RESEARCH PAPER: AI in the Modern Enterprise

By Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead - January 17, 2025

We’re in perhaps the most dynamic era of enterprise IT. Modernization initiatives have been rescoped and accelerated to support generative AI projects, which have captured the attention of every executive with good reason. Gen AI promises to transform businesses in ways we haven’t witnessed.

However, as the need to accelerate and alter modernization efforts to support this new wave increases, IT budgets are only rising incrementally at best. Sustainability is another variable in the equation. While AI initiatives require more compute, storage, and other resources, CIOs are tasked with lowering power footprints to drive sustainability goals.

How can enterprise IT organizations simultaneously achieve modernization, AI, and sustainability goals, which seem to directly contradict one another? Moor Insights & Strategy (MI&S) sees the solution as rooted in infrastructure.

Outdated operating stacks powered by outdated hardware and processors unable to deliver the required performance, agility, security, and targeted acceleration are, in some cases, used as the building blocks for the AI-driven workloads running the modern business. This is a recipe for failure.

This research brief will explore enterprise IT organizations’ technical and operational challenges and how technology vendors are responding with hybrid cloud environments powered by modern AI-ready infrastructure. Further, it will evaluate how Nutanix, Dell, and Intel have partnered to deliver the Dell XC Plus running the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) and GPT-in-a-Box powered by AI-accelerated Intel Xeon CPUs.

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Table of Contents

Summary
Modernization and AI — Complementary Yet Competing
Can IT Modernization and AI Operationalization Occur Simultaneously?
Where Do We Get Enough Power?
The Optimal AI Foundation Begins with the Cloud
Nutanix Cloud Platform — Simplicity Through Abstraction
Dell XC Plus — Performance and Security
Intel Xeon — Modernization Starts in Silicon
Managing the Modernization-Plus-AI Journey
Call to Action

Companies Cited:

Nutanix
Dell
Intel

Matt Kimball

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Matt Kimball is a Moor Insights & Strategy senior datacenter analyst covering servers and storage. Matt’s 25 plus years of real-world experience in high tech spans from hardware to software as a product manager, product marketer, engineer and enterprise IT practitioner. This experience has led to a firm conviction that the success of an offering lies, of course, in a profitable, unique and targeted offering, but most importantly in the ability to position and communicate it effectively to the target audience.

Patrick Moorhead

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Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.