DXC and Dell: Making multicloud part of your enterprise AI/GenAI strategy

Welcome to the last in a series of three interviews conducted with leading executives from both DXC Technology and Dell Technologies, which explores some of the next-generation technologies in focus in 2024.

In this final conversation, Head of Cloud & Infrastructure Offerings Andy Haigh, Chief Technologist for DXC Cloud & Infrastructure Jim Miller, and Dell Technologies Global Alliances Account CTO for the DXC Partnership Andy King discuss the state of multicloud in the enterprise, including the most effective way to use the technology as part of an AI/GenAI strategy.

DXC and Dell: Partnering for innovation (Part 1)

Harnessing GenAI to reshape the enterprise (Part 2)

Q: What are today’s top multicloud trends?

Andy Haigh: A very small fraction (8 %) of businesses leverage a single cloud capability. A very small fraction of customers have walked away from hosted entirely. Multicloud and hybrid cloud is the state of the nation. There is a constant balancing act between driving through complexity in a quest to migrate workloads to the cloud, whilst simultaneously addressing end of life requirements. Modernizing legacy and hosted environments can be accomplished by leveraging software-defined storage and compute solutions to springboard between hosted and cloud capabilities. Those customers stuck in the weeds on complex workloads often stray from the original quest to transform the business, and instead become obsessed with consumption. They then turn to DXC to help them chart the path back to their original goals. 

Jim Miller: We view multicloud as a component of the overall “modern IT landscape,” which includes on-premises, cloud and edge environments. A significant trend is the switch from traditional IT operations to more integrated hybrid IT operations to manage that complex landscape — which becomes increasingly complex as more Internet of Things (IOT) and edge devices enter the environment. The applications landscape is changing significantly. Traditional applications, cloud-aware applications, cloud-native and edge applications are integrated into the multicloud domain. You have to manage all of that to deliver business value to customers.

Of course, you can't have a technology conversation nowadays without talking about Generative AI, and most customers see GenAI playing a significant business role in their overall environment. But one of the key challenges will be getting access to all of the data that exists throughout the environment, including multicloud, so that your Generative AI functions and applications allow the business to evolve.

Andy King: To Jim’s point, edge technology is now built into the multicloud picture for many companies. Our customers are speaking to us about it and we are working with DXC to deliver solutions. People need the multicloud experience and they want to be able to pay for it on a utility-type model. That's where Dell’s APEX solution comes in, providing as-a-service consumption of infrastructure.
 

Q: Speaking of GenAI, do you see data repatriation from cloud to the data center as a valid strategy for companies to get the most leverage out of the technology?

Andy Haigh: Some companies have chosen to repatriate, going from public cloud to on-prem, largely to maintain a balance between cost, security, compliance and data management requirements. Industries including public sector, secure manufacturing and military require on-prem for data sovereignty purposes, so they’re building out analytics specifically in the hosted landscape.

AI and next-generation AI technologies are really enabled by infrastructure, as opposed to being driven by applications. The ability to handle the amount of data that's needed to do the amount of processing required for large language models (LLMs) is driving an overall trend to pull data over to being hosted.

Jim Miller: Companies do repatriation for the reasons Andy mentioned, especially data management when it comes to a Generative AI environment. But one thing to avoid is making significant data movements, because of the cost involved. There's a concept in the industry called “data gravity,” which means that core data attracts applications, services and even other data. The key is to locate applications and business functions as close to the source of data as possible to get maximum value from it and alleviate data access problems and data movement costs.

That's why enterprises have to look at a GenAI strategy that locates some of the GenAI functions closest to the data — whether that be on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge — and then integrate it all together.

DXC has a process we call Precision Guided Modernization. It's a framework to help our customers plan their IT transformation journey and help them avoid future repatriation of data and workloads. So, we lay out a plan of where the workload should be, and where the data should be and how to get to it, so that there are no surprises down the road and you don't have to repatriate back to on-prem.

Andy Haigh: Our cloud infrastructure teams that drive Precision Guided Modernization work alongside DXC’s AI and analytics experts who can help them build that data strategy as part of defining their transformation journey. We can spin up playgrounds for them to experiment with the technology and see what's right for their business. That way, they can do proof-of-value tests up front before making a commitment. 

Andy King: At Dell, we’re also finding that the GenAI challenge is less about how quickly data can be processed and more about data management. So to Jim's point, data locality and access are important. To help address this challenge, Dell provides AI-optimized hardware for Starburst’s data management platform to enable customers to create a data lake that spans across multiple clouds, bringing the data to wherever it needs to be.
 

Q: How are DXC and Dell working together to address these data issues? 

Jim Miller: At DXC we have something called the Enterprise Intelligence Services (EIS) platform. It provides the foundation and capabilities for a data control plane, enables governance and regulatory compliance and provides data integration exchange, to accelerate a customer’s AI journey. It also includes integration with intelligent operations and observability though DXC Platform X™,  our data-driven intelligent automation platform that creates a resilient, self-healing IT estate.

For this effort, we’ve been working with Dell and NVIDIA to use the NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform that enables AI components in a multicloud environment that includes on-premises private clouds and public clouds. This allows customers to utilize compute capacity where appropriate and place AI components as close to the data as possible.

Andy King: We're really passionate about getting this all working together because it's how Dell is coming to market in the GenAI landscape. DXC will help us do that by taking this to Dell’s and NVIDIA’s joint customers.
 

Q: How can you use AI to manage multicloud environments?

Andy Haigh: Using AI at the heart of intelligence operations allows organizations to focus less on operations and more on strategy. Whether you are running hosted, compute, storage, mainframe, data centers or clouds of any kind, we have a toolkit for running intelligent operations, which is largely driven by Platform X. We create a single pane of glass for total observability, then pivot to data lead operations.

From observability we can then automate. Whether it's start-of-day checks, patching, provisioning or backing up, DXC is able to run more infrastructure per headcount than anybody else. It is not just about automating but using AI for predictive analysis, to get ahead of incidents and problems and put automation in place to stop them. For some of our customers we’re mitigating about 85% of their IT incidents before they even crystalize as incidents by using AI to analyze trends. On the other side, when an incident does occur, using automation ensures that it is resolved very quickly. We can automate a comparable percentage of the incidents that are likely to occur, which really minimizes impact to the business.

Jim Miller: We are also using Generative AI in intelligent operations to generate knowledge articles for our support staff, drawing from problems, incidents and logs in our customers’ environments. That helps them move more quickly to resolve operational problems, in multicloud or any other IT environment.
 

Q: How can you help companies wrestling with skills gaps when it comes to AI and infrastructure talent?

Jim Miller: DXC has a group of highly qualified AI practitioners distributed across the globe and organized into dedicated teams focused on achieving AI-enabled business outcomes for our customers. These specialists have extensive experience in all AI domains, including the rapidly maturing Generative AI. They bring a unique combination of technical AI expertise — open source, cloud and proprietary software suites — and deep industry knowledge to customer engagements.

Andy Haigh: This is part of the DNA of DXC. We effectively “sandwich” the problem. Our Analytics & AI capability works top-down helping the business drive insight, optimization and monetization from data. Our technology teams work bottom-up enabling capability needed at the infrastructure layer to serve our Analytics & AI teams working with our partners like Dell and NVIDIA to determine what we need to build.

Andy King: Dell is building automation into our tools in order to free up resources within organizations and within partners’ delivery teams, so that there is bandwidth for retraining in this space, and so that people can pursue other tasks that are more AI/GenAI-based.
 

Q: How do DXC and Dell combine their strengths to transform customers’ businesses?

Andy Haigh: DXC, certainly in partnership with Dell, can cover all aspects of a customer’s transformation process. We bring our value acceleration and Precision Guided Modernization to create a technical roadmap and determine how a data strategy should interlock with that. This supports determining whether to follow on-prem, cloud, hybrid or multicloud approaches for data enablement to drive business insights. We achieve all this through a union between our infrastructure capabilities, our application capabilities and our engineering expertise to help get complex workloads into the cloud. We act as a service integrator (SI) so we can implement those workloads natively, with security, and supported by modernized networks.

As the cloud journey evolves, we also systematically move customers’ legacy technology into storage-as-a service or compute-as-a-service, modernize mainframes and, as we mentioned before, bring it all together and run it under intelligent operations that lean on AI. We thrive on simplifying this complexity for customers.

Jim Miller: DXC and Dell have extensive co-development and co-investment activities that have really yielded a lot of new technology and new business functions for our customers. For example, we worked very closely with Dell on cyber resilience in a multicloud environment, and we're currently working very closely with them on Generative AI in the on-premises world, as well as in hybrid and multicloud.

Andy King: This is a 20-year partnership that continues to evolve and grow. Multicloud is a new dimension that we're all working towards, as is GenAI, and we look forward to continuing with DXC on that journey.