WATCH LIVE: Dell Technologies Forum 2026 - Bengaluru

Good morning. Namaskar. And a very warm welcome to Dell Technologies Forum 2026. How about a big round of applause? I am Mandirai and it's wonderful to be back with all of you here in the beautiful city of Bengaluru and to have so many more joining us virtually from across the country. We are delighted to have you all with us for what promises to be a very exciting day ahead.

What a moment it is to come together because across India today technology is moving at an extraordinary pace changing how we live how we work and increasingly what we believe we can achieve. We've transformed the way a nation pays through UPI. We're taking major strides in semiconductor manufacturing with commercial production of made in India memory modules now underway and a new generation of Indian space companies is pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve. Different industries, different breakthroughs but one unmistakable story. India is not waiting for what's next. We are building it.

And that brings us straight to the theme of this year's Dell Technologies Forum. Turning possibility into progress. Because possibility is where every idea begins. Progress is what happens when we put it to work. When ideas become action. When innovation moves beyond experimentation. And when technology starts creating outcomes that matter. And today as AI reshapes how we work, how businesses operate, and how decisions are made. That journey from possibility to progress has never felt more relevant.

That is what brings us together today. Leaders, customers, partners, and innovators exchanging perspectives, exploring what's next, and looking at how technology can translate ambition into action. So today, look forward to fresh perspectives, innovation in action, and conversations across AI, infrastructure, data, security, and of course, the modern workplace.

Before we begin, I would like to recognize the partners who've helped bring Dell Technologies Forum 2026 to life. Global sponsors AMD, Intel, Microsoft and Nvidia. Gold sponsors Acera, Ingram, Micro, Readington, RPC, Tech Data, and Silicon Cloud. Silver sponsors, Inflow Technologies, Iris Global, and Progress Software. How about a big round of applause for our sponsors? A big thank you to all our sponsors for their continued partnership and support.

Wow, this is a full house. So, Bengaluru, are we ready for Dell Technologies Forum 2026? Make some noise. Yes. Love the spirit. On that note, please welcome with a round of applause Manish Gupta, president and managing director, Dell Technologies India for the host keynote.

Good morning and a very very warm welcome to Dell Technologies Forum 2026 Bangalore edition. It's such a pleasure to be with all of you here today. Looking around, I see customers, I see partners, I see industry partners, ecosystem and colleagues. All of who have come together to shape the industry, but equally and more importantly shape the nation and the ambitions that we have for the nation today. That makes it exactly the right room for today's conversation. How to move faster, how to work smarter, and how to scale with confidence.

As I look at this the screen behind me, these are not just logos. These are conversations. These are outcomes. And all of this has changed materially over the last one year in particular. Our ambitions are growing. We've got a clear road map. We have got a clear path. And what we all want to do is transform our organizations, but equally and more importantly disrupt the industries that we are a part of. None of these are just conversations about platforms and products. It starts much early. It really starts with us getting to a discussion about understanding your business. What is it that truly matters to you as outcomes? What is it that truly matters to you in the journey that you are on of modernizing and digitizing your organizations?

And AI is becoming front and center of it. It would be remiss on my part to say if we are not discussing AI in the first five minutes of any conversation, we are possibly sitting in a wrong room. With that, we are very very comfortable, very confident. And what we have been able to achieve together with you is building the next era of intelligence right here in the country across Asia Pacific and across the globe.

The pace of change has never been higher than it's today. By the way, when I say this, make no mistake. 12 months back in exactly a same room with a lot of you here, I said exactly the same thing. It has accelerated dramatically. AI has moved from being an assistant to being an operator. It takes decisions and where it cannot, it is escalating. The shift is very very visible in India as well. 87% of Indian enterprises are saying that they're already either in the process of adopting AI or they have already adopted AI.

The economics of AI have shifted significantly. You know, one of the things, one of the jargon that you will hear more and more about is really tokconomics. The consumption of tokens has gone up 10fold. Last I remember I saw the data was 100 trillion plus tokens consumed just in the year 2025. But as that consumption goes up the cost of tokens and models is declining significantly about 80% decline in the cost of tokens just over the last one year. The workloads have shifted they are changing. I remember a couple of years back when we were having this discussion and I was being told that listen we are going to have inferencing being 80% of workload and training and fine-tuning just 20. It was difficult to believe because we were seeing more and more of training. But the world is shifting and 60% of the workload is really about inferencing because that's what brings real value to the enterprise, to all of us as consumers and to the world at large.

Infrastructure demands are increasing significantly. Power and consumption, power consumption is not just about an infrastructure decision. It's a boardroom conversation. Just to put things in perspective, the data center capacity is expected to grow fivefold in the next five years. AI data centers are expected to add 26.3 gigawatt of electricity demand by fiscal year 32 and 37 gigaw till FY37. Now these are the latest projections. Make no mistake, they have doubled just in the last 6 months. So the patterns of consumption are changing. What we need to make data centers and AI a reality is changing and we know this is particularly real for all of us here in Bangalore which houses one-third or the third largest data center hub for us in the nation and continue to grow.

Cyber risk is exploding. We've got to remember that the surface attack area has increased exponentially just because of the proliferation of AI devices and how the data is moving across various across getting the outcomes on AI. 94% of the ransomware attacks today are on your backups. Just look at the number of things we have just spoken about. All of this was enough to happen in one year or in a couple of years. But now it's coming fast and furious together to us at the same time. The pace of change itself has changed and that's pushing the IT leaders to define where to plan, where to invest and how to move forward.

So let me share a couple of numbers, you know, just to underscore everything that we have been talking about. We just did a modern enterprise readiness study 3,500 organizations across 35 countries. But make no mistake, it is extremely valid for India because we had our customers, our organizations represented there as well. So everything that you hear from me now is a representation of what we are seeing in India across the globe as well as across Asia Pacific. The first number and let me just make it easier for everyone to memorize 76424896. That's all that you've got to remember. So to begin with 76% is the first number. 76% of the customers are saying that the silos across AI, across workplace and data modernization are impacting their ability to operate effectively. What does that mean? We continue to run these as parallel projects, not something that comes together as a connected strategy built on a common thread.

Very recently I was talking to a CIO of a very large global capability center based right here in Bangalore and they have three different tracks of projects running. There is an AI modernization, there's a data center modernization and a workplace. Three different tracks, three budgets, three teams, no connected strategy. Sound familiar? That's the world that we living in. All of the IT leaders today need to take a decision fast so that they can move forward. The second number like I said 76 done. Let's come to photo two. 42% of the customers are startled with the pace of disruption. No surprise. We just spoke about a couple of those things right now. The urgency is clear. Execution is what is a challenge and we need to overcome that challenge faster than ever before. The third is 48. Nearly half of the customers agree that there's a lack of road map between AI, between data and security. Remember data is a fuel. We spoke about the security attack surface increasing. Unless we are able to bring this all together, we are not going to able to innovate fast enough. The execution imperative is now on us.

The nation has laid out its ambition very clearly through the AI mission. We have already put in the last two years grown from 10,000 GPUs to a national infrastructure of 45,000 GPUs available to research to academia to startups to enterprises of all sizes. The onus is on us as enterprises to move forward and make that ambition a reality. The last one is 96% pretty much all of the decision makers agree that security and cyber resilience are critical risk that they are running with and they want it to be structured as a part of any infrastructure conversation built in not bolted on. Two data points just to remember. World Economic Forum is saying that India's biggest risk in 2026 is going to be cyber security. The second and certain came out with this report just about a month back. Across two sectors, healthcare and BFSI, there were 9.72 incidents, cyber incidents that happened over 18 months. To put that in perspective, across those two sectors, 1,700 cyber incidents every single day. Cyber resilience is no more a differentiator. It's basic hygiene. It is what a modern enterprise needs to be built on. So be very clear on the priorities that we are set up with.

Recognition of what's happening around us and what we need to do. Agency to act. Clarity of thought of purpose and getting all of this done via trusted partners who can bring the pieces connected all together. That is the mandate that we have today. Our endeavor is to make it bring a clear point of view, give you real examples, make it practical. And that's what we are saying is the theme of today's Dell Technologies Forum built for what's next. Organizations that are going to succeed in this world are not just the ones that are going to move fast. They are the ones who will have clarity of purpose, who will get their data right, who will know which right models to run and have the right infrastructure. That's what we are going to do and that is how possibility turns into progress and that's what we're going to walk you through today. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the trust that you repose in us and thank you for your partnership. Make no mistake, together we are going to create magic and change the world as it's going to look tomorrow for our organizations, for our industries, and for our nation. With that, let's begin with a few words from our chairman and CEO, Michael Dell.

How about a big round of applause ladies and gentlemen. Thank you Manish for setting the tone for the day and a special thank you to Michael Dell for sharing his perspective. Now we've heard the India story. We now turn to the global picture where the opportunity is not just in what technology can do but in how it all comes together to turn possibility into progress. Please join me in welcoming Jerry Tunnel, Chief Marketing Officer, Dell Technologies for our global keynote.

Hello. Well, good morning. Well, it is great to be back in India. I love coming here. The pace of development is absolutely incredible. Well, we just saw Michael lay out the opportunity. Intelligence is becoming infrastructure. Your data is your differentiator and the architecture will be hybrid. Manish framed the challenge which mirrors a lot what I hear from customers. They recognize the opportunity and the urgency yet they still want clarity and trust. Clarity because they want a practical roadmap across data AI and governance and trust because customers need to know that it's being handled responsibly. The question for us all is not whether to adopt AI. It's how quickly can we turn it into results. That shift is the defining moment. And we've seen this at Dell. We narrowed hundreds of AI ideas into four areas of impact. Supply chain, go to market, so sales and marketing, engineering and customer service. Every investment had to drive a return. That return was sometimes financial, so revenue, units, margin, experiential, making a customer's experience better, or how to reduce risk.

Now, the pressure on these returns were coming from every direction. Agentic AI is moving from assistance to action. Tokconomics is reshaping how leaders and we all think about investment and cyber risk is rising across every area. Now this is especially relevant in India where GCC's, regulated industries and digital services move from an experimentation to AI in everyday operations. All of this creates a significant shift. It's a fundamental rethinking of work versus jobs and the important distinction between them. Generative AI largely helped people do their work differently. With agentic AI, we're beginning to digitize parts of the work itself, and that has important implications for the technology underneath it.

In our experience, it comes down to five connected imperatives. The first, an AI ready data foundation because AI cannot run well on fragmented data. A distributed infrastructure because AI needs to run across device, data center, cloud. Security built in right from the start because autonomous systems expand the attack surface. Integration across the stack because seamless results matter. And you need to be deliberate where those workloads run because that's the biggest lever for cost, performance, and control. Now, those imperatives, they aren't separate projects. They're really one connected challenge. And organizations need a partner who connects the entire picture. That's what we mean when we say built for what's next. Not simply adding more technology but building how the business runs.

Now today we're going to look at this through three different priorities. The first modernizing the data center ensuring the data is accurate, accessible and protected. Two, modernizing the workplace because intelligence needs to reach the places where work happens. Scaling AI because you want to move from those pilots to overall outcomes. Together, those three areas create the foundation. And that foundation is one of the biggest gaps we see today. 67% of organizations say their infrastructure is not ready for AI workloads. The ambition is there, but that fragmentation shows up everywhere. The protections uneven. The performance isn't where it needs to be. Now, analysts also agree. They said data readiness is the number one challenge in AI implementations. And that's the job of the modern data center to create a foundation that supports the next wave of workloads. And that has to do several things well. Run fast enough for training and inference at scale. Stay secure and resilient as cyber threats accelerate. And be flexible across the desk side, data center, and the cloud. Because all of that is where AI runs.

Customers, they're telling us the same thing. 95% say integrated data protection and cyber recovery are key criteria for their storage and their server platforms. 46% rank cyber security and resilience as their number one priority when they modernize their data center. Those requirements are clear and that's exactly what Dell is building. With that, I'd like to welcome a friend to the stage who's going to help us look at how Dell is translating those into results. Please welcome Chris Kelly.

Thank you, Jerry. And listen, good morning to everyone in the room. What an amazing turnout. And to everyone online, thank you for joining us and thank you for your support. I think, Jerry, you really shared some some true pearls of wisdom in that session so far. And what really jumps out to me is the fact that yes, this is an opportunity like never before. But in some ways, it's actually a double-edged sword. And so what do I mean by that? Sure, the potential is truly immense. But the path, it's not always clear or simple or secure. The fact is that AI has literally changed the cyber threat landscape. Bad actors can exploit weaknesses faster than ever before. Recovery speed, it's no longer an IT metric. It is quite literally a business imperative. The question is how quickly can you restore confidence, continuity and customer operations and that that is why we built Power Protect 1.

We wanted to bring together management, recovery, and immutable backup storage together in a more simplified and unified way. We wanted to enable customers to keep the tools they trust, to cut operational overhead, and critically to recover faster when it matters most. Plus, we've added Dell managed detection and response for a stronger defense and recovery posture. When you pull that together, that is what I call cyber resilience built for the real world. But we said it before, cyber resilience is just one part of this foundation. We also need a storage platform with the performance, the efficiency and the flexibility to meet the demands of these workloads. And that is why Power Store Elite with this introduction, we provide something that is much more than an incremental upgrade. We're talking about a modern data platform with greater performance, greater efficiency, and something that requires far less manual effort. We focused on the proof points that matter most to you, our customers and partners. Industry best 6:1 data reduction guaranteed and built-in AI that reduces manual manual workload by up to 95%.

Now power store elite is also the foundation for the Dell private cloud. Now, this is a platform that has truly been built to just keep getting better over time rather than forcing our customers to go through a disruptive reset in a few years down the track. And with Dell services, we provide life cycle extension, Dell Pro deploy, pro support, all of this designed to help you, our customers, get into production faster with less complexity. Now, it looks good on PowerPoint and it sounds good when I present it here, but what about in the real world? Let's look at a customer who's putting this into action right now. It's awesome to be able to talk about Omega Healthcare, a homegrown Indian company that supports leading US hospitals and healthcare providers through very complex healthcare workloads that run 24/7 with literally zero time for disruption. With Dell, Omega was able to build a standardized, resilient data platform that provides reliability and importantly independent scaling of compute and storage resources that was enabling them to strengthen their global continuity. The result they have the confidence to keep essential health care workflows running so that patients and the providers are continuously supported.

Now I mentioned it earlier there are many pieces to this puzzle and storage is one of them. But when we talk about the power behind an AI ready foundation, we need compute. And that is where Power Edge comes in. At the compute layer, Power Edge is quite literally the engine of the AI factory. Our latest generation, which just so happens to be the broadest refresh in Power Edge history, is purpose-built from the ground up for AI. We give you the choice of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel silicon. We give you the choice of air cooled to liquid cooled all the way up to power rack, our largest AI building block. The idea here is to let our customers match the right compute to every workload from databases to the large scale training and inferencing models that are out there today. And the performance the performance behind this is incredibly important. From generation to generation, we've seen 70% more performance introduced with our latest offering. We've seen consolidation from 13 down to one. And those are good stats. But what does it actually mean in reality? What that means is there is more AI capacity, more compute capacity in that same footprint. And by the way, all built on a quantum resilient security foundation designed for the threats that you see today. and more importantly for what's coming tomorrow.

We believe that that is what a modern data center looks like in practice. Not a simple refresh from yesterday's architecture, but a foundation built for intelligence and ready for what comes next. We believe I believe that if you get that foundation right, you are in a much stronger position to extend intelligence across your entire business. Now, as much as I love the data center, I have to admit that we know now transformation does not stop in the data center. It has to extend to the people, the devices and the environments where that work actually happens day-to-day. So I want to shift gears a little bit now and I want to introduce our point of view on the modern workplace because ultimately transformation has to reach the people that are making decisions that are serving customers and keeping our businesses running every day. And that is why the next phase of AI is equally about getting intelligence closer to where the work actually happens in their hands on the device and woven into every workflow. I should also call out that this isn't a future trend. It's the next refresh cycle and it's happening right now. So the question becomes, are you going to design for it deliberately or are you just going to let it happen to you?

You may also ask the question, what does it actually look like if you design for it deliberately? We started with our customers. We wanted to listen to you and hear what you say you want from a workplace partner. We did a global survey and we boiled this down. And when we looked at the results from India, there were some real standouts here in India. We heard that 53% of the respondents, they want AI PCs that can run real workloads on the device. We also heard that 51% want hardware rooted endpoint security with a secure supply chain. So you look at that and it becomes very clear customers they're not choosing between AI and security. They expect they demand both in the same device and from the same partner. So let's step back for a moment. Let's look at how work actually happens on a day-to-day basis. When you break it down, the PC is where AI shows up every day under more pressure than ever. Picture this. You got the screen behind me. We've got an AI assistant drafting a note in one tab. You got a frontier model running with a few agents in another. Several presentations are open with a live meeting taking place. And let's be honest, more browser tabs than any of us would care to admit. That's not some future scenario as you all know. That's just another Tuesday or any other day for that matter. And it's worth pointing out that even when AI runs in the cloud, the PC still does a huge amount of work with the memory, the processing, and the battery. And we see as agents do more work in the background, they will ask even more of the device.

So, we took all of that into consideration and that is exactly why and how we designed the latest Dell Pro AI PCs. We have them running on the latest Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen AI silicon with Intel VRO built-in. And importantly, customers, they do not have to choose between mobility and performance. These systems they are lighter they are faster they are quieter they are more efficient and they are ready for on-device workloads because it's important to note that shifting workloads to the device it can lower token costs it reduces the data exposure and it cuts cloud dependence clearly. The AI PC is not a standalone story. It's part of the same continuum from desk to workstation to data center. The same intelligence from edge to enterprise infrastructure and pulling all of that together. That's what makes Dell the world's number one commercial AI PC brand.

But again, we have to step back and look at the reality of what's happening in today's environment. As AI expands to every device, so too the attack surface expands. More local intelligence means more local sensitive data. So we start with security in the supply chain and run that through to the device with zero trust across manufacturing, sourcing and software. We also included hardware routed protection with safe BIOS, safe ID and Windows 11 security from silicon to cloud. We provide telemetry plugs into crowdstrike and Microsoft in tune. This means that the threats are shut down before they become a business problem. The goal here is simple. More control for it, more confidence for employees with security built in from day one. Now, I've said it before and all of this has to happen in the real world securely, reliably, and at the pace that business demands. So let me share with you another example of how we're doing this with a customer right here with Zebasys. Now Zebasys, they deliver cloud and IT services to a large number of stock broker and banking clients across the region. And as you can imagine in that environment, real time trading depends on always available, always on infrastructure, low latency and high levels of operational visibility. The Dell Pro PCs, they help Zybus. They keep developers and operation teams productive, secure, and responsive. And that that supports mission-critical environments with greater speed, consistency, and confidence. And that is the point I'm getting at. Workplace technology has to perform in the real world under real world operational pressure.

But as you would expect, the role of the device continues to evolve. For developers, sophisticated AI workloads can now begin right at the desk. And we created Dell deskside agentic AI to provide a secure local environment to build and refine agents before scaling into production. We can run these on the Dell workstations from the GB10, the Procre towers to the true powerhouse that is the GB300. All of these with Nvidia Nemo claw providing a secure agent framework. When you step back and look at that together, this truly changes the economics of AI. Think about it. You could have 10 agents, just 10 agents burning a billion tokens a day in the cloud for three, four, $5,000 versus zero cost on a Dell workstation. That math that should change how every IT leader thinks about where AI runs because once validated the agents can then scale to production on Power Edge and that provides a much shorter more predictable path from idea to enterprise. So that is what we believe a modern workplace looks like when AI is built into the experience from everyday productivity to extremely advanced agentic workloads. As intelligence moves across the devices through data centers, cloud environments, the bigger question then becomes how it all comes together at scale. The workplace is no longer separate from the data center. It is part of the same connected architecture. Now, I could spend a couple of hours and run you through what that next era looks like. But the reality is there is literally, and I mean literally, nobody better to do this than Michael Dell and Jensen Hang. So, Michael and Jensen, over to you.

I'm here every year selling Dell.

Well, two years ago, we had just started with the generative AI journey, which led us to agentic systems. So now we have for the very first time useful AI which is the reason why your demand my demand is going parabolic. A couple years ago we started we didn't have 5,000 enterprise customers. Now we have the biggest companies in the world like Lilly and Samsung and Honeywell. They're piling into this in a big way. But really that's just starting. Michael and I have been working on a whole new line of computers to run agents. There's a large language model that NVLink72 that's the brain. However, an agent starts with the harness. That harness has to sit in a secure and governed container. We call it a sandbox. Nvidia open shell inside. We have a reference harness we call Nemo cloud. Nemo claw runs on a CPU. It can also run Neimotron or any of the open source models that you would create your own specialized agents for your own companies trained for your own special domain of data or skills that would run locally if you like and then the large language models could run in the cloud and so you have this hybrid AI that runs every frontier AI model. We support every open-source model and they we support them in the cloud or locally. Our systems are built with confidential computing. This way you don't have to trust the operator with your secure data. Agents in this new world, you're generating tokens. You're not renting CPU cores anymore. You're generating tokens. That's the economics of this AI era. An individual can manage, you know, a thousand, 100 agents. The possibilities that that unlocks where you've got the power in your own PC, in your own data center, and you can use it with your own data. You don't have to struggle with token anxiety. Michael, this is this is 100 times larger than this one, the station, right?

Thank you. What you just heard really reinforces the shift underway. AI is no longer a feature added to the enterprise. It's becoming part of the operating model. The next question is how do you connect those pieces and turn AI pilots into enterprise-scale results? That's where many organizations stall. When leaders ask about what's holding them back, 53% point to security, compliance, or privacy concerns as the biggest barrier to scaling their AI. 79% say their data and their IP is just too valuable to hand to a third-party genai tool. Organizations want AI, but with governance, protection, and trust built in from the beginning. But control, that's only part of the equation. The other part is economics. And the economics are changing fast. Token prices are down 80% year-over-year, but token use for reasoning is up 320x. Now, the architecture can make an extraordinary difference in that. At Dell, we had two different teams tackle the same agentic use case. We wanted them to identify a customer need and package an offer. So team one used an large model to do almost everything. It consumed 25 million tokens. Team two used an agent to orchestrate amongst existing configurations and pricing tools and it produced a more predictable result at 20,000 tokens. So same business problem dramatically different economics which brings us to a critical question. Are you running the right model with the right workload in the right place? Not all work is the same and neither are the agents doing it. And you can't solve it with a single infrastructure answer. That's what hybrid AI is all about. Smarter decisions. And as Chris showed, it's a choice that can extend all the way to the desk. Scaling AI isn't just a technology problem. It's an integration problem. Infrastructure, data, and economics all working together within one system. And that's exactly what the Dell AI factory with NVIDIA is built to do. Not give customers a box of parts, but to help them work as one connected system. More than 6,500 customers are already using it to accelerate AI adoption. Each of them is showing a faster time to value up 3.6x ROI in the first year. And the hardest part is not the model or the GPU. It's the data. Data is scattered across documents, systems, emails, tools, and teams are spending more time finding it, preparing it, governing it than actually using it. And that's what the Dell AI data platform is designed to solve. It brings storage, data engines, and orchestration into one open secure foundation that turns fragmented information into trusted AI ready fuel so the right data can reach the right model at the right time to unlock value. Now the start of this is validated building blocks across compute, storage, networking, software, automation and services. Then they expand as your needs grow step by step, workload by workload. That gives organizations a practical path from AI experimentation to AI at enterprise scale. That means getting the economics, the governance and the infrastructure right so AI can move from those interesting pilots to the way your business operates. So let's bring this together. Building for what's next is more than modernizing it. It's modernizing the data center so the data is usable and protected. It's modernizing the workplace so intelligence reaches every person or place. And it means scaling AI with confidence. So insight becomes action in your business. Not as separate programs, but as one connected strategy that turns data into action, scales AI into measurable results, and puts intelligence into the hands of people doing the work. When delivered across all three, something fundamental changes. Decisions get better because the data infrastructure and AI are working together. Security becomes a strength, not a source of friction. And growth becomes more sustainable because modernization has reduced complexity and helped organizations move with greater confidence. What many customers need now isn't more technology. It's a clear path and a partner who can reduce complexity and help them execute. And that's exactly what Dell brings. A portfolio that spans from AI PC on the desk to infrastructure in the data center, services expertise across the entire journey, a resilient global supply chain and an open ecosystem of the strongest partnerships in the industry. AMD, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia. That gives customers the flexibility as they evolve. Because remember, the organizations that pull ahead won't be the ones that move first. They'll be the ones that moved with clarity and the right partner. That's what it means when we say built for what's next. So my final ask, bring us your toughest challenges, your most ambitious use cases, and the parts of the strategy where you feel most stuck. And let's work on them together because what's next? It's already here. Thank you.

A big thank you to Jerry and Chris for those fascinating perspectives. How about a big round of applause, ladies and gentlemen? Transformation always sounds simple when you see the end result. The real story is in everything it takes to get there. The choices made, the challenges navigated, and the decisions that turn ambition into outcomes. Our next session, a fireside chat, brings that journey into focus through real customer perspectives. For the transformation conversation from possibility to progress. Please welcome Wenut Sitharam, senior director and country head, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies, India.

Hello. Hello everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Can be better. Good morning. Good morning. That's great. Thank you very much. We're going to have a transformation conversation. Transformation conversation requires positive attitude and great energy and therefore I thought I'll kick start this conversation with some amount of energy and thank you for your response. This is centered around the theme of this event where possibility meets progress. When you think about transformation and you go and ask this to every company or any business, they say transformation is centered around business. How we can scale the business, how we can run the business more securely than before and how we can build that capacity that is needed today and build trust around this. Now when you think of all of these, it's all about making choices. Making the choice becomes very very critical in the world where everything is changing with AI pretty much integrating with business operations. Isn't it? To get you a realistic view of the choices that some of the technology industry leaders have made to see this transformation and realize these outcomes in their business? I have the privilege to host this conversation and you'll hear from three distinguished technology industry leaders who's going to join me for this conversation. And it's not that we we're talking Dell point of view here. We're going to give you what's going on in the industry with some of our customers and what role Dell played in helping them realize this outcome. So ladies and gentlemen please join me to welcome Arun Nagapan general manager and CTO Kendra Bank. Arun please come over. That I'll call my next speaker Nazmir CTO from Kayfin Technologies Hyderabad. I'm going to be joined by yet another distinguished speaker and this is Dr. Sri Khan Katuri. Dr. Srian Katuri from Omega Healthcare. I wanted to clarify doctor is not a medical doctor. He's a research doctor in technology. So that's please take a seat gentlemen. Thank you for taking the time to be with us here. It's a real privilege and I'm sure the audience are eagerly looking to hear your perspective and each of you have turned your vision into reality by having that foresight of investing into what is called as modern technology architecture leveraging AI integrating that to your business operations and you have built a very safe trusted cyber security framework. Work. So this discussion is going to focus around these topics which are interest for most of us here. Arun let me start with you. You think of Kandra Bank household name isn't it? Canra Bank household name isn't it? 120 years of legacy amazing and I I grew up with Canra Bank. In fact my family banks with Kandra Bank. I didn't tell you this Arun but I'm sharing this with you today and I'm sure many of us here are doing that you have an extraordinary legacy of trust and customer centricity that you have built a bank and when you think of bank it's about trust right so looking at this legacy tell me about two things that you have done and what role that technology has played in driving those two key initiatives within the bank.

Good morning everyone it's a pleasure to be a part of this conversation Thank you. See with lot of legacy and history comes a lot of responsibility as well. So leg and banking is the business of trust. So and for us it's very important that we are able we are always available and accessible to our customers who to meet their requirements. So that means we have to be always up and running. So resiliency is the key factor here. and then the technology is something which helps us meet that at the same time technology being a legacy bank trust is something which you're built on but that's something that we need to leverage further again and the legacy should not hold us back so from a technology is what you know can help us leapfrog and take things to a next level so it's very important what decisions we take how we are planning out and scaling out for the future how prepared we are so everywhere it's it's going to be a critical function again.

Wonderful. Right time, right decision being taken centered around the technology architecture is instrumental in reshaping Kendra Bank's journey. Great. Let me switch over to you Naz. When you think of Kay Fintech, you serve millions and millions of investors, a lot of fund and hundreds of fund fund houses and I'm sure you must be handling a daily transaction of over 10 odd million per day. That's huge. It's not it's not small, right? And and if you have to think about that which is scale and allow technology to create new services and reach to your customer and customers customer that's about turning possibility into progress. Talk to us about your vision in making this journey possible.

First of all Ward thank you for having me here and I think that was a fantastic keynote that you had. So where we really looked at the cutting edge what Dell has to offer right. So if if you look at KF fintech, so we service around 400 million investor accounts and we deal with 10 million transactions every day. And for us what is very important is each transaction right however small or big it may be it can be someone's savings right it can be if if I may right so earlier financial inclusion was for people who were earning something above some pay grade right today we are talking about financial inclusion going down and reaching the villages and tier 2 cities and everyone is is a part of this financial inclusion right so every transaction matter matters to us not how big or small so coming to your question Ward right so turning possibilities how do we turn this possibilities into progress right so that for us predominantly is taking what is available today from a technology standpoint right and making it work meaningfully at scale so as I said we serve around 350 to 400 million investor accounts And we are seeing significant opportunities in areas such as AI data and conversational interfaces. If you look at our recent launches at global fintechfest as well, our product II is a conversational intelligence chatbot, right? But I think this this comes with any financial services. Innovation cannot be separated from your governance, security and resilience. We cannot create a better experience at the expense of trust. So our focus on technology is not just about using tech for just technology's sake. It is about using technology to remove friction, improve decision-making and broaden access which I spoke about inclusivity right while ensuring that the underlying platforms remain secure resilient and compliant that to me and to KFIN is how we turn the different possibilities into progress.

Wonderful. That was great. When you when you think about impacting financial lives of many you know humans in the country you know the the the security becomes a very very important aspect and you've outlined that very very well and how you have gone about making technology accessible let me flip it over to you Dr. Sriant Katuri when you think of Omega Healthcare very very interesting perspective one of the lead RCM companies it's a it's a Goldman Sachs funded company you orchestrate a lot of patient outcomes right it's

Patient transaction outcomes and when you think about Omega Healthcare, 24/7/365 without even an interruption, your technology, your business setup has to be running so that the patient care or the services are rendered without any interruption. So how did you envision setting up the technology foundation layer?

So the coincidence is that tomorrow I'll be completing two years with Omega Healthcare.

Fantastic.

So when we started off, I mean, when they had me on the new job, one of the biggest aspects was to strategize, and the strategic theme was Recalibrate 2025. That's what we have started with. And we had silos of excellence. I wouldn't say we were like suddenly we've sensationally done something new. It's a continuum, right? Any enterprise and each of us have their own set of historicities. But because it was more of islands of excellence, siloed infrastructure, and one of the key themes for companies dealing with patient outcomes, right, in the RCM space, is that in the triangle that you talk about, the CIA triad, right, the confidentiality, integrity, availability. Availability is actually the axis, and I would encourage everyone to think that availability is everything in today's world, whether it's AI or security, because without availability being there, whatever design thinking you have has no sense of purpose because that's the first design principle. So we latched on to that, and the vision was to have a cohesive view of our overall infrastructure globally. And then we have had some very tough conversations with Dell. Dell came about to us. We had a series of workshops with you. I mean, if you remember...

Yep.

And then we pulled off the AIOps, and today we run a very strong 34,000 workforce globally across four geographies. But availability is our fundamental theme because we have resilience as a part of our offerings to our customers. A very unique value proposition to our customers is that we are very resilient. We can roll back to normalcy in a sub-minute fashion where the patient care will not stop. So that, in my sense, is the fundamental theme with which we started our journey, and we have done very well the first year. This year is Reimagine 2026, and we are another quarter away from this year's performance, and we're doing well.

Excellent. We heard three different perspectives: choice for availability, choice for scale, and choice across a trusted platform. Very, very interesting and important considerations in what is called as laying down modern architecture, right? Modern architecture, that's very, very important. So coming back to you, Arun, on that background, let me return to the direction you described about Canara Bank, and I'm sure your vision must have got tested, and there were expectations around tangible outcomes that the bank was expecting. And amidst of all this, there came amalgamation of Canara Bank and Syndicate Bank that all of us would know. It was one of the largest in the history of banking. Two banks with different technology stacks came together. You would have had multiple data sets in silos. Rather than simply putting them together, you made a very cohesive approach about bringing everything together around the modernization decision that you made. What confidence gave you that you could make that shift? Can you talk a little more about that shift and about that choice that you made in bringing these two together?

See, when two mammoth organizations with so much of history come together, I mean, two aspects: one is technology and one is HR. These are two things which are going to drive, and underlying is always technology itself. So there are two options. You can just have both the systems have an interconnect, have a layer on top of it, and run it, or you'll have to convince your management that let's take a step back and see how do you leverage this opportunity and try to do a rethink. I think we, it was not completely on that side, but then we bent towards that more. So we kind of took a pause and took a rethink as to what we wanted to do, how we calibrated it, and we looked at primarily how do you consolidate and how do you standardize so that you have better leverage in the days to come. So I think that is the thought that we ran the amalgamation with, and we had a lot of asset size, a lot of people were there, and a lot of systems were there, a lot of silos were there. So we kind of rearchitected in a smart way, and we did something at an installation layer to start off with. So the day one gets going, but slowly, brick by brick, we replaced them and got them fit into the architecture that we wanted, and that's what is holding us in good stead today.

Absolutely, well said. Consolidation requires rearchitecting and looking at multiple silos and bringing them together. It's not an easy task, and it was fantastic to hear from you. I'll flip this over to you, Shriant. What was your decision that involved rethinking the architecture and the partnerships around it?

So I think we have had our own grief periods. Sitharam, as you know, we have had some grief periods, especially around the VMware grief points, where I'm sure everybody in the room agrees with me that during that period everybody had their own bites of grief, I would say. But one of the key things which we've done very clearly is that when you have architectural considerations, do not be too skewed away with a bias towards a particular partner for whatever reasons, whether it's licensing reasons or pricing reasons. And I would encourage that we get them to the table and build consensus. In this example, I would be very confident to say that we have had some very tough conversations with both Dell and VMware at that point of time. We were not very happy for like 30, 45 days. We had series of conversations, but the good part is that we had some tough conversations but the right questions on the table. And interestingly, within 45 days, we built the consensus, we turned around the conversations, and I think we've done very well. We went live today. We are able to go back and confidently state that the rearchitecting need not necessarily be substitution with a new partner. It can always be building consensus with the existing partners. And I'll say the reason for that is that when an enterprise has got large deals which has got five to seven-year depreciation life cycle, right? Even if it's an opex life cycle or a depreciation life cycle, you cannot just drop down the ball and then suddenly get into a new architecture. It's going to take time because if you look at enterprises, it's all a continuum, right? So I would encourage that you pause a bit, have a conversation, but try your best. If it's not working 10 times, try 100 times to build consensus, and eventually you'll get through. And we had a use case where we've got out of the grief and now we are slowly back on the track. So architectural decisions, to sum up, architectural decisions have to be considered in the larger interest of the enterprise than just a financial life cycle management. And this is something that we did build consensus with our finance guys also, and we have come around. So replatforming, rearchitecture should not be driven by partner bias. That's what I want to say.

Fantastic. Building consensus is very important, and glad that Dell had the opportunity in helping you unlock the challenges that you faced with multi-hypervisors that you just narrated and free up from vendor lock-in, which is amazing. And I'm sure that gave you the ultimate confidence on the path that you had to choose, right?

Yeah, I can also state that, Sitharam, I don't have any equity in Dell and I don't have any shares with Dell, so I can openly proclaim this that the customer centricity that you guys and your team get to the table is phenomenal. And we did have tough conversations. Sometimes we have had quite a bit of arguments. But I think we came around that, and all the teams that work with us from a Dell standpoint definitely have a higher degree of customer centricity as compared to any of the partners. So thank you for that.

Great. It's been a privilege. We continue to want to have tougher conversations so that we can deliver great outcomes. So keep challenging us. Now I come back to you, Naz. This is about looking at the choices that you made in what is called as our rapidly evolving financial ecosystem. So how do you go about meeting the expectation of your AMCs, the mutual fund companies, as well as the customers who are for those AMCs, which is all of us investors today? What choices did you make and how did you go about navigating them?

Yeah. With the advent of AI, right, so if you look at it, there's the pre-AI era and the post-AI era, the LLM era, right? So the expectations from our customers and the expectations from our customers' customers, who are investors in the ecosystem, have rapidly changed, right? So how do we go about addressing that? So earlier we used to design for capacity, right? But today the choices, the thinking that we have is we don't only design for capacity, but we also have to design for resilience, security, and efficiency at scale. I think we are going to hear a lot about resilience, efficiency, and security today, and with the power that is there in our hands today, right? So I think we have been a very fortunate generation where we saw three paradigm shifts in technology. We saw the advent of internet. We saw mobile phones, which democratized technology, and now we are seeing AI, which is again going to democratize technology. So we have been, I would say, very lucky to experience all of these things. But there's a famous saying from Spider-Man, right? With great power comes great responsibility, right? So you have great power. So how do you ensure that you use it with responsibility? And that is where I think resilience planning and designing not only for capacity but designing for resilience, designing for security, and designing for efficiency come into picture. I'll give you one example of what is happening at our organization. So we were predominantly on, we are predominantly on all the hyperscalers, right? But when we looked at our strategy, what we are currently undertaking is, and I think this is happening with a lot of other enterprises as well, right? So we are moving part of our workloads back to on-premises because that's where it gives us that flexibility. We have our own stack, we have our own Kubernetes clusters running on-premise, and I would say from our experience, the resilience, the posture, resilience posture, the efficiency, and everything, we have tremendously benefited by it. We operate around close to 10,000 physical CPU cores, if that metric, I don't know if it means anything, but 80% of it is on Dell's infrastructure, right? And again, the other point I would say is in financial infrastructure, I think we have also started thinking about not just architecture but observability, cyber security, disaster recovery, and other operational processes, right? So the question no longer is can I keep the system running, but how quickly can I recover if something happens to my systems. I think that is the fundamental question we have.

Great. That was a great insight. I mean, I didn't know that 20% was not Dell, and I'm sure all my Dell colleagues in this room must be itching that where did the 20% go. So guys, I hope you heard that if you are in the audience. I would like to follow it up on the resilience that you picked up. You operate under an environment which is a very, very highly sensitive, stringent, highly regulated. So how did you go about working with Dell Technologies on building a cyber resilient posture which today meets the expectations of everybody including the regulator, and where did you see meeting expectations? And tell us about some real-world readiness which our audience will be keen to hear.

So as I said, right, so it is not just about capacity planning, right? So we have to take a lot of other factors also, and one of the factors that we also everyday think about it is the possibility that prevention will never be perfect, right? So you build all your defenses, you do everything, but there is a very small possibility or probability that all your preventions and defenses may not be enough, right? So a mature cyber resilient strategy also should ask a different question. If an attacker gets through, can we contain the impact? Can we protect critical data? And can we recover safely? I think, and I'm not kidding when I say this, we have spent tremendous amounts of time on this. I think probably more than 18 months evaluating all the different players in India, globally, and everywhere. And I have to give it to you because again you have the best product there, right? So we utilize Dell's backup and recovery in our air-gapped environments where we use capability across compute, storage, data protection to create multiple layers of resilience and isolated recovery environments. And as I said, Dell is an important part of this technology foundation, and today what we are doing is we are actually so happy that we are broadening the scope of where we started, and our responsibility is to integrate those capabilities further into our different lines of business. So the outcome we are looking for is straightforward: prevent where we can, contain when something happens, and recover with confidence. And I think you have been a fantastic partner there.

Thank you very much, that was wonderful to hear. I would like to build on this topic, resilience, and when it comes to Canara Bank, you know, it's all about resilient DCDR architecture, and that would require modernizing all your storage, look at your workloads, modernization, and building what is called as a resilient compute platform as well along with storage and a DCDR architecture. And you've been expanding. So why don't you throw us insight on how did you go about doing this?

See, resilience is one is always have the lights on and ensure services up and running, which is very critical for a financial services space where we are in. Second thing is, as my co-panelist told, that incidents will happen, but then the maturity is in how fast you're able to recover from that and how do you course correct, how quickly you're able to do that. The MTR is what is very important today. So having a DCDR infrastructure is one thing, but being able to operate and leverage it and quickly switch over operations and ensure transactions are flowing through and the blip is not becoming big. It's just a small blip. That's where the trick is. Again, it's a lot of people process involved. Plus you need to have the right partnerships in terms of the tech stack that you are implementing and the capabilities, how smartly you're imagining them and leveraging them. I mean, we also use a lot of Dell products which you're aware of. So you can use it as a traditional compute and storage box, or you can also smartly use the features which are coming into it, which we have been doing, especially and good support from your team as well on that. So that makes a difference. I mean, not just investing, but how do you ensure that works really well and what we're designing today is not what should hold you back in the days to come. So that's very important that we get it right. And again, a modernization or a possibility, it should not just stop with what technology infrastructure implementing, it's how much the business is able to leverage that and the comfort that business gets, how much able to scale operations on top of the stack that you're building. So that's the game changer.

Awesome. This is wonderful insight on how they approached cyber resiliency. This you have approached that not just as a compliance requirement but it is approached as a strategic priority and how you have gone about navigating that within the organization and how you have leveraged technology partners to put that framework in place that meets the requirement of pretty much everyone. Before I do a wrap-up question, I just wanted to come back to you. How do you manage running your business pretty much every day with the role of AI and automation today? Steps that you have taken in advancing that and integrating that as part of your business processes. Tell us more about it and some of the outcomes that you have seen through this effort.

So in terms of AI itself, I think the clear-cut differentiation between AI in the enterprise and enterprise AI, right? So one is tools and toolkit you give to your end users. That's one part that's anyway sorted. Everybody has access to AI, but enterprise AI has been a part of our strategy. And just so that you know, we run close to 1,400 bots in our Denver data center on Dell platform. I'm sure you know that.

Yes.

So we have close to seven to eight very, very critical revenue-making workloads that we run on the Denver data center on-prem on purpose. The reason why we haven't moved those bots into the cloud environment is for the simple reason that Denver data center is SOC 2 certified and we're right now going for HITRUST. The reason for that is because the predictability and the certainness I have to recover, especially from an agentic AI and bot behavior standpoint, is much more predictable if I'm running on-prem because I'm in control of that. But from a strategy standpoint, we've always had bots running. It's just that we were running it for automation earlier, but right now we are actually disrupting some of our workflows to have everything end-to-end using agentic AI. But Dell has been a part of our Denver story. Now we're building a Charlotte story with Atul's team where we wish to have a sub-minute failover with some kind of a 15-minute, you know, you can go back in time for 15 minutes and you're still up and running. So that I think is a very encouraging thing. And I'll give you one example where we were trying to run some AI-driven workloads for one of our customers. We initially had a four-week POC on a very big cloud provider through VDI and all of that. But I'm happy to state that we rolled over to the on-prem sustainable, reliable environment. We have been running workloads in the last 10 days and things seem to be shaping up well. So just to sum up, I think there's nothing like an AI strategy so to speak. You already have an enterprise strategy, you embed AI into the scheme of things, and then you'll do well on the first principles.

Awesome. Embedding AI into enterprise strategy is the way to go, and that has helped you expand to 1,400 bots, 15 odd delivery locations, and...

24/7, 40,000...

34,000 people, 1,400 bots, 14 delivery centers, and we run close to 30,000 VDIs at every point of time, 24/7. So that kind of scale, though you might say elasticity on demand and all of that in the cloud, in my view, I know I will become controversial if I state this, is that somehow the conversation has to be more moderated and it should be skewed more towards on-prem because the numbers, somehow it's not a y is equal to f of x, it's much more quadratic in the nature than what people say that oh if you go to cloud everything is simple and straightforward. At least that's not been my experience as a practitioner. You need to make situational decisions based on what makes sense. Another example I'll give you, initially we were a big fan of VxRail, now we are slowly moving to the...

We've become a big fan of private cloud now.

It's iteration of different technologies based on your situational ask. It cannot be one size fits all. So in that sense, I think it's a great thing that we have on-prem Dell Denver and Charlotte story, and we're doing well.

Very interesting perspective. That brings us to the close of this conversation. Transformation made real, possibility to progress. But you know, I can't close this without asking one quick answer for this question: how do you envision the next three to five years? So one word.

It's going to be a lot of efficiency parameters built in. So AI is going to make that change.

AI is going to make the change for efficiency for you, Naz.

I think if I have to answer that in a sentence, right, so make the experience above the infrastructure layer increasingly intelligent and effortless while making the infrastructure layer underneath increasingly resilient, secure, and invisible to the customer. I think that is what we should be doing for the next two years.