Partners building capabilities around AI infrastructure

“What we see now is a lot of partners have built their services and capabilities that are wrapped around the infrastructure of AI. And they are able to take those solutions to the customers and implement those solutions with the enterprises,” says Manish Gupta, Vice President, Global Alliances, APJC at Dell Technologies.

Dell Technologies’ recent financial results showed positive growth for the first quarter of the year, especially for its servers and networking products. Yvonne McGill, chief financial officer, Dell Technologies, stated that the company’s core business grew as it reached US$23.4 billion in revenue in the first quarter.

AI infrastructure contributed significantly to the growth with Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and chief operating officer, Dell Technologies stating they achieved first-quarter record servers and networking revenue of US$6.3 billion.

“We’re experiencing unprecedented demand for our AI-optimized servers. We generated US$12.1 billion in AI orders this quarter alone, surpassing the entirety of shipments in all of FY25 and leaving us with US$14.4 billion in backlog,” said Clarke.

At Dell Technologies World, the main focus was also on enhancing AI infrastructure to support its growing demand. As Michael Dell announced new capabilities and enhancements to its AI Factory, including new servers, the tech giant remains confident that it will continue to see strong demand in the industry, with partners playing a key role in ensuring the vendor remains successful.

Partners and AI

According to Manish Gupta, Vice President, Global Alliances, APJC at Dell Technologies, partners in the Asia Pacific region are now focused on helping clients plan and build their AI infrastructure, especially as more businesses in the region looking to deploy more GenAI and Agentic AI workloads.

“The most important role that we want partners to play is to be trusted advisors to the customer. A lot of enterprises have a vision to adopt AI, but very often they do not know the right path. In that journey, that is where we want the partners to play the role of being a consultant, so that they can help the customers through the journey of identifying the outcomes, identifying the use cases, and then provide the technical solution,” said Gupta.

Gupta also mentioned that partners play a more consultative role when it comes to AI adoption because the focus is more on identifying a business problem first that needs to be translated into technology problems and then only a solution. More often than not, businesses struggle to find real use cases that can benefit their AI investments. Hence, taking that consultative approach helps them identify the problem and then only focus on solving it.

In solving the problem, partners are not just selling a service but also providing that needed infrastructure and guidance to customers, especially when it comes to implementing AI solutions.

One popular offering is the AI in a box which is seeing strong interest from developers in the region. Gupta mentioned several distributors in APAC like TechData, Dowell Technology, DickerData and such have created AI in a box offering that are built on the Dell AI Factory. These offerings are now being offered to tier two partners who are taking it customers.

“AI in a box can act as a sandbox for customers to do their POC on and then take production. It also helps customers to be well aware of the use case and how they are going to utilize it. They can just go buy something off the shelf rather than having to do everything on their own,” added Gupta.

Interestingly, Gupta also pointed out that Dell is seeing customer savings as much as 62% when AI workloads run on-premises versus being run on the public cloud. This is also one of the reasons why Dell’s PowerEdge servers have witnessed incredible sales growth in the past year and as stated in their financial results.

In fact, Dell received US$12.1 billion in AI orders, surpassing the total shipments for all of FY25 and leaving the vendor with a backlog of US$14.4 billion.

“There’s a very compulsive case at this point in time for customers to make the switch and the partners see that goodness coming in and thus they are very well equipped with our solutions on that. We are seeing this switch right now in large enterprises, in mid-market and also in startups, depending on how large they are,” said Gupta.

With that said, Gupta believes the partner of the future will be a partner that's equally equipped with AI within their organizations. They will have the right tools to take their offerings to the market.

“A partner of the future is somebody who's going to be as AI-enabled as what they are taking to the market to their customers. And it's happening. We can see partners in APAC using AI technologies to increase their productivity, get into newer segments and do better,” said Gupta.

Dealing with tariffs

While customer growth remains positive, there is still a concern about how tariffs could impact business in the future. When asked how partners are coping with any potential fallout from the tariffs, Gupta said partners are primarily having two concerns when it comes to tariffs.

The first concerns partners have is whether the vendor has got a robust supply chain in a dynamic tariff world to be able to take care of supplies. For Dell Technologies, partners trust us because they know we have a very diversified and global supply chain to be able to navigate as the ecosystem is evolving around tariffs.

The second is really around pricing. At this point in time, Gupta said as the entire tariff situation continues to evolve, pricing is more dynamic in nature. However, Gupta believes that Dell is sitting in a very good spot because of its diversified global supply chain that is allowing them to get across a dynamic tariff world.