- Welcome everyone, this is the Digit Podcast. I’m László Személyi, managing partner of Future-NOW, and my partner in crime is Zoltán Szekér, founder and managing director of OD&IT and Sailing Hangar. Hi everyone, good afternoon! The aim of the Digit Podcast is to help those who are not satisfied with superficial articles and flashy slogans get closer to today’s defining trends in digitalization and IT. We’re really going to dig deep into things here. This is the Digit Podcast, the second season of the podcast series created together with Delta. Our guests today have come from Dell Technologies: Krisztián Técsy, vendor specialist at Delta Technologies, and Árpád Draskóczy, partner account manager at Dell Technologies.
- That’s right.
- Welcome to the show.
- Hello, hi everyone!
- I’m very glad you’re here, especially because I’ve noticed on the market that hardly any shows are made about Dell. And I’m very grateful to Delta for managing to bring Dell here. And my first question is: how are you doing these days? So this question has to be interpreted among the biggest players. How long have you been working with Delta, how well are you able to cooperate, and how forward-looking is this cooperation for each of you?
- Well, the relationship goes back a very long time; this cooperation with Delta has been going on for 10–20 years, really almost from the very beginning they may have been our direct partner, moreover our direct reseller partner, and as in every good relationship, communication is the key trick here too, which I think we do have, thank God, at least definitely at our level, but also at management level, so this is a functioning, living and indeed forward-looking relationship.
- That’s right, absolutely.
- So I’ve been dealing with Dell products in one way or another for more than ten years now, in fact we could rather say 15, because a very long time ago I was still a Dell product manager when we started dealing with server products, and back then they brought us in during the second round of direct partnership and we received, or rather concluded, that agreement under which we could buy directly from Dell. We could also sell devices to end users, then later I moved away from it a bit, there were other areas, client products, and then about four years ago, well, then let’s be back in the big-machine world again, back to the server-storage world, and since then once again, and more recently, as a vendor specialist, Dell specifically belongs to me among our biggest manufacturers, and then Árpi and I communicate on a weekly basis, coordinating and discussing all kinds of partner-related issues and odds and ends. So I think the relationship is absolutely active. Communication is very good, I really don’t feel that pressure of, wow, we need more, more, more, that we’re not enough. Of course, they do actively motivate us, so to speak, to move further forward. But overall, I think this is a very well-functioning story, and such a… stretch. So it’s not like you’re in knots because the manufacturer calls and asks again where our forecast stands, where our turnover is, what’s going on with certifications, how the engineering exams are progressing, etc.; instead, it all goes absolutely fluently.
- And what makes this strategic relationship more?
- Well, I think there are many kinds of partners, and reseller partners exist in many different qualities and roles. Basically, a good partner is one who knows the portfolio from A to Z and is able to identify what to recommend for a given need. And compared to that, a strategic partner lives a bit more closely together with the manufacturer, meaning that if the manufacturer says that storage is part of my strategy, and this is how I think, and on the client side this is how I think, and by the way I think the world is moving toward, say, I don’t know, AI, and everything should be AI-ready, then the partner understands this, sees through what it means in depth within the manufacturer’s portfolio, and also tries to turn with it. These are big ships, after all, so they turn very slowly, but one way or another the manufacturer responds very quickly to technological requirements, in fact it goes a little ahead in this matter, while the partners see from the front line what is happening in the given market. With regard to certain technologies and needs, the strategic partner practically turns with us; as our ship turns, it turns too, grows a new line of business, automates another line of business, that’s roughly what it looks like, and this is the direction the relationship and cooperation with all our larger strategic partners, including Delta, is taking.
- And how do you now see this AI-hype-driven change within this strategy? Because of course we’ll also get to what products you have, but when you look at it from a market outlook perspective—big ship and change—the market is now being shaped mainly by AI in one way or another, so how much did the strategy need to be transformed in this?
- Basically, with Dell we’re lucky, because across the full vertical they can provide us with products through which we can, so to speak, ride the AI hype, or serve AI-based customer needs, because on the client side, on the networking side, and on the server-storage side as well, the right products are there. So for us it’s both convenient and good that we can carry through the building of a complete ecosystem with a single manufacturer. We don’t need to look elsewhere, and moreover Dell also has the background specialist experts who can support us technically above the level that we may perhaps have in terms of competence or that depth of product knowledge which, understandably, is present at the manufacturer; even the latest prototype-type manufacturer information can reach us through the appropriate channels, and we can think ahead or plan ahead. We see products that will hit the market in, say, 2–3 months. But we already receive the training so that we can go out and say, look, take into account that if you’re planning something now, maybe don’t rush, you don’t have to buy it right now, wait half a year, and for the same investment you’ll get something 30% better or a more future-oriented solution. So from this perspective, it works very well.
- I also see, by the way, that on the partner side Delta has strengthened on the AI front as well. They’ve built up the knowledge behind it, so being able to put together an AI server, to think through an AI infrastructure, is starting to become fairly fundamental. And I think that today there is no business of any kind without a manufacturer-certified partner. Not on the end-user side, not on the manufacturer side, nowhere. So right now we’re at that point where the old “well, this is how we usually do it” approach is no longer going to be enough.
- Yes.
- So it’s absolutely necessary to move with the technology; there are strong bastions of this within the partners, including within Delta as well. Obviously it’s no coincidence that Krisztián is here too as a product specialist, and the partner also needs to turn in this direction, because while we are responding to the demand that maintaining and making smaller or bigger developments to the usual IT systems requires, this, at this scale, will come to an end after a while, because right now we are still keeping IT alive, but the world has reached the point where IT has long been a business partner, and anyone who takes that a bit more seriously, and if it is a business partner, then an AI-ready infrastructure or an AI-supported decision-making process can bring much greater business results, and here new tools and a new way of thinking are needed so that even when acquiring an infrastructure element I can say, yes, this was fine, but listen, move forward. Make it a bit AI-ready, and you don’t have to blow everything up for it right now, but when you do switch, let this not be the bottleneck. And this is where the partner also needs to know what the difference is between the two, and the salesperson needs to know what the difference is when they say it out loud. We’re learning this too; unfortunately it’s not the case that we come here and tell everyone with complete certainty what they need to know, we’re learning it ourselves as well. We too are being pushed by the multinational environment, obviously, to learn, learn, learn, and to pass this on. This is also how the relationship between companies is changing, between the manufacturer and the partner, and also between the customer and the partner: we try to pass on more and more information to them in this direction, whether they ask for it or not, so that at least they know what is missing, because when it really starts to be missing and that is when they begin to act, then we have already lost.
- And to what extent can you support the partners?
- Obviously, Delta is quite a large group of companies with various capabilities, but the bottleneck is always financing. And I would not like to go into financing separately now, since that can be heard about in another episode. But technically, in the planning process, are you already shaping these ideas together with Delta and Dell in such a way that they can be future-proof?
- Exactly, absolutely. Basically, scalability means where we are starting from and where we want to arrive; that is always a fundamental principle. So when we listen to a customer and say, tell us, what is your problem, what would you like, tell us about yourself, we are just mapping out what kind of environment we are about to enter. Obviously, the basis is that we start with some kind of passive information gathering, and then based on existing relationships, or also using our prior knowledge, but adapting it to the given current situation, we try to start planning something. And that is the starting point here. A great many customers fall into the mistake—or not even a mistake on their part, but somewhere we could call it that—of trying to figure it out themselves, because we can save this step, it costs money, it takes time, and so on. No, you do not need to. On the one hand, it is in our interest, and in their interest as well, because a good start can save a tremendous amount, and a well-scalable system can bring tremendous savings. And not only from the financial side; there is also a great deal to say here about the operational side, and about the placement of a given infrastructure itself. In the old days it was very simple: in a good case, I grabbed the server, pushed it under the desk; it was a bit noisy, but it was enough. Then 3-4-5-6 years passed, the company got bigger, and then I should have a server room—alias I closed off a toilet—but really, I think the first server rooms were some similar broom-closet-type solutions.
- Well, we could do a whole separate show about that.
- Exactly.
- And then afterward, when they were faced with the fact that there should be a raised floor and everything else, and we started thinking properly, then of course there was already the possibility of a proper server room as well. But I have noticed that in the last three years technology has accelerated to such an extent, and with it practically its energy demand, cooling demand, and network demand, that this too has to be rethought. So it is possible that it will not be enough, and all he wanted to get out of this—I may have gone on a bit at length—is that in many cases thinking starts with: tell me what kind of power feed you have.
- Yes, well, many people cannot tell you that, and a split air conditioner is not necessarily standard equipment for a server room either, but then this brings us to the next question, this rethinking. What is the portfolio? What can be rethought from, and what can be rethought? What I mean by that is, you mentioned networking products, storage, AI, and a bunch of other things, but let us put it together a bit and see what is actually there.
- Okay?
- We are lucky, I think, because even in client products, from headphones to very serious GPU-capable workstations, or workstations capable of accommodating GPU cards, and then networking, data storage, IT security, obviously servers and compute capacity all the way to cloud-ready environments—Dell has everything in such a way that you can put it all in one hand, so we can present a complete package, including services, obviously supplemented by a great many partner services that we tailor, in line with partner needs and capabilities, as to what they should provide and what we should add. This is equally true, by the way, for both products and services. So there is a full portfolio in this IT space, and a partner like Delta is more or less aware of this, where there is a separate specialist for everything and there is an overview of this entire portfolio. I think this is fundamental; I believe that at a large company, when infrastructure modernization is taking place, the partner’s basic expectation toward the vendor or supplier is that they understand the whole thing before touching any part of it. Because without understanding the whole, I do not know, stack, together with the entire data set, without understanding everything, you may end up slipping back a little toward a siloed environment, which is not a modern approach; rather, I would say it is better to improve things through a completely different direction of approach and modernization, one that is workload-based, load-based, absolutely based on business needs and undertaken with the hope of business benefit.
- Very often the problem, as I see it, is that the business does not understand IT, and IT does not understand the business. How do you see that?
- That is the partner’s role.
- This is very much present with the partner; it is a partner value to help the customer with this, which is why I told you that without a partner, there is no way—no matter how good specialists the customer has, I believe the partner, who has gone through the breadth of it and understands the customer’s business need, will certainly be able to say something that the customer specialist dealing with operations and development will not—not because they do not want to, but because that is not their role. That is why it may not occur to them. And then a partner comes in who sees the whole picture, and that is why a strategic partnership with the right supplier can deliver significantly more.
- Why Dell?
- I would go back a little to the very beginning. Because it can provide services across the full vertical. So practically, from the very smallest client devices through to the largest data center solutions, and also the communication between the two—so in terms of networking devices as well—we can turn to Dell. And they absolutely have that innovation, that equipment base, that set of services, which we can assess through the customers, through consultation and preparatory processes, and present to customers in such a way that this communication transformation shows how technology becomes a business advantage, or how technological advantage becomes business advantage. In practice, it is a ready-made solution; “solution” is a bit of a cliché, but for us too, “we deliver solutions” was our slogan for a very long time, and it was even displayed on the wall of our old office building, as a system integrator, but in practice this still works the same way to this day. So this part is not going to change. The manufacturer will be able to provide the innovation, the equipment base, and the related services, and we will be the ones who can convert all of this into a digestible format for the customer; we can call that business advantage. Obviously, for them the point is that we can support the core business they are engaged in in such a way—because even today I still see that at companies where IT is not the core business, so we are not talking about a software development company or something similar, there IT is practically good when it is quietly there in the background, and let us say that the financial decision-makers at most only see an invoice, or preferably not even that from them, because it is not their problem—and in fact we often run into partners where IT understands the IT problem, but they cannot communicate it internally to their own management either. Yes, that is what I was alluding to earlier when I asked for six terabytes of storage. No, what you want is storage that solves the problem of SAP being able to save, because you have run out of storage space. And then I had already gone a little deeper than if I simply said, I have run out of storage space, give me storage, or solve the problem.
- Now, that is a very good direction, because these types of problems are seen differently by the business and differently by IT. And in business, it’s a very interesting question whether they know how much data AI works with, and where to store it. And how to connect that product to it properly in terms of thinking? Let me give an example: you see AI and that data should be stored, but does Dell actually have a story for storing it, or is there a server you can run AI on, or the one side and the other side of the desk, so we work with client devices, this connects somewhere. Could you talk a little about these?
- Well listen, what I can say is that today there is no business without IT. And we can look at this from here or from there, but there are very few jobs where the light switch is the most complicated IT device. Ergo, there will be IT in most places. What perhaps still hasn’t arrived everywhere, though I think in fewer and fewer places it hasn’t, is that IT should be asked about the approach to and solution for a given business problem, that the IT leader at a given company should be a business conversation partner, and that the task should be to bring business value. I think hopefully this is the case in fewer and fewer places. And once they do ask the IT leader, who up to now has basically been keeping everything alive, that’s somewhere a new question for them, somewhere they’ve finally received such a question, and can finally think a bit more freely, then obviously a finance person comes along and tells them how freely they can think, but when we start thinking in these products, that is already a translation of a business need into IT, and then the reseller arrives for IT, or rather the system integrator to be more precise, saying, listen, here’s the situation, we were thinking about this, and then we can calmly ask why you were thinking about this, then you get involved through consultation in business-type conversations, and coming back to financing, as they say, friends, money is the smallest issue. Well, here in Hungary too that’s almost true, but when they say, okay, okay, now we don’t want to look at this as a cost, but rather let’s invest in IT so that something one step more than before comes out of it, so that it adds something to our lives, not just that little Manci can type on something again, because that was already working before. This doesn’t exist. This way of thinking is changing, or will change very quickly, especially with AI. And that’s why I say, when these questions come in, and then financing again, solutions do exist with financing. So the fact that lifecycle management together with financing is a specifically natural request, we respond to that in a day, a person gets a financed offer for it, and that’s it. The company is looked at, or Delta, or obviously its customer, and then they get a financed car, if it costs this much, in five years I’ll say thank you, but then we’ll take it away, or else you do whatever you want with it. So this is no longer rocket science. So I think the money can be found for such a development, and the portfolio elements, the moment this business consultation by the partner exists, can be put together so that with gradual replacement or replacement of a larger stack all at once, but definitely starting from there that okay, then what is the business, what is the business’s problem or need, how can that be implemented on the software side, and what do we need to support it with as a service so that the by now basic demand for business continuity is maintained under all circumstances, and then these things come up like, okay, okay, how business-critical is it, if this stops then everything stops. That’s critical, my friend. So let’s treat it as such, whether because in the country you sit on critical infrastructure as a quasi-state or state institution, or because if the cooling stops in the brick factory, then that’s bad, because it gets hot there by the furnace, so needs like this, and from here that kind of conversation starts that let’s examine it from the cost side, let’s give an efficient but productive solution to this whole story, and at the end of this come the infrastructure elements, because honestly speaking, what the partner puts it together from, some people care, some have dug into it because they like it, but in the end the business is infinitely not interested.
- Well, it won’t be interested.
- It’s not interested in the product, let it work, my friend, what it is interested in is that it should be reliable. So there should be business continuity, reliably under all circumstances, and it needs manageability, and here comes the part where the partner has a management capability, data mining, understands the data that belongs to the business, and in the end puts together an infrastructure with service included that we can connect into, that we can stand behind alongside them. So this whole thing roughly goes like this from the top, and what I see is that more and more people are arriving with needs like this, more and more people are saying that okay, okay, not servers, but the situation is that this should be solved, or our life should be solved in such a way that. And then from that point on we say, tell us something for this, up to now we thought this was it, but tell us something about it. And here we sit down together and tell them something, which if it has to be run from a generator because next year the drought will be even worse, but this is now a live example, so when electricity consumption has to be reduced a bit, then immediately you have to look at how efficient that server is, how efficient that whole thing is, you can’t turn down the air conditioning and have it still just keep ticking over, because there won’t be as much as needed, and already now let’s review it so that we invest in such a way that this kind of business is sustainable even in difficult moments, when the climate has to be turned down from 17 degrees, or they’ll take it up to 24. And then not every device says I’m happy, but thank God there are devices within the portfolio that say okay, up to 35 degrees you can blow in whatever you want, just don’t let there be any very large dust in this stuff.
- That’s a very important sentence, because basically a specific 3-degree temperature increase generally kills the machines in the server room.
- Yes.
- From my late days as an IT director I remember my favorite story like that, that there was no cooling in the server room, but not because we didn’t want it, but because the contract was missing, which my predecessors hadn’t arranged. And then at 9 p.m. in Tesco decide whether there should be electric public transport in a city or water service.
- Yes.
- You have one single mobile air conditioner to play with.
- Yes, and when they made a server room out of a toilet, right, they said toilet, they made a server room out of it, then think about it, what is harder to bring into a server room, water or air conditioning?
- Well probably air conditioning is harder to bring in.
- And if you need water cooling, then what do you do?
- Yes, this is my favorite, when let’s set something up in a basement that is otherwise a floodplain.
- A floodplain.
- That is in a flood-stricken area.
- There it is drop-based.
- It is drop-based, and channels ran along the ceiling, right, everyone has been in such old public institutions, server rooms, so to speak, set up in the basement of 130-year-old buildings, okay?
- And there really. So there were places where the server cabinet had a top because water was dripping onto it. But it worked, because it was cool in the basement and the 13 degrees were there. Fine, okay, let it be 18, because I know that used to be the conservative industry standard, but actually, coming back a little, just a small technological addition to this, nowadays it looks like this: when you start configuring a server, it starts with at what temperature this will operate, that’s the first parameter you have to tick off, and then it starts screaming when that cooling will no longer be able to serve that config.
- And your blanket only stretches as far as it works at that temperature. And then there’s no more RAM, no bigger hard drive, nothing.
- Aha.
- And then the story stopped there. And that’s where we are now.
- But then this is the hardware. What else are we talking about in the server room? We talk about traditional servers, we talk about storage.
- What else is in the server room that is worth talking about?
- By now, it’s more that we only talk about certain infrastructure elements when we are actually putting together the specific requirement. We talk about what the customer needs in order for it to work, or for their problem to be solved. And then we start breaking that down into infrastructure afterwards, but in a rack practically everything is already included, starting from the network, everything should be able to go into it. Cooling has to be taken care of, so this has a service where they bring down a rack, unpack it, plug it in, and that’s it. And it works that way because it has been put together. But in Hungary, I rather think we rely on integrators to put together the infrastructure of the given customer’s “brain trust,” tailored precisely to that customer, and they go out there, do it, and every light turns green, plus they say, listen my friend, now every light is green, but let’s also see how this will stay that way for you in the long term, and then those service elements come in that make operating this whole thing safe for the customer, and of course from that, sooner or later, it can sell more to them, but the best is if the partner operates it.
- Could you give an example of what we mean by security? Because sometimes this is kind of intangible, and in relation to Dell as a manufacturer, what does security mean?
- Everything started with business continuity. Whatever stops the business has to be dealt with. This can be a failure, overload, a deliberate attack, or pressing the wrong button in the wrong place.
- But what I mean now is that obviously you may not necessarily distribute Dell aggregators in the portfolio, but you might have firewalls, so I’d rather like to separate this a little bit that way.
- Then let’s break down exactly what protection means.
- Yes, so let’s look a little at what you mean by Security, because that’s interesting.
- By the way, Dell is particularly strong in this, and there are complete zero trust solutions that basically work on an appliance basis. You should imagine this as Dell providing the device onto which you save the data. This can basically be disk-based now, and it comes with software features that are already on this device at the operating system level. If we want to break it down to a very physical level, then this is a server, a computer, a PC operating system, that can accept a lot of disks. Its task is that this is where you store the backup. Alongside it, it provides security functions such as, say, a time lock, ransomware protection, dedicated communication protocols through which its primary storage systems can back up to this device via secure lines. Credential-based security protocols or rules can be configured on it such that, in practice, the system administrator cannot open it if you have set it to read-only for two weeks. And of course there are also storage methodologies which, specifically on the operational side—or rather, I would say, without a file system—these object-based solutions are about the fact that they cannot be attacked because there is nothing to attack; practically no structure is visible that could be encrypted. And all of these are layered on top of one another; there are central management software solutions that manage this whole thing, but it can provide the whole thing to the customer as one package: here you go, here is storage that is ransomware-proof, here is a backup that can store, I don’t know, ten petabytes because it has such compression, with time lock, etc., with protocols such that the whole thing can practically be completely isolated from the outside world, and the whole thing also absolutely has scalability, because there is a BCD product for everything, depending on where the customer requirement starts and where it is headed.
- That’s also an important question; here I’m trying to connect it a bit with compliance, because there are various regulations for large companies and also for financial institutions. One is that if I look at a large company, then generally they have to comply with, say, ISO 27000, financial institutions have to comply with DORA, and then here is our favorite, NIS 2, where 3,000 companies will surely face the fact that they too may sometimes need some kind of infrastructure replacement, depending on whether it is assessed on a checkbox compliance basis or on a real compliance basis, but they may need an infrastructure replacement. And within this room for maneuver, everyone can find what works for them. Do you understand? So from SMEs to financial institutions, anyone can turn to you at any time? Do you have something for everything under the sun?
- I think that obviously they first turn to partners, to integrators, and alongside that Dell can support them in ensuring that ever-so-often mentioned business continuity. As Krisztián said, with zero trust elements, so we can make it happen that even if the trouble is big, we can still somehow carry it through. There is a system with which you can get started, restart, if this is not about a failure—so right now we are not talking about physical hardware failure or external factors for the moment—but because your IT system is being attacked, or something there suffers damage. It exists that you can recover from this with minimal business loss and time loss. There is also forecasting of this: listen, trouble is coming, my friend—systems know this. Obviously, Managed IT Detection and Response type services are also included in Dell’s portfolio, but I still say that what Dell is really, truly outstandingly strong in—and this has already been compiled and certified by the institution called Shelter Harbor, which audits and reviews the United States’ financial institutions from an IT perspective. For a very, very long time we have been able to think in terms of a system that can restore your infrastructure elements to working order in any such case, but it requires the kind of service where someone thinks through how to do this well. Obviously Dell can do it, but as for how to do it well, that requires the kind of consultation that we must be able to carry out together with the reseller and the integrator. So Dell is good at this. This is what we know; we do not sell firewalls.
- That’s really good.
- That’s basically it. Now you can look at it from here or from there, what we sell is that if there is trouble, with us you can come back, we bring things back to life. This is what we are strong in.
- And where are the new developments heading? Where is the technology going, for example? So what are the new things at Dell? What can be expected? Which direction are you heading in?
- That leads to the question.
- The new thing, insofar as I can call it new, is that everything should be prepared for AI. So when it becomes more or less a requirement for the worker of the future, on both the employer and employee side, to have a hybrid working option, a little home office, a little office, for this to be secure, to be supported by AI, and preferably efficient in every respect, then AI can no longer be separated in any way from client devices suitable for carrying out AI tasks all the way to the capabilities of the full infrastructure, which can even mean that in certain places on the edge side, that is, right down to the endpoint side, there should also be AI capability there, capability for AI-based processing, and the structuring of this, the storage of data in a way that is both secure and easily processable for artificial intelligence, and transferable for analysis and lifecycle purposes, is absolutely the technology of the future, and that is what is coming. Mainly so that with this AI-accelerated work and AI-supported work, companies can also be supported, and not only the end user sitting in front of the machine trying to write and create with the help of AI, but also to give corporate decision-makers support through AI that places before them, well selected, running on the right data, well trained, what they need to make a decision about now. I see technology moving in this direction, and we are moving in this direction too, on the Dell side, in that we are no longer storing servers, but storing AI-ready infrastructure, one element of which is an AI-ready server, another element being the kind of storage and network environment that can serve this well at the right speed and with the right layering, and that is capable of keeping it secure as well. I see this coming toward us, and this is where we will need to shift our thinking a little.
- Anything to add?
- I think Razsi has said pretty much everything. I see it the same way, that in practice the semi-automated manual management we have had so far is going to transform into absolutely AI-based management, and this is already happening today. So those central vendor solutions, usually cloud-based solutions, where people hook up their devices and get various predictive analytics or get any kind of notifications saying hello, this or that is going to fail, those are practically all, all, all operating on an AI basis by now. These are in fact filtering all the way down to client device management practically everywhere; this is not only true for large-scale systems. And the simple reason for this is that where this started from, with machine learning and so on, has now reached the point where the support environment that vendors can provide has practically gotten all the way to the level of assistants based on large language models, or this can also be built in the same way with a third-party system. Agenting, or whatever they call it, the assistant, the digital assistant, is now in every bush. Just today I was on Dell’s website, and the assistant immediately popped up saying, hello, here I am, how can I help? Tell me, boss, what can I do for you? So now it’s no longer even the case that I have to look on a website to see what the problem is, because it already comes up to me and offers the option on its own: hello, if that’s why you’re here, then go ahead, type in your trouble here, and you’ll get the answer. And this really works. And I think, I believe that at some point this kind of operations work, which up to now has required a huge amount of human effort and a huge amount of digging through data, oh my God, what is the problem, and this is still going on even today, will get to the point where I simply log into a dashboard like this, and there the system is in front of me, and absolutely, say, divided into different severity levels, the agent has laid it out before me: listen, buddy, I solved these 50 problems, deal with these 20 because I’m not sure, but deal with these 10 right now because they’re really urgent. And then this could even come to your mobile phone as well. So somewhere, that is what it will be.
- Before we move on to the future. It is important that before we move on to the future. In every program there is a point where I have to interrupt this professional thread and bring in a personal one; this is a special privilege required and requested by my fellow podcaster László Személyi, and the current personal thread is: do you have a connection to water, do you connect to water in your free time? That is the question.
- Absolutely. We connect to water. There is work and there is free time too. Absolutely. I think for two different reasons, more than likely, but since you started this.
- Yes.
- I spent a large part of my life’s summers by the Danube, absolutely. First at Lake Balaton, then by the Danube I spent my summers, and I swam, so for me water is one of those things, it has not only been a life-giving element inside the belly, so absolutely, and I love it very much, and if I approach this personal thread from the professional side, then water is indispensable for manufacturing, see battery factories, and thank God how nice it is that they use our water, but in any manufacturing too water is a fundamental element of this whole story. I very much hope we will take very good care of it, because one day the river may simply no longer flow in its bed ever again, and if the factories have used it up, then we will not only be talking about whether we can drink or cool things down; that will be an unpleasant conversation. Just look at what actually happened to us this summer, when everyone was asked not to run air conditioning between five and eight o’clock, or rather not too much between 5 and 10, because we cannot cool with water the output that gives us this comfort. So this attitude of taking care of water, regardless of the fact that I love it anyway, means that if I have to go on vacation, city trips interest me too, but what interests me most is whether there might be water to look at; that would not be such a bad thing. So this is absolutely how I connect back to it; you can put me down somewhere and I calm down.
- Definitely water.
- Well, in certain respects I am more drawn to water in its solid state, so I am more of a winter person, but I am not the kind of person who immediately runs to the seaside when, I don’t know, it hits 35 degrees. My wife and I are more the sightseeing, hiking type. So we do very well in a forest, it is really great, we love going to arboretums, but regardless of that, in winter we love snow. We really miss the fact that we live in the countryside in a house, we have a big garden, and we often miss that nowadays in winter we barely encounter that nice crisp white snow, where you look out from the terrace and everything is glowing, moonlight, wow, and we truly both love this moonlit brightness. And from here I would connect to the other state of water, its natural liquid state, because we have a great many plants. So over the past six years we have planted more than a thousand plants in terms of sheer numbers. Small, large, trees, bushes, shrubs, herbaceous plants, you can imagine everything, annuals, perennials, and so on, and so on. And then there is watering them. And this year that was an incredibly painful point; we take a lot of photos of this garden, and so we can assess very well how in a year it can go from something green and thriving into this tumbleweed-chasing central Mexican desert, and this year that did happen, because we were loyal and sensible enough not to start watering mindlessly, we could have done it because the tap was there and it was possible, no, we did not do it, and certain areas did suffer for it, but regardless of that we spend a very, very, very long time thinking about how it would be possible to implement some kind of irrigation technique that is, on the one hand, realistic in some way, and not a completely selfish solution of water, water, water, and from this point of view water management, even on the micro level, is a very important issue for us.
- Super, I’m very glad to hear it, and thank you very much for sharing that with me, but to go a little into the future, if we have already been talking about water, then this actually makes for a very good transition to Dell and water, but that is not the point; rather, what do you think things will be like in three to five years?
- What I see, and what we’ve already talked about, is that the way we work really is going to change to some extent, and AI assistance will become part of work in most places. Right now, since we’re in the middle of building a website, the fact that you could ask for its help with things like that during the night saves hours, but also in anything else, product selection for example. This is definitely coming within 3–5 years. I also think companies need to prepare for this; everyone prepares according to their own size, and what already exists or is coming will obviously happen faster at large companies, while smaller ones will also need to develop and grow their own AI capabilities, because asking everything from as many GPs as possible is a good idea, but not every company wants to fundamentally entrust that to various AI service providers; rather, they would try to think about this a bit more securely, to a smaller or greater extent. So I definitely see the world moving very, very much in this direction, and people are thinking about it, and also about what we already talked about as well: requests will come in not on an infrastructure basis, but on a problem basis, and we will respond to that with infrastructure and added consulting, then operational services and/or financial services.
- I absolutely see this changing in the next 3–5 years.
- How do you see it?
- I think exactly the same.
- So right now, at this very moment, it’s very much on that track of, okay then, overnight, and this discusses everything through.
- And that is absolutely practical, basically. What I see is that infrastructure itself and things like that are not really going to change much. In 3–5 years, technologies won’t—there won’t be some brand-new thing, there won’t be a quantum computer sitting everywhere. But if we look at these things that are already currently in the portfolio, their nicer, slightly bigger, newer versions will be there. Here, really, it is communication, and the operation of this whole ecosystem, that I think may be standing before a huge revolution. Being able to be more efficient and more ergonomic with our own employees, because the poor person is setting things up too, and let them be a bit more comfortable already, why not if we can do it, and as a result they can be even more efficient, and then practically that kind of filter, someone who can be, say, an IT director or IT manager, at their own level can communicate that, okay, then we can save this much here, that much there, this is how we’ll be more efficient, that is how we’ll be more efficient, this is how we’ll be safer, insofar as decision-makers care about that, because what they usually care about is being able to work more and more cheaply, and the background support can provide that, can serve them from that perspective. That’s where I see a big change. So absolutely management and communication are where I see that we’re fundamentally talking about software-based solutions. Software is what can add this. They won’t be able to generate more electricity, or be bigger, smaller—although now maybe I was just thinking the other day that if one mole of atoms is Avogadro’s number, then six—how much is two times ten to the twenty-third bits in zettabytes, because then I can express data in grams.
- If one hydrogen atom is one bit. And practically now I’m already working with such large volumes of data that you could think about it that way. I know it’s very abstract, but it could actually be calculated, because there are already exabyte-based storage systems.
- And what tool do you use when you calculate that?
- Listen, this is going to surprise you, but I looked these up. And one of my favorite storage systems from Dell’s portfolio is the storage called Powerskill, in its childhood name, or maiden name, the ID-on; it’s a NAS. And I asked the smart software what it could tell me about it, and it says that 740 petabytes is the cluster size that it can still store at file level in a single namespace, so in a namespace where everyone can see it. That’s 740 thousand terabytes. If I want to put it a bit more into everyday terms, that’s 7.4 million gigabytes. So the point is that it’s an enormous amount of data, and there are storage solutions on an even larger scale by another one or two zeros, and I think by now it reaches two to the twenty-something, but the point is that this is actually where that Avogadro story came from, that here we’re already talking about two to the twenty-something bits. Very cool. And this exists and it works. The hyperscalers are the ones who basically think on this kind of scale. We ordinary mortals here in Hungary, I think, at most get up to petabyte-sized levels, but this is no longer data where, say, in 2000 an exabyte was the total capacity or amount of all the data on the internet, and now we’d be able to put it onto one storage rack. And this can already be stated, because it’s a validated figure; there are datasheets, white papers, etc. for it. And this is where we are now. And then in the future, well, infinite. I wrote down that there was this question of what it will be like in five years. We’re going to use an enormous amount of electricity, and we’re going to need enormously powerful cooling. If I wanted to sum it up in one sentence, because we don’t know the rest.
- It’s going to grow somewhere, very big, very fast, and to a very large amount.
- And if you think about this enormous heating and cooling, as we talked about it, when you can raise the temperature by 3–5 degrees and your systems will still operate, and let me give an example: step out onto your balcony when the AC is turned up, and step out onto your balcony when the outdoor unit is there—well, not that—and figure out what happens when you lower the cooling on the AC, and see what you do. And then you can understand it—now imagine that with, say, 400 air conditioners and a relatively large balcony, because that’s simply what we’re talking about; efficiency won’t be irrelevant here, because cooling won’t be irrelevant, and neither will water, obviously possibly water cooling.
- So here, efficiency and planning for energy use also really have to come in.
- They have to, because without that there is no awareness. We still have time for one last question. And my last question would be: if you had to sum up the shared story of Delta and Dell in one sentence, how could it be phrased?
- Well, I more or less see it like this: our shared story, and if we look at the two companies as one big whole, then they are the ones who provide the infrastructure, provide the innovations that they, as a manufacturer, can ensure, and we are the ones who, on the one hand, bring the customer demand, we are the ones who give this whole thing a complete form, we are the ones who can put the consulting and planning processes alongside it, the implementation processes alongside it, we can carry out the expert consultations, and if this whole thing is already there at the customer and working, then we can support it with operations, put post-sales and lifecycle management behind it; we also talked about this, that practically we can go all the way back—or get all the way—to asset management, so we can also dismantle it, take it back, provide new technology upgrades alongside it, and we will also be able to hold the customer’s hand and take them through the whole thing, where there is uncertainty we are the ones who add that little bit extra, we smooth out the road a little, let’s put it that way; if there is any problem, we have quite a significant support team within the building, and at every level we either operate directly or can also provide operational support alongside it.
- I also see that we started somewhere with an IT supplier relationship, we got to the point where we approach our customers with a good system integrator–manufacturer relationship, and in a very short time we will get to the point where, for a business need supported by AI, we will put a joint solution on the customers’ table.
- That’s how I see our relationship here, in one sentence.
- Thank you very much.
- We're out of time.
- Thank you.
- Thank you very much for being here.
- Thank you very much, Misi.
- Thank you.
