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With its position as a key provider of service and processor solutions to the worlds largest companies, Intel Corp. can see trends coming from miles away.

Thats the kind of perspective that over half a century in the technology business can provide. The company saw the coming of cloud computing, and now it is witnessing the latest wave of artificial intelligence, although at least one executive believes that growing use cases are moving into a phase where the tangible benefits of AI in the enterprise are real.

AI went through the same thing that cloud did, where you have every business leader or chief information officer saying: Hey, get me a cloud and Ill figure out what for later, said Lisa Spelman(pictured, left), corporate vice president and general manager of the Xeon and Memory Group at Intel. It was get me some AI, and well figure out if we can make it work. Were through those initial use cases, and were starting to see business value derived from some of those deployments.

Spelman spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Medias livestreaming studio. She was joined by Ravi Pendekanti(pictured, right), senior vice president of server product management at Dell Technologies Inc. Frick also spoke with Jeremy Rader, general manager of digital transformation and scale solutions at Intel, in a separate interview and heard from Thierry Pellegrino, vice president of business strategy and HPC solutions server and infrastructure systems at Dell. They discussed how AI is helping users manage data at significant scale, the impact of partnerships with independent software vendors, a joint project to map the human brain, and tailoring technology for the right solution. (* Disclosure below.)

As the use cases for AI continued to expand, Intel and Dell Technologies Inc. have partnered to provide solutions to businesses across a wide spectrum. One such customer is Epsilon Data Interactive Inc, a provider of permission-based email marketing services to major companies, including Dell.

Epsilon uses AI and machine learning to analyze customer activity in significant volume.

What really blew my mind is they service or send out close to 100 billion messages a year, so you can imagine the amount of data they are analyzing, Pendekanti said. Its all possible because of the kind of analytics we have driven into PowerEdge servers using the latest Intel Xeon processor coupled with some of the technology from the field programmable gate array side.

What is different from the get me some AI days is that both customers and providers such as Intel and Dell are building specific solutions into respective technologies to best address business needs while partnering with independent software vendors. This dynamic has created an ecosystemthat can help enterprises get desired results faster and with more impact.

It starts first with delivering the best hardware for AI, and Xeon is the foundation for that, Spelman explained. On top of that, theres the optimized software which is going into each of those frameworks and doing the work so that the framework recognizes the specific acceleration weve built into the CPU. Once weve done that software layer, this is where we have the opportunity for a lot of partnership.

Intel works with a number of ISVs in partnership with Dell to support customer needs. This forms a three-legged stool of value for the delivery of AI-based solutions.

What weve done with Dell is bring that portfolio together with Dells capabilities and then bring in that ISV partner, that software vendor, where we can really bring the most value out of that broad portfolio, Rader said. If you bring in the software vendor, hardware vendor, and Dell into the mix, you get a really strong outcome.

What are some of those outcomes? Researchers from McGill University and the University of Montreal are working on an artificial neural networkthat functions like a human brain. This specialized work requires the use of high-performance computing to process and analyze large-memory MRI images.

The project leverages Intels Zenith cluster combined with Dell PowerEdge servers and Xeon processors to make breakthroughs in cognitive science.

We collaborated with Intel on a tuning of algorithms for them in code in order to accelerate the mapping of the human brain, Pellegrino explained. Think about what you can get with that kind of information in order to cure Alzheimers or dementia down the road. It is using technology to help all of us and those who are suffering from really tough diseases.

Based on the experience of Dell and Intel, through projects such as the one in Canada, AI is beginning to move from an object of desire for no clear purpose to solving complex enterprise and human problems. It is being demystified and, for practitioners such as Dells Pendekanti, thats a good thing.

Most of us probably use an ATM to withdraw money, but we really dont know what sits behind the ATM, Pendekanti said. Our mantra for this is very simple. We want to make sure we use the right basic building blocks, ensuring that we bring the right solutions.

Heres the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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Dell and Intel answer the call for AI by building specific solutions for real problems - SiliconANGLE