5 Practical Strategies to Modernize Your Midsize IT Infrastructure

  • Dell Technologies
  • Intel®
5 Practical Strategies to Modernize Your Midsize IT Infrastructure

How to Balance Daily Operations with Practical AI, Hardware Security, and Cloud-Smart Control

Modernizing midsize IT infrastructure can feel like trying to fix the engine while the business is still moving.

Legacy systems need attention, cloud decisions carry new cost and control questions, cyber threats keep escalating, and AI is quickly moving from future ambition to near-term business priority.

In this webinar, 5 Practical Strategies to Modernize Your Midsize IT Infrastructure, IT leaders will discover a practical path forward — not another abstract conversation about transformation or modernization.

In this expert-led discussion, Dell Technologies and Intel unpack what modernization really means for midsize organizations today. This includes, but is not limited to: reducing complexity, strengthening resilience, improving efficiency, and building a more flexible foundation for AI, cloud, and whatever comes next.

Rather than advocating for a disruptive rip-and-replace approach, the conversation focuses on smart prioritization, integrated planning, and practical modernization steps that help teams make progress without overwhelming limited IT resources.

The webinar also highlights the value of choosing the right modernization partners, combining local expertise with proven infrastructure capabilities, and avoiding fragmented "Frankenstein IT" environments that can slow teams down. With a practical lens on affordability, reliability, simplicity, and flexibility, the webinar offers a clear starting point for organizations that want to modernize with confidence.

If your team is balancing day-to-day operations with pressure to support AI, improve resilience, control cloud costs, and simplify infrastructure management, this webinar discussion will help you understand what to evaluate first. Importantly, it'll explain and guide you through why the smartest modernization strategies are phased, integrated, and built around real business priorities. Register to watch the webinar and get practical guidance for building an IT foundation ready for today's demands and tomorrow's opportunities.

Here are five strategic themes explored in this webinar:

  1. Start with the workloads that matter most: Learn why modernization should begin with the data and applications that are most critical to the business — and how that focus can help teams prioritize investments, reduce risk, and create faster value.
  2. Shift from cloud-first to cloud-smart: Explore why cloud is better understood as an operating model, not just a location, and how midsize organizations can decide which workloads belong on-premises, in public cloud, or across a hybrid environment.
  3. Use automation to reduce operational drag: Hear how standardized platforms, lifecycle management, and intelligent automation can help IT teams spend less time maintaining aging systems and more time preparing for new business demands.
  4. Build cyber resilience into the foundation: Discover why security can no longer be treated as a bolt-on layer, and get a preview of how organizations can think about trusted infrastructure, immutable protection, isolated recovery, and critical-data prioritization.
  5. Prepare for practical AI without overbuilding: Get a grounded look at how midsize businesses can begin with focused AI use cases — such as support, knowledge access, and customer-facing experiences — without assuming they need massive infrastructure from day one.

Speakers

  1. Jess Steinbach Webinar Moderator Future B2B
  2. Brian Henderson Senior Director, Storage and ISG Group Dell Technologies
Jess Steinbach (00:00): Hello and welcome to Modern Infrastructure for Midsize Organizations: Reducing Complexity, Strengthening Resilience, and Preparing for AI. Our session today is sponsored by Dell Technologies and Intel and produced by IT Pro and Tech Radar Pro. My name is Jess Steinbach and I am delighted to be your moderator. Data centers remain central to business resilience as well as operational continuity and performance, but much of the infrastructure that many organizations like yours rely on today was built for a very different set of demands. Things are evolving rapidly. And as data volumes grow, cyber threats intensify and AI and cloud strategies reshape IT priorities. Mid-size organizations are under pressure to reduce complexity, to improve efficiency and to protect critical data while still creating room for growth. That is a lot to balance and that is what we're here to unpack today. We are going to move beyond theory and explore what modernization actually looks like in a real practical world, how organizations can simplify operations, strengthen cyber resilience, modernize compute and storage, and build a more flexible foundation for AI and cloud strategies. (01:17): Now, rather than a slide heavy presentation, today's session is designed to get more of an interactive conversation focused on the priorities that technology leaders are navigating right now, right in the world that we live in, and practical decisions that can help you move forward with more confidence and more control. A lot to be excited about. We've got a lot to get into today. Let me introduce our wonderful expert presenter here with us. I am very pleased to welcome Brian Henderson, Senior Director, Storage and ISG Group at Dell Technologies. Brian, thank you so much for being here with us today. Brian Henderson (01:53): Thanks for being here. I'm very excited to be joining you from my old house here in Quincy where we're going to talk about IT modernization for mid-sized businesses. Jess Steinbach (02:03): All right, I like this. You're bringing the personality to us, Brian. So besides being in your wonderful character-filled home, what else should we know about you? Brian Henderson (02:13): I've been in this space for a while, from running labs to marketing, to meeting with customers, to talking to our customers about what they can do to transform their IT departments. So this is a topic I'm pretty passionate about and super happy to be with you today, Jess. Jess Steinbach (02:33): I love that, Brian. You are bringing the passion and excitement. We have a ton of questions to get through, lots we want to cover. You ready to dive in? Brian Henderson (02:40): Let's go. Jess Steinbach (02:41): Let's go. Let's go. All right, Brian, let's kick things off. Let's kind of set the stage here. So when you are talking with mid-size organizations and really digging into infrastructure modernization, and as you said, that's one of the wonderful things about what you get to do is having these conversations. So what are you hearing? What are the biggest shifts that you are seeing that are driving urgency right now? Brian Henderson (03:06): Right now, it's a pretty crazy time in IT if you think about it. There's a lot of shifts happening all at once. There's an increasing discussion around cloud and cloud costs. There's a discussion around AI and implementing that the right way and AI costs as part of that as well. They're also trying to… We're looking at cyber resilience and how people stay protected from threats. The number one thread though that we keep seeing across the board is how do we remove complexity? How do we take this complexity out of the equation while increasing control? So the idea of gaining control back keeps coming up. There's also this little factor of flash drive pricing. This has been a new challenge that started really at the beginning of this year that all of our customers are trying to face. So the key thing is that they want to improve their IT department and their infrastructure without complexity and they're looking to partners to help them with that. Jess Steinbach (04:18): Yeah. There's so much changing and evolving and happening all the time and you're trying to balance all of these things at once. So when you're sort of looking at the larger picture facing organizations, you've got everything looking ahead and everything changing around you, plus trying to maintain your day-to-day business, your day-to-day costs, managing risk. This is a lot. And really we're talking today and kind of looking very closely at mid-sized organizations. So pulling back to that lens there, what does data center modernization mean today given all of the complexity that we just talked about in real practical terms? And why do you think, Brian, that this has become such an important priority for these organizations right now? Brian Henderson (05:02): Yeah. Yeah. Good question. I think what they're trying to do is balance that combination of keeping the lights on while preparing for what's next. So if you look at what's taking maybe 80% of their time, it is maintaining older infrastructure. Some of the systems are outdated. They might be slow. They might be introducing security risks. It might be a lot harder to support than if they were to modernize a couple of these things. At the same time, the cloud is an increasing conversation, especially with the midsize business where they're looking to move things very quickly. And sometimes cloud is seen as the answer to that, but there might be some spend issues. There might be some complexity issues. There might be some security issues with that. So it's not just about replacing the old stuff. It's trying to find an integrated strategy across your compute, your storage, your networking, and your data protection in order to simplify things and just build that infrastructure that's going to be more efficient for what's there today and also set them up for what's going to be coming next. Jess Steinbach (06:22): I really love the words integrated modernization. I think that's so important, Brian, that's really sticking with me. And I think partially because I mean, wouldn't it be nice if modernization was just like press button for modernization if it was on tick box? But we know that that's not true. We know that this is complex and you've kind of walked us through that. So it is important to consider that more as an ongoing and iterative program. So I'm wondering maybe if you could give us some ideas, some clarity here. When organizations are evaluating their next steps, they're looking beyond that tick mark, maybe they're feeling a little overwhelmed. There's a lot to consider all at once. So what would you suggest that they prioritize first if they want to hit that immediate value without losing sight of the longer term goals and that longer term flexibility? Brian Henderson (07:13): That's a great question. I like the word you used. It's prioritize. So what they need to do is take a look at their infrastructure and prioritize what is the most critical workload to their business. Now, if we're talking about a company, there tends to be different opinions of that. So your sales team is going to say, oh, it's the CRM system. Your finance team's going to say, oh, it's the accounting stuff. But if you're, let's say an engineering organization, it's probably the data that holds your IP, the critical things that hold your company's crown jewels. So the team needs to get together. This is the not so easy part to figure out what is the critical components of your infrastructure that you can look at first. And we always recommend starting with where the most valuable data sits to that company, starting with that and how can I take things either away from it or how can I add to it in order to increase efficiency, improve cyber resiliency, or maybe just save cost? (08:26): So those are kind of some of the areas I look at. And when it comes to Dell and Intel working together, we always look for simple, affordable, reliable solutions. So start with the priority, the critical workloads, start with them, and then you're starting to build towards this integrated infrastructure where everything can be a lot simpler. Jess Steinbach (08:50): I love the simplicity of it. We've talked a lot about the complexity and then what you're sort of offering are options forward where we can simplify all of these many things that teams are trying to juggle all at once, again, while also managing their day-to-day workloads. So I'm thinking, because again, we're pulling back to mid-sized organizations. And one of the things that we've talked about is prioritization, but we're also talking about teams that might be a little bit smaller. So efficiency is really important. And that really comes back around a strategy. You said looking ahead, think about what you need. Look specifically at your organization and what is important to your organization. And that is that strategic layer. So if we're looking at the mid-sized organizations joining us here watching this today and specifically looking about cloud in the context of a modern data center, what does it actually look like to think, I love the word strategy, what does that actually entail while still maintaining your control over your data, your operations, and of course, all importantly, cost? Brian Henderson (09:51): That's a very good question. I think what happened, especially around the time of COVID is everybody had difficulty getting into the office. Things were shut down. Let me open up some cloud services. Let me do this because my people maybe can't get into the data center. So they went with the strategy, which sounds really good, cloud first. So everyone went all in cloud first. Why should this application not be able to be run from the cloud? Now, Dell and Intel's perspective is cloud is not really a location. It's an operating model. And to us, what that means is services should be able to be spun up quickly. The data should be protected at all costs. So people, I think, equate cloud with public cloud. And where we see that going is people are looking now at a cloud smart strategy where they're saying, "Hey, where does it make sense actually to run this workload?" Because we're seeing some of these critical workloads, especially AI. (11:00): That's a huge one where there's a lot of data being processed and generated and consumed. And if you're trying to use a public cloud model to run against your on - prem dataset, you're putting a lot of data through a very small pipe and it just doesn't make sense to do that through a very small network connection. So what we're seeing is a lot of people coming back and saying, "All right, look, I think on - prem should be my control point and I want to be able to push certain workloads that make sense. If I'm starting up a new application, we see this all the time with smaller IT companies and small startups. It probably makes sense for them to start with a very small cloud deployment to see, all right, let me test this out. Let me prove it. Let me see if it can run." Once you start to get serious about running that though, your costs are going to add up quickly. (12:01): So you want to probably bring that on - prem and leverage the cloud where it makes sense. So I think that's how we think about it. It's cloud smart, not cloud first. And cloud's not a place, it's an operating model. And together with Intel, we can provide that same cloud experience in an on - prem setting. Jess Steinbach (12:23): Those are really cool distinctions. Really important reminders. I like that approach a lot. And I think what you're describing seems like it's a way that you can get the flexibility that a lot of organizations are looking for. You're not introducing a lot of unnecessary operational sprawl. You're sort of tailoring to what you need and then allowing for those needs to grow or to change. You hit on, you said the magic word, you said AI, and we got to talk about automation, right? That's important. We got to talk about AI. We're going to keep getting into this, but I want to start with sort of automation and in particular automation and lifecycle management. And I'm wondering if you could help us understand how that fits into the conversation. How can they help simplify the day-to-day operations? And of course, and especially important to these size organizations, how can we reduce the burden on IT teams? Brian Henderson (13:19): That sounds good. So yeah, automation is more important these days because especially in a mid-sized organization, there's not a huge number of specialists. So what people are looking for is simple ways to get things done across the board. We want to reduce some of that manual work. We talked about 80% of an IT's time is typically spent keeping the lights on versus improving and getting ready for the future and modernizing. We want to help them shift that balance and automation is really the key to do that. So if you have standardized platforms, if you have software that can intelligently detect workloads, load balance things, take some of that monotonous work off the plate of the IT staff, they're actually going to appreciate that. It's seen as a way to get them out of the day-to-day manual stuff and get them more towards planning and future growth and new workloads like AI. (14:25): So together with Intel, we help them build that kind of foundation. So we're really building the infrastructure on the Dell side and then Intel with its performance and efficiency capabilities. It's really a great combination for people looking to simplify and automate a lot more. Jess Steinbach (14:44): Boy, in change management, we talk a lot about the importance of having change ambassadors. And if you're rolling out a modernization program, being able to look somebody in the eye and say, we can take away 80%, we can take away a huge chunk of these mundane repetitive tasks they're working on and allow you to think with that future lens. I can only imagine that that would really, really set you up for those ambassadors very quickly. That's going to get people very excited. Brian Henderson (15:11): There's so many tools that we have to do this. There's software from SaaS-based tools, things that are in the server, but more and more what we're seeing is they want that in one place. And that's really what we're trying to do is get that unified integrated experience. Jess Steinbach (15:28): And that's also going to allow more time for that sort of protective element, that security element, which we've talked about and kind of brushed against a few times because as we know, one of the important things when we're building that future point, when we're looking forward is to be aware of security. And with all this complexity and pressure to move quickly, which I know we're all facing right now, it is very hard to balance the need for security against the need to move quickly and to meet those forward-looking goals. So I'm wondering if I could ask you to dig into that a little bit for us, Brian, and explore what does that actually mean to build security into the core of infrastructure rather than as I think we sometimes do, we build our whole wonderful infrastructure project and then we just sort of bolt it on a little bit on the outside. (16:19): So how should organizations watching this here today, how should they be thinking about cyber resilience as part of that modernization journey? Brian Henderson (16:28): Yeah, very good question. I think we're in a situation now where people are moving from what we used to call a perimeter defense where you'd set up firewalls, you'd have antivirus, you have some security checks, you have things that are kind of looking out for these things to go wrong to more of a cyber resilience stance, which basically says if you look at some of the stats, it's kind of depressing how many people are getting attacked out there. So the question is it's probably not if you're going to get attacked, it's when you're going to get attacked. And are you ready for when that happens? And the way Dell thinks about this it's not just a product, it's a strategy. So we have to make sure that security is built into every single thing we do down to the server that's coming out of the factory. (17:31): The bios that runs on that server must be verified down to the code level. So before the server even boots up, we've got this thing called a hardware route of trust, which verifies down to the bit level before the server even runs the application, whether or not that's a legitimate full bios from the original manufacturer to make sure things are up and running. So it starts at a very low level, which is a pretty unique thing in the industry. Then it moves up to integrated security within the server itself. Then it goes up to networking stacks that we have. Then it goes into the storage. Every component has that security built in. Now the way we're thinking about that for our customers is I would take a look at how they're assembling that because it's that same priority discussion. What is the most critical data that you have to think about? (18:33): How do I protect that and go from there so we can get further into that? Jess Steinbach (18:40): Yeah, it's so important. And I think coming back to where you started with us, Brian, we were talking a lot about strategy and prioritization. So there's really a need for that planning phase to come in through here, which I was asking you about change management earlier and approaching possibly with having ambassadors. I think for some folks out there, when we think about rolling out a big change like this, there's the desire to just rip the bandaid, just going to do this all in one transformation, boom. And maybe there's an argument for that. I think there's other people that are really looking at it in the slow rollout and I can see pros and cons to each. You are right in the thick of this. You talk to people every day. How would you advise organizations to balance? Maybe those are kind of extreme ends of the spectrum that do it all at once and do it as a very slow rollout. (19:31): Is there a better, best practice, smarter, modular pathway that could allow organizations to balance that resiliency and also reduce risk, but not necessarily forcing their organization into this immediate rip and replace? Brian Henderson (19:47): Yeah, it's the same idea. It's the fact that it shouldn't be a rip and replace. I (19:55): Talk to a lot of customers, a lot of different partners, and for the most part, people are doing many of the right things. What we recommend people looking at is a phased strategy similar to how we talked about treating their data where they're looking at the most critical elements first. What are those things that if we were to lose access to that data, we would be in trouble as a company? Then you can start to think about, all right, how do I want to protect that? Maybe there's immutable snapshots, maybe there's immutable backups where people cannot actually do anything related to hauling those things. Even at the API level, we actually shut down code level access to those data types. So there's ways to shut that off completely. The other thing is when you go up the stack, maybe they want a completely isolated environment. (20:55): So the fact that there could be a potential attack or a ransomware threat and what they do there is they go in and they get access from the inside. They'll take your backups, they'll encrypt them and they'll say, "Hey, for a fee, you can get your data back." Now if you're able to completely encrypt that off the network and get a complete gold copy of your most critical data, that's a way to say you're not getting my money because I have a copy and we can recover from that. So I think that's a critical thing to look at for companies' most important data. You don't need to air gap or create a vault for every single element of data within your company, but for those critical elements, we believe it's very important to do that. But when you're building that infrastructure foundation that we talked about from before, that should address the same thing. (21:54): It should be simple, affordable, and reliable to make sure that the cyber strategy is built into that foundation and it's just part of what you do. It shouldn't be a separate bolt-on. It should be all part of that same strategy. Jess Steinbach (22:10): Yeah, you can really end up with a Frankenstein aproach if you're just kind of sticking it. And that goes to what you said earlier about the perimeter. It doesn't work if you're just sticking things on the outside. You have to have that integrated all the way through. Brian Henderson (22:22): 100%. Jess Steinbach (22:24): Okay. I mentioned AI earlier. I said I wanted to come back to it. I feel like again, if we have a conversation and we don't repeatedly talk about AI, are we even talking anymore? So I want to bring us back to AI because I think this is an important part of what mid-sized organizations, really any organization is facing right now. But in particular with mid-size organizations, obviously there's a lot of hype around AI. And I think for teams out there, they want to take action. They want to be able to take advantage of these wonderful innovative opportunities in front of us, but they also want to make sure that they are ready for that, that they have the resources, that they have the strategic approach, that they understand what the outcomes are so that they're not just running forward based on buzzwords. And so I'm wondering if we could approach, again, looking at those best practices. (23:15): In your opinion, from what you've seen, what does it actually mean to prepare a data center for AI in a practical and also business relevant way? Brian Henderson (23:28): It's a great question. It comes up obviously a lot. AI is front and center to what a lot of people are thinking about and how it applies to them. And I think if people went to Dell Technologies world this year, there was a lot of AI discussion and a lot of heavy metal on stage, big, big machines. The one thing I want to say for this audience is it does not have to be crazy expensive. It can come in all sizes and shapes and costs. So I would recommend people looking at something that works for them. So when people are thinking about AI, the most useful thing I'd say for a medium-sized business is to look at the data that they have today that is currently, let's say, not being activated. Let's say you've got a knowledge base. Let's say you have something that describes how to install your products or some type of thing that's going to be beneficial to your end user customers. (24:33): Do they have access to that in a way that simplifies the experience for that customer? And most of what a mid-size business is going to do is not large scale training of data sets. So all of these big, big enterprise frontier models, the OpenAI and Cloud and all these, they've done all this training and there's a significant number of open source models that have also done all of the heavy lifting on training. And what these companies need to do is set up an inferencing environment. And in order to do that, you don't need a very huge server to do that. You need something that is much smaller. We have many different types. We have from workstations all the way up, a lot of them powered by Intel CPU processors to be super fast. And what we're trying to make sure is that people aren't overbuilding. (25:35): They want to be able to run the model. We have a great partnership I like to talk about with Hugging Face. And it's a company that puts out these, it's almost like a platform for different models so that you can pull down the model that you want, test it out, run it on your server. I think we've qualified over 40 or 50 of these by now. And people can train these models against their own data and be up and running with a chatbot or something like that very quickly. So people don't have to overbuild. They don't have to fall into, I need 20,000 GPUs type of thing. You don't need a lot of heavy duty hardware to get started. And I would start small with a small use case chatbots against your company's most critical data that people commonly ask about. Support is another common area that we see people starting. (26:38): So start small, keep it simple and don't overbuild because you could run out of cost pretty quick. Jess Steinbach (26:47): It's really easy to get excited and just start going crazy and building all the bells and whistles. So I get it. But Brian, you've kind of given us three main core themes in our conversation today. We've talked about AI, we've talked about cloud strategy, we've talked about cyber resilience. We have these three things. Now, as we start to weave these three things together, this is where we really get into the strategy. This is where we're really going to see things take off. So I'm wondering if you could give that through line to the folks watching this today. How do these three elements work together to create real genuine business value rather than, and we've talked about this a few times today, just taking each one on its own, each one separately and reevaluating that integrated aproach rather than individual pieces. Brian Henderson (27:41): Yeah. Great question. The way we talk to our customers about this is they're really trying to do three things and they're trying to do it all at once. Number one is they want to run the business better and that's by designing a better private cloud experience. So the private cloud addresses what's happening in the hypervisor space, people reevaluating what they want to do with VMware versus Red Hat versus Nutanix versus Microsoft. So that's like step one. They're looking at that area. Step two is they look at AI and they say, "This is where I can transform my business. This is where I can start to make value. My company can move faster. We can respond to things faster. And then step three is how do I protect the business?" Now all of this is put together with end-to-end unified control. So it's all being put under the same umbrella. (28:41): So these parts are not separate. They're all part of the same strategy. And if you're designing the same strategy at the same time, that means you're going to be more unified. People can move faster. They can be more agile. If they want to shift to a different hypervisor, they can do it. They want to change their AI model that they've chosen to run their chatbot against. They can do it. And with our data protection products, they can also change the backup software. So if they want to leverage the hardware we've got, which is known for its great de - dupe, you can still change the backup software. So we give them a stack that's very open and flexible. So that's why we kind of put ourselves in the camp of a consideration here.But we think that a good infrastructure strategy should be unified and again, simple, affordable, and reliable. Jess Steinbach (29:43): Very important things. And I think you're kind of bringing us around really neatly to where I'd like to get into next is partners. I think you've set a great example and argument for approaching with strategy and taking the time to make those plans. And Rather than just kind of running forward and then dealing with things as you go. One of the really important steps that I would assume is part of that early phase, that planning phase is choosing a trusted partner, really joining in with somebody that you know you can trust that's going to help you move from where you are today to where you're looking to go to get to those big, bright, shiny goals in the future. So a lot of organizations, I'm sure some of the people watching here right now are feeling a little that maybe that's a little intimidating, Brian. (30:31): There's a lot of partners out there. So how should organizations be looking at this modernization partner journey, especially when they are trying to balance the immediate operational needs that we've talked about with that long-term planning, that long-term strategy and readiness? Brian Henderson (30:49): That's a great question. I think what a mid-sized business especially is looking to do is reduce the complexity and keep it simple and rely upon people they trust, like you said. I think the partners to me come in two camps. One is that we find the midsize businesses tend to leverage reseller relationships. So they may have partners that sell to them that are as trusted if not more trusted than their own IT staff because they know their specific business very, very well and they can customize things. They can give them support, services, solutions for their very specific situation. The second partner is really on the vendor side. And that's where Dell Technologies and Intel kind of come in. We've got the right infrastructure, we believe, to be able to simplify things across the board, whether it be storage, compute, networking, private cloud software, AI data platform. (32:00): We have all this great software plus the services and support in order to back that up. But I do recommend if you have a local technology partner near you, we find that they work with us extremely well. And so you get kind of a nice one two punch. You get the reseller that's local to you that can understand your business very, very detailed. And Dell's always going to be there to support them and to support the customer directly. Jess Steinbach (32:32): I think you've made a really good argument for how you're supporting other organizations. I also think I've heard you make a lot of reference today to the wonderful partnership between Dell and Intel. And clearly there is a real better together story. You were just kind of brushing against us, but I'm going to ask you to dig in a little bit more, Brian. Give us some specifics. How are Dell technologies and Intel working together to help organizations modernize with confidence and joy? Brian Henderson (33:00): Yeah. I go back to the three things that stand out for me that kind of anchor the Dell and Intel relationship. It's to keep things simple, affordable, and reliable. So we make sure that the technology is simple to deploy and manage. You've got all the automation lifecycle management to keep all the software and the servers and the storage updated without having to think that much about it. It's just going to happen in the background. Affordable means you've got the performance and efficiency while you're maintaining that high level of reliability. So we've done a number of great things with Intel from the QAT onboarding that helps us do de - dupe and compression on some of our storage devices. We have chips inside the Power Edge server that do some amazing things with the latesty on processors. We also have Intel inside of our PowerProtect cyber resilience devices, whether people are looking to do better integrated backups with that or create a CyberVault environment. (34:11): So it's really our infrastructure powered by Intel's processing power, which gives people the benefit of this integrated solution. Jess Steinbach (34:22): Brian, I love that. And as you said at the start, you're bringing a lot of passion. I can feel that from you as we've gone through this entire conversation. I wish we could keep going because I know there's lots more to cover, but I'm going to start to bring us to a little bit of a close here. And I'm thinking about sort of everything that we've covered as we've gone through this conversation. We've talked about why modernization has become a priority for mid-size organizations, why we're seeing that kind of come to the forefront for a lot of teams. Then we got into the how a modern data center can help simplify operations. And you gave us some great examples of where that can play in terms of strengthening our cyber resilience as well as modernizing compute and storage. And really, I think for me, what brought that home was allowing for flexibility, especially for mid-size organizations, that flexibility is so key in order to get to their goals and what they're trying to do as an organization. (35:15): What I'm wondering, that's a lot that we've covered, Brian, you fed a lot into a short period of time. And I'm thinking about this wonderful story that we've sort of put together of reducing the complexity, creating those reliable solutions, affordable solutions and wondering if you have sort of one takeaway, if there's one thing that's jumping out at you that you think you would like everyone here watching this today to walk away either knowing, understanding, or looking into as they leave the conversation. Brian Henderson (35:48): Yeah, that's a great question. I think it should be done in a practical way. So when we modernize, it should be done practical. We talked about prioritizing quite a bit. Look at those critical workloads. Look at where you can save the most costs, where you can increase resilience, where you can add efficiency, where you can balance out that spend across cloud and on - prem. And we think we're coming from a great spot at Dell working with Intel to give you that practical foundation. And we think the way things are kind of stacking up, everything works together. There's no need to go to different companies and kind of get this patchwork as you called the Frankenstein IT environment. A lot of these companies don't even like each other and they're trying to patch together these solutions and it ends up in a finger pointing exercise. We think Dell and Intel together provides a great foundation for what's next and for what's today. Jess Steinbach (36:58): All right. Well, great points, Brian. Some great thoughts to end on. Speaking of taking away though, I think there's a real argument for how fast things are changing. We need to stay in touch with education opportunities, learning all the time. It's a never-ending process for us. So if somebody's watching this right now and thinking, "I love this, I want to learn more," what do you suggest as a great way to keep this conversation going to learn more as they're thinking about everything that we've talked about today? Brian Henderson (37:27): Yeah, sure. I think I would mention three things. Number one is check out dell.com. Everything we do is up there. We try to keep that super updated. Number two, we have a series of sessions that are going on across the world from our Dell Tech forums to our Dell Tech Symposium so people can receive information in a live local setting that they're a lot of fun. And step three is kind of doubling back on the website. We try to make sure hands-on capabilities are brought to life through the website. So there's a variety of hands-on labs, demos, simulations for people to experience the technology without having to install it. So those are the three things I'd recommend. I Jess Steinbach (38:17): Think that's perfect. I love a good hands-on demo. That opportunity to get into the sandbox and play is so important. But I also really love these conversations, Brandon. I think you've really brought a lot of things to life for us today. So I want to thank you for that. Thank you for your insight. This has been a real pleasure. Brian Henderson (38:34): Same here. Thank you, Jess. Jess Steinbach (38:36): Lots of incredible insights, great takeaways from our conversation today. A big thank you to Brian for such a thoughtful and practical conversation. Of course, thank you to Dell Technologies and Intel for making this whole discussion possible. And I also want to take a moment to thank all of you for taking time out of your very busy days to watch this conversation, to join in the discussion today. I hope that you're walking away feeling maybe a little bit clearer. You have a better view of what data center modernization can look like in practice and how a modern infrastructure foundation can help you reduce complexity, strengthen resilience, and prepare for what's coming next. Go hit all of those bright, shiny goals ahead of you. Very excited to see what you all do from here. I hope we get to chat again soon. And until then, have an absolutely wonderful end to your day.

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