In this episode of our AnalystANGLE series, I’m joined by my colleague and fellow analyst Bob Laliberte for a look at some tech news of the past week, starting with Kyndryl Cloudflare aligning more deeply. We also discuss Cloudflare’s acquisition earlier this month of multicloud networking startup Nefeli Networks, Dell’s expansion of its Gen AI Solutions Portfolio in collaboration with support from NVIDIA. We covered news out of NVIDIA’s GTC event this past week, including announcements around NVIDIA NVlink and 6G research platform. And last but not least, we touched on news from Nile introducing the industry’s first AI Networking Solution with performance guarantee
Watch the full video conversation here, or stream it wherever you get your podcasts. Jump after the video for an overview of the conversation.
Kyndryl Cloudflare Alliance
The Kyndryl Cloudflare alliance announced last week is, not surprisingly, designed to speed IT modernization, drive transformation, multicloud innovation, and zero trust security. Isn’t everything focused on this in some way these days?
That said, the Kyndryl Cloudflare alliance is not a new relationship. Cloudflare first partnered with Kyndryl in the spring of 2023 on infrastructure modernization with end-to-end services, bringing managed WAN as a Service and Cloudflare Zero Trust to the entire corporate network.
In the industry today, we are seeing movement of enterprise networks away from dedicated backbones to different types of cloud, SaaS applications, and the need to transfer data between locations, etc., and building competencies around that has been a focus for Kyndryl.
In our briefing last week with the team at Kyndryl, we discussed the fact that data center networking is starting to resurge a bit now as not everything is moving to the cloud. The thing they are sensing talking with customers is that many held off on data center optimization as they were considering moving to the cloud. But now, that is starting to settle out and many are keeping these data centers and now need to refresh them with new tech as it is aging out. And naturally, Kyndryl is seeing a resurgence of their business on that front. This move is driven by Kyndryl’s need to expand the game in the networking edge group in areas that are important to the industry and customers, but which also present good growth opportunities (e.g. private networking, private 5G, cloud networking).
The Kyndryl Cloudflare alliance should help enterprise customers more easily migrate and manage workloads for multicloud connectivity and also provide comprehensive network security. Kyndryl’s consulting services and expertise in enterprise networking, security, and resiliency pairs nicely with Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud, which offers security, performance, and cloud flexibility all in one. Additionally, we see similarities in how the companies respectively GTM and beyond all aligned very well.
What Cloudflare is doing with its security portfolio is also valuable to Kyndryl, and customers will no doubt find value there, along with some merging tech capabilities that fit Kyndryl’s bigger picture (e.g. gen AI capabilities, for starters). This is
Cloudflare has built its offerings from the ground up, and offers customers flexibility along with a consumption-based cloud model. For customers who don’t want to deal with a heavy capital refresh cycle, flexibility and consumption based offerings are quickly becoming table stakes. There’s much opportunity here: customers already know Cloudflare, but they might not be as familiar with some of the capabilities Kyndryl and Cloudflare are the collectively bringing to market so we see this as a strategic, “stronger together” move — and a smart one. CF operates as a consumption-based cloud model, and for customers who don’t want the heavy capital refresh cycle, this alliance
The key goals of the Kyndryl Cloudflare alliance are:
- Help accelerate digital maturity and network modernization
- Reduce spend on private network and appliances
- Saving IT teams from manual work
- Extend network security to offices and data centers by replacing traditional WAN
- Leverage sustainable networking
On the sustainability front, it’s especially of interest that Cloudflare’s Connectivity Cloud eliminates the need for hardware and traditional networking equipment. This, combined with Kyndryl’s expertise in stack migration and Cloudflare’s global network services will allow customers to integrate sustainability into their business models, which is important, as sustainability is a key focus area for Kyndryl. In news that absolutely got our attention, Cloudflare claims that migrating from on-prem network hardware to Cloudflare’s cloud-based services can decrease related carbon emissions between 78 and 96%.
Cloudflare Nefeli Acquisition
Earlier this month, Cloudflare acquired multicloud networking startup Nefeli Networks to boost multi-cloud networking.This move is all about allowing customers to “unlock the full potential of the cloud” by mixing and matching the best features of each public cloud provider. With complexity regularly the biggest barrier to organizations’ ability to drive innovation, this combination, which brings simplicity and scalability together for multicloud customers, is attractive. Smart move, Cloudflare.
Dell Gen AI Solutions Collab w/NVIDIA
Moving on to Dell, solutions designed to help enterprises accelerate AI adoption are all the rage, and Dell is always part of that party. Dell’s expansion of the Dell Gen AI Solutions Portfolio in collaboration with support from NVIDIA is big news, and it includes the new Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, also obviously designed to help companies speed up their AI initiatives.
In the AI race that we’re running, easy solutions designed to help companies quickly adopt, integrate, and realize some benefits from AI are becoming the norm and it all starts with high quality, clean data.
Here’s a quick overview of Dell’s end-to-end Generative AI solutions portfolio announcements, which include:
Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA integrates Dell’s compute, storage, client device, software, and services capabilities with NVIDIA’s advanced AI infrastructure and software suite, underpinned by a high-speed networking fabric. This is delivered as a fully integrated solution, and provides testing and validation combined with a high-speed networking fabric, which is intended to help customers quickly transform data into insights they can use. Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA is available globally through traditional channels and Dell APEX now.
Dell will collaborate with NVIDIA to introduce a rack scale, high density, liquid cooled architecture based on the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Superchip, which will support the next gen ecosystem, providing the foundation for improvements in performance density for AI workloads.
Dell Gen AI solutions with NVIDIA – Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) leverages new microservices in NVIDIA AI Enterprise to offer a pre-validated, full-stack solution to speed enterprise AI adoption with RAG. This should help with model quality and results accuracy, wth proprietary business data and knowledge bases. This is globally available now.
Dell Gen AI Solutions with NVIDIA – Model Training. This offers a pre-validated, full stack solution for companies who want to build their own custom, domain specific models. The model training capabilities will be available in April.
Dell Data Lakehouse – is now GA and is an open, modern data lakehouse that helps organizations discover, process, and analyze data in one place across hybrid and multicloud environments.
Dell PowerScale – the world’s first ethernet storage solution validated with NVIDIA’s DGX SuperPOD with DGX H100 systems, which is designed to help customers achieve faster, more efficient AI storage. This is available globally now.
What I like seeing the most here, is Dell’s Professional Services for GenAI, which is expanding with support from NVIDIA AI and infrastructure experts to help customers integrate, manage, and secure these solutions more quickly. Dell Implementation Services now include capabilities to deliver the new RAG solution, model training, and the Dell Data Lakehouse, as well as new Advisory Services for GenAI Security to help customers find, assess, and minimize security risks. Advisory services will be available in select countries starting 3/29.
We’ll close the Dell news by sharing that at last week’s NVIDIA GTC event, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang remarked: “Every company will need to build AI factories,” and … Michael Dell is happy to take your order.” Nodding from the audience, Michael Dell affirmed that he is indeed happy and ready to take those orders.
NVIDIA GTC
The fact that last week’s NVIDIA GTC event was called the “Woodstock of AI” event by analysts and NVIDIA employees shows what a very big deal it was. NVIDIA is the first company to reach a $2 trillion market cap and has zoomed past a whole lot of companies, including Amazon, to become the third-most valuable company in the world. And Jensen Huang and team rarely disappoint. Some key news from GTC that we discussed included:
- NVIDIA unveiled its new AI chip, Blackwell, named after mathematician David Blackwell, btw, the first Black scholar inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.
- The Blackwell computing platform includes the new B200 chip, made up of 208 billion transistors and will be faster and more powerful than its precedessor, the greatly sought after $40K H100 chip named after computer scientist Grace Hopper. While “Hopper is great,” said Huang, “but we need bigger GPUs” and that’s what Blackwell is — a very big GPU. Microsoft, Google’s Alphabet, and Oracle are all prepping to use Blackwell, and Microsoft and Google are two of NVIDIA’s largest customers for its H100 chips.
Huang also shared news of new partnerships with software makers Cadence, Ansys, and Synopsys, and he shared that Cadence is building a supercomputer with NVDIA GPUs. The company’s AI foundry is working with SAP, ServiceNow and Snowflake.
As we discussed earlier, Dell and NVIDIA are partnering, expanding AI offerings to customers which include new enterprise data storage with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure. We also covered news of NVIDIA’s Computing platform Omniverse, which is now streaming to the Apple Vison Pro headset, and talked a bit about NVIDIA’s NVlink and 6G research platform.
For a deeper dive on all things NVIDIA and AI, see my colleague Dave Vellante’s latest Breaking Analysis column: NVIDIA, Broadcom and the expanding breadth of AI momentum.
Nile Introduces Industry First AI Networking Solution with Performance Guarantees
Last week Nile announced a new solution architecture for its Nile Access Service, which include Nile Service Blocks, Nile Services Cloud, and two categories of AI applications: Nile Copilot and Nile Autopilot. Designed to completely automate tasks that have traditionally been manual and “redefining innovation principles for enterprise networks” this brings together cloud native service delivery and integrated security, combined with AI-powered closed-loop automation designed for campus and branch IT infrastructures.
That’s a wrap for this episode of the AnalystANGLE. We’ll be back next week with more coverage and our insights of happenings and news from across the tech ecosystem. As always, thanks for watching, listening, or reading.
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