This year, Dell Technologies held their Annual Tech Forum at Magazine, London. The Annual Tech Forum is always a good opportunity to catch up on the latest technology announcements and insights from Dell. Along with connecting with new people and catching up with familiar faces.

We had the pleasure of hearing from a host of presenters throughout the day. Taking to the stage was Dr Eliza Filby giving her take on the “100-year life”, and Richard Ayoade and Claudia Winkleman discussing how IT has impacted their respective fields and lives, there was something for the die-hard techie and the casual alike.

For me, the main highlight of the Forum was having Dell dive a little deeper into the Dell Automation Platform. A series of curated pre-validated solutions for customers looking to simplify and streamline their deployments at the Edge, in the Cloud, and AI deployments. This has grown from their NativeEdge solution to encompass a wider range of use cases and business needs.

Customers can benefit from choosing their preferred software platforms and services in a pre-validated solution that effectively means deployment is plug and play even for more complex solutions such as Nutanix, VMware, Redhat etc. This pre-validation is done at factory so when the kit arrives on-site it is a case of plugging it onto the network and it will already have all the pre-agreed software and configuration to simply turn on and go.

This process will support customers who are looking to migrate from any existing platform to a range of new ones (such as customers facing the rising costs of VMware).

This automation platform benefits all involved as it helps simplify the software platform deployment element significantly, taking an aspect that would typically take days, or weeks even, once kit is on-site and making it more like hours, saving on engineering costs and deployment costs and reducing complexity.

Through Dell, OEM further software and even bespoke and unique applications that you may have can be preinstalled before shipping, further reducing complexity and time to deployment.