The analysts are getting very excited about AI PCs, and also GenAI. How excited are you?
Mixed, is the answer. I’m excited because this is innovation that will require more tech at the edge. And more tech at the edge is good for VARs. In general, the cloud isn’t – well, [that’s] not completely [the case]. But more tech at the edge is good news for our business, more distributed technology is good for our business, and that’s true for all VARs, not just Computacenter.
“More tech at the edge is good news for our business, more distributed technology is good for our business”Mike Norris, Computacenter
I think it’s going to be interesting to see who buys it because if you look at how excited everybody is about Nvidia, they’re only really selling to five people at the moment. There’s going to be very few Nvidia chips bought outside of five customers between now and the end of next year, I would have thought. It is about Google and Meta and Amazon and Microsoft – so it’s a very tight customer base. How much are we going to see significant infrastructure across the whole marketplace is still a question to be answered.
AI is going to be embedded within most of the software we buy, whether it’s ServiceNow or Microsoft or Salesforce or SAP, which is going to require more power at the edge, which is good. How much is it going to be truly adopted and truly used, how important is the use case, and how critical it is going to be to business, is still to be proven. I’ve seen people have a lot of fun with some technologies but not seen true business benefit come through enough yet. But if it gains even a half – or a third – of the traction people hope it will, then I think it’s good for VARs.
“I’m not going anywhere, I promise” – see next page for Norris’ views on what drives him…
