Dell Technologies Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are expanding their decades-long partnership to deliver integrated enterprise architecture for AI, hybrid cloud and application modernization, according to Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. At this year’s Dell Technologies World, Dell expanded its private cloud offering to deploy the latest Microsoft software implementations, and since that event Microsoft has worked to enable a disaggregated architecture simplifying operations across Dell PowerEdge compute, Dell PowerStore storage and Azure Local. Nashawaty said the focus since Dell Technologies World in May has been on connecting Microsoft Azure Local, SQL Server and hybrid-cloud capabilities with Dell’s automation platform and enterprise infrastructure to help customers deploy, govern and operate AI workloads wherever their data resides. Dell Automation Platform and Dell Private Cloud provide an operational backbone for deploying Azure Local on-premises and managing the hardware lifecycle, including firmware and updates, while Azure Arc provides consistent management across environments and SQL Server can run in virtual machines or Kubernetes containers. Bob Ward, principal architect at Microsoft, told theCUBE that the key architecture for AI capabilities integrates embedding models for vector searching or chat completion models for AI agents inside the SQL Server Engine, and that the Dell partnership allows connection to anything on-premises, including Azure Local, Dell and Nvidia Factory.