Dell EMC feeds channel's hunger for AI

Dell EMC has unveiled a new AI Experience Zone in its Sydney office, as part of a company-wide artificial intelligence push for its channel partners.

The AI Experience Zone offers education and training for both partners and customers that are looking to implement some AI projects, featuring access to data science tools and Dell EMC hardware.

The company said a number of partners are lining up to use the facility, including Data#3, Dimension Data and Sydney-based IQ3.

“Our customers and our channel partners are front and centre to this experience through these hands-on prototyping workshops, workshops and labs where they’ll remotely be able to sample and try our AI infrastructure,” said Andrew Underwood, Dell EMC APJ chief technology officer for HPC and AI.

Dell EMC has also been running training courses, dubbed AI master classes, where partners are shown real-world examples and demonstrations of AI, system architectures and project management. On the technical side, the training also touches on concepts of deep learning probability, mathematical probability and neural networks.

Partners also get an AI-specific channel partner enablement pack, to help them understand how to sell the technology and deploy reference architectures.

“With the hype that [AI] is getting in the industry, it’s almost becoming an imperative to embrace it in one way or the other,” Dell EMC APJ vice president for compute and networking Chris Kelly said.

“I think a number of the partners are looking at this as an opportunity to add an extension to their capabilities and or an additional revenue stream.”

Kelly added early adopters that specialise in high-performance computing (HPC), big data and business intelligence are set to take advantage of the AI push, but there is also interest from other channel partners.

“There’s interest from channel partners that never worked in AI in the past but have very strong backgrounds in infrastructure delivery,” Underwood said.

“Because ultimately you need to be able to build and deliver infrastructure to deliver an AI outcome.”