said.

Dell vice chairman and co-COO Jeff Clarke agreed, saying during Dell Technologies World that the “multicloud world” must be a single distributed system that is agile, elastic, dynamic and easily consumed.

Dell’s multicloud architecture is built around a common storage layer that connects cloud, workflow and data and enables data mobility and a “connective tissue” from the public cloud to on-premises cloud, Clark explained.

He described this as “ground to cloud, cloud to ground,” managed by the APEX SaaS control plane. That provides access, deployment, monitoring, discovery, lifecycle management — and in the future, native AI insights.

“If you get your handling of the data right, everything else from access, to tools, to choice of cloud, to your ability to control and manage your costs, becomes far more achievable,” Clarke said.

2. Harnessing the power of the edge, a full zero-trust journey

Data is accumulating at an astounding pace, and enterprises want the capability to act on it where it lives — at the edge. This can minimize latency and fuel new workloads (including AI).

But as Clarke put it, “massively distributed architectures are difficult to manage, automate and provision.”

The new Dell NativeEdge edge software platform — the advancement of the company’s Project Frontier — aims to enable centralized deployment of containerized and virtualized apps. Clarke described it as “multicloud by design.”

The platform can help reduce operational complexity at scale via centralized management, zero touch deployment, onboarding and automated infrastructure operations. An open design works with software applications, IoT frameworks, multi-vendor operations technology tools and multicloud environments. Dell NativeEdge also helps ensure security across the supply chain through zero trust security.

Emphasizing its commitment to zero trust — or least privileged access — Dell announced the forthcoming Project Fort Zero, which will be embedded throughout Dell’s apps and products. The capability will be released within the year and will be validated by the U.S. Department of Defense, said Herb Kelsey, Dell’s security strategy program lead said during a day two keynote.

“The previous security paradigms had us protecting the edge of our environment, our perimeter, but not really inside,” he said. With Dell Project Fort Zero, the goal is to “get people to that fully zero trust journey.”

3. Leveling the generative AI playing field

Undoubtedly, AI will transform the world and everyday business and life. And, many affirm, enterprises that don’t embrace it risk getting left behind — or may even become obsolete.

To help organizations adopt generative AI, Dell has teamed with Nvidia with Project Helix. The platform enables enterprises to easily create and run custom AI models.

Nvidia president Jensen Huang didn’t put it lightly when he said in a pre-recorded Q&A that “generative AI is a very, very big deal.”

He added that “nothing is nearly this amazing, nearly this impactful.”

Because it is easy to use and can understand almost any language or input, every enterprise will be able to put it to use to revolutionize their products and company, he said. Juang described it as “a whole new computing platform” because it is “incredibly flexible” and can increasingly perform tasks either without training or with just a little bit of fine tuning.

And in incorporating GenAI, enterprises need context specific to their domain and the ability to work at the edge, “closest to the speed of light,” he said.

However, while generative AI gets better as more data and processing power are added to it, enterprises need new architectures with greater and greater orders of magnitude of speed and performance to realize its full potential. They must also secure data and ensure data integrity while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Project Helix provides a design blueprint for generative AI with right-sized configurations, guidance and deployment with support from expert advisors; resilient and scalable unstructured data storage; and AI-enabled cloud-based monitoring with CloudIQ.

NVIDIA H100 tensor core GPUs are integrated into Dell PowerEdge platforms and NVIDIA AI enterprise includes the full-stack AI software required for GenAI deployments (including NeMo large language model frameworks). Furthermore, NVIDIA base command manager deploys and manages AI clusters from edge to core to cloud.

As Huang put it, the last wave of data was centers for file storage. The next wave?

“Harnessing our domain expertise, our proprietary data, and transforming it into intelligence.”

He called this next iteration one of “AI factories.” Every company at its core is about intelligence, and Project Helix “will help every company be an AI factory” that can produce domain-specific intelligence “at light speed and scale.”

Clarke agreed that “these models are game changing and highly disruptive.” Ultimately, “it's an exciting domain, we've just scratched the surface.”

4. Private wireless networks and SONiC gain traction

Other notable announcements from this year’s Dell Technologies World include the following:

Dell Private Wireless: An enterprise-level tool that uses 5G technologies to deliver standalone private wireless networks with dedicated bandwidth and infrastructure to meet the diverse connectivity needs of enterprise edge applications. The private wireless tool is powered by Dell VxRail and PowerEdge servers and built in partnership with mobile technology providers Airspan and Druid.

The platform allows enterprises to benefit from 5G wireless — speed, low latency, reliability, security and efficiency — across edge deployments without having to move data outside their network or compromising data control, sovereignty or governance requirements.

Enterprise SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) distribution, a unified network operating system (NOS) across cloud, core and edge use cases supported by multi-vendor platforms.

This helps organizations build high-performance fabrics with choice and flexibility; gain ease of management and greater insights with customizable options for edge deployments; and enhanced data center capabilities that enable the building of more feature-rich, enterprise-level fabric.