Dell AI Data Platform Wins CRN Tech Innovators Award

At Dell Technologies, we believe technology should empower real progress — and when that work is recognized, it’s both an honor and a spark to keep pushing forward. So I’m thrilled to share that the Dell AI Data Platform has been selected as a winner in the 2026 CRN® Tech Innovator Awards, in the AI Software and Platforms category.

This one is especially meaningful because it’s the second year in a row that the Dell AI Data Platform has earned this recognition. Last year, the platform won the 2025 CRN Tech Innovators Award for helping customers on their data journey with Dell PowerScale and ObjectScale. Winning again in 2026 reinforces our commitment to building the data foundation that turns enterprise AI ambition into production reality.

Celebrating excellence with CRN

The CRN Tech Innovator Awards recognize the most innovative technologies shaping the future of the IT channel. Selected by CRN’s editorial team from hundreds of submissions across 30 technology categories, winning solutions demonstrate exceptional innovation, market differentiation, technological advancement and measurable value for channel partners and customers. These award-winning products stand out for their ability to address real-world business challenges while helping drive success across the technology ecosystem.

What’s new since last year: the Dell Data Orchestration Engine

Last year we were celebrated for helping organizations unify and manage their data across on-premises, edge and multicloud environments. This year, we’ve gone further — closing the gap between raw data and AI-ready data with the new Data Orchestration Engine, announced at NVIDIA GTC 2026.

Most enterprise AI initiatives stall not because of the models, but because of the data feeding them: it’s too slow, too siloed, or too ungoverned to use. The Data Orchestration Engine solves that by acting as a control layer across the full AI data lifecycle. Here’s what makes it different from where we were a year ago:

• • • • A marketplace that accelerates time to value. More than 200 pre-built workflows, NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA AI Blueprints help partners and customers move from pilot to production in weeks, not months.
      • Automates the complete AI data lifecycle. Powered by technology from Dell’s acquisition of Dataloop, the Data Orchestration Engine discovers, labels, enriches and transforms structured, unstructured and multimodal data into governed datasets at scale — combining automated pipelines with active learning and human-in-the-loop workflows for continuous quality improvement.
      • No-code/low-code by design. Both technical and business teams can build and operationalize AI pipelines, eliminating the siloed tools and manual workflows that slow AI adoption.Works across heterogeneous storage — not just Dell. It’s the only vendor-provided, no-code/low-code solution that automates discovery through governance on a single platform while running across mixed storage environments.
      • GPU-accelerated performance built into the data layer. Integrated NVIDIA cuDF and cuVS deliver up to 12x faster vector indexing and up to 3x faster data preparation — no separate data-engineering stack required — fueling retrieval-augmented generation and agentic AI.

Together, these innovations make the Dell AI Data Platform the data foundation of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, already serving 4,000+ enterprise customers. This year’s award recognizes not just a platform, but a fundamentally more complete answer to the number-one blocker to enterprise AI: getting trusted, governed data into production, fast.

Building on a proven foundation

The Data Orchestration Engine doesn’t replace what earned recognition last year — it builds on it. Dell PowerScale continues to lead the industry in scalable, high-performance file storage, ObjectScale delivers secure, cloud-ready object storage and integrated analytics capabilities unify structured and unstructured data for high-performance analytics and AI. Layering orchestration on top of that purpose-built infrastructure is what gives the platform its end-to-end advantage — from storage all the way through governed, AI-ready datasets.

“The 2026 CRN Tech Innovator Awards winners represent the most innovative technologies driving the future of the IT channel,” said Jennifer Follett, Vice President, U.S. Content, Executive Editor, CRN, The Channel Company. “These award-winning solutions demonstrate exceptional vision, technological ingenuity and a commitment to solving real-world challenges for partners and customers. We congratulate this year’s winners on their innovation, channel leadership and meaningful contributions to the technology ecosystem.”

2026 Tech Innovator Awards Winners will be announced online at crn.com/techinnovators starting on Aug. 5.

Ready to build your AI data foundation?

If you’re looking to turn enterprise data into a real advantage for agentic AI, this is the next step. Dell AI Data Platform is built to help organizations create AI-ready datasets, automate data pipelines and support modern workloads across the full AI lifecycle. Start by registering for the event:

Then explore how Dell is helping customers build an open, modular data foundation for AI:

Join us in celebrating

We invite you to celebrate this achievement with us. Share the news using #CRNInnovators, tag @DellTech and @CRN-Media and keep the conversation going with your feedback, your questions and your vision for the future. Together, we’re advancing innovation and driving human progress.