This is IT conference season – the time of year when every week at least one large IT vendor holds its annual event. This week, Dell and Red Hat were up.

The major themes at Dell Tech World and Red Hat Summit were the same as other IT vendor shows so far this year, and no doubt will be the same in upcoming conferences. AI was the headliner, and virtualization also figured prominently. Dell and Red Hat stated their case for being an enterprise AI platform while offering virtualization options for unhappy VMware customers.

AI on Center Stage

Dell and Red Hat execs focused mostly on AI during keynotes, but the approach was different. The most obvious difference is that Dell takes a hardware and infrastructure approach while Red Hat focuses on a software ecosystem. Dell fleshed out its AI Factory plan first revealed at 2024 Dell World, emphasizing its hardware enabled by Nvidia GPUs. Dell wants to help customers create AI Factories, which of course requires Dell servers, storage, networking, data protection, etc. It’s a similar strategy that HPE follows with its GreenLake private cloud emphasis. Dell and HPE both strive to convince IT practitioners they have the best infrastructure to run AI workloads whether they’re on premises or in private clouds and whatever AI tools customers use.

Red Hat’s approach is to enable software-defined AI with its OpenShift, RHEL, Ansible and other open-source software along with its InstructLab open-source community for developing generative AI models. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AI provides runtime environments across Nvidia, Intel and AMD platforms, and supports IBM Granite large-language models (LLMs).

Dell and Red Hat CEOs laid out their takes on AI.

"We're entering the age of ubiquitous intelligence, where AI is just as important as electricity," Michael Dell said.

Red Hat’s Matt Hicks compared AI to the early days of open source when the path forward was far from clear.

"Right now, that is exactly where we are with AI: we are in the moment of uncertainty. We have to simultaneously understand that while the fundamentals we know are changing, so many other factors come into play in creating true business value," Hicks said.

Dell’s reality check on AI was an admission that many are still cautious about adopting it despite the hype. For instance, Dell channel execs admitted AI PC growth is slow because customer are searching for an immediate use case.

Virtualization Visions

Dell’s virtualization stance changed after it sold VMware to Broadcom in late 2023. Dell’s product line was heavily infused with VMware before the sale, but now it focuses on choice of hypervisor or other cloud-native operating systems. Dell is phasing out its VxRail HCI platform that uses VMware, and offering customers hardware support for Red Hat OpenShift, Nutanix and other virtualization options in what it calls its private cloud. And VMware support is limited to vSphere instead of the VMware Cloud Foundation that Broadcom prefers.

OpenShift Virtualization is Red Hat’s home-grown VMware alternative. At Summit, Red Hat executives spoke of an uptick in adoption driven by dissatisfaction with VMware’s licensing changes and prices increases under Broadcom. Red Hat sees OpenShift Virtualization as a big part of its AI-ready platform, and as both complementary to VMware for customers who aren’t ready to ditch VMware and as a way to migrate off VMware.

This is hardly the last we’ll hear of AI and VMware alternatives.