Taking a Look at Dell’s New IaaS Cloud-based Solutions

With one of the largest install bases of VMware customers, Dell is poised to become a serious contender when it comes to providing for its customers across-the-board support from the data center to the cloud. Still, the cloud services industry remains a wildly competitive one, in which nearly all major IT vendors will likely be playing in the not-too-distant future.

I sat down last week with Egan Christensen, the Executive Director of Cloud Services Sales at Dell, to talk about the company’s announcement and how he sees it changing the landscape of the public cloud space.

Kim Borg: Now that the post-VMworld dust cloud has settled and Dell has announced its new Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions, how will this enable the company to carve out part of the fast-developing market for cloud-computing services?

Egan Christensen: Dell is taking a stance on cloud computing with our investment in the vCloud datacenter that we announced recently, as well as with the investment of more than a billion dollars in data centers around the world, so our intention is to truly work with our enterprise customers and, in the future, our medium and small business customers.

Essentially, we are offering yet another alternative in the market today for Infrastructure-as-a-Service and other cloud-like offerings.

KB: You’ll not only be selling business customers space on a ‘secure Dell datacenter’ that will run on VMware software but also offering consulting, data security and other services. Would you please detail these offerings for our readers?

EC: Dell is going to offer the vCloud infrastructure as a service offering and then around that, we’ve got a full suite of application development capabilities that will allow us to help our customers to modernize their application stacks as needed to work inside a specific environment. We’ve also got a full set of consulting services wrapped around this, where we can help our customers in their journey to the cloud by understanding what’s achievable now and in the future. What we’re doing is really just helping them with their roadmap.

We’re taking a very agnostic approach to cloud management. We’re not there to push specific hardware services, including our own. Rather, we’re there to help our customers understand what options they have and get them on the right path to ensure their success. Whether its our IT management services, sole outsource services or our services combined with a customer’s existing cloud or private infrastructure, we’re able to offer a very comprehensive approach to managing these environments for our customers in a more flexible, dynamic way.

KB: Do you anticipate that this offering will make Dell a true competitor, on the level of cloud computing rivals such as IBM and Amazon?

There’s a big enough market out there today for everybody to play in this space without stepping on each other’s toes too much.

It’s a world of co-opetition, so for us it’ll be about finding the right solution for our customers and pointing them to those solutions accordingly. We hope, of course, that those solutions will include our Dell public infrastructure. We think it will, because of the Dell name and the brand behind it, our ability to understand the cloud and the cloud market, and the fact that we provide the backbone to 18 out of the top 25 Internet providers in the world today.

In addition, we have a security offering through our SecureWorks acquisition, which gives us a Managed Service Provider-like control around our entire cloud environment. In essence, we’re offering a very differentiated approach from most of our competitors, so we think this will level us very quickly in the market.

Certainly, we’ve got some maturing to do when it comes to our offering stack and finding the right customers to join us in the beginning of the journey, but we’ll be expanding deeply over the next few years to make sure we get the right customer alignment and provide the right solutions for those customers.

KB: Would you please touch on how this new cloud offering is part of Dell’s broader corporate strategy to reduce dependence on PCs? What benefits will that yield?

EC: Clearly, the need for on-trend solutions and privatized cloud is not going to go away. But what these offerings do is offer a different way for our customers, at a higher level, to really understand how they’re going to manage their business. Do they want to continue with the day-to-day management of their Development and Quality Assurance environments and do they want to deal with the sprawl of cloud within their own organization and ensure that sprawl is being used effectively? Do they have the right tools, people and processes to support that?

Well, the answer in many cases is ‘no’, so looking at a cloud solution to divert some of those actions allows customers to consolidate, centralize and utilize it in a way that they can really understand how their organizations are using cloud.

The need for local desktops will still be around, even when we announce our products such as VDaaS [Virtual Desktops as a Service], which will allow us to provide desktops on the fly to individuals. But we recognize that’s always going to be a blended solution and that there will be a specialized market for that. As Internet connections speed up and as connectivity gets more solid, these tools will become more prevalent and will mature with the industry over the next few years.

KB: Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell’s services unit, has been quoted as saying that “cloud computing brings a new level of economic advantages to data centers.” Would you please expand on just exactly what this means?

EC: We look at it as a way to move from a capex-based environment to an opex-based environment, depending on the needs of an organization. This means helping customers understand, from a fiscal perspective, how they can manage the end-of-life of a server, whether they own it themselves, or whether they decide to use a public cloud service, which moves them over to more of an operating expense paradigm.

We also see the shifts of having unused hardware, so if customers continue to run their own private cloud, they’re only using 50 to 70 percent of that environment. Well, 30 percent of that depreciates over the three to five years of life that a customer assigned to that desktop, laptop or system that’s inside the data center and so that becomes a cost bear that the organization has to hold onto.

What Steve is talking about is essentially the ability to truly understand your costings, to bear your system shift and make the best choice for your organization based on where you’re set up. For instance, if a company has a very robust data center and they have a lot of space in it – which isn’t the case for most customers we talk to today – remaining private would be a much more palatable solution for them based on how they run their business.

Alternatively, customers who are having storage issues and development system issues – for example, a shrinking data center and a lack of capacity – are more likely to move to a public cloud because it would allow them to augment their data center without having to buy a whole new data center and deal with all the cooling, heating, maintenance and support that goes with running a day-to-day operation. This allows these types of customers a flexible approach to computing, which is what Steve referring to.

KB: When will the new services be available?

EC: We plan to announce the vCloud datacenter services at the end of October, and then in the first quarter of next year, we’ll be announcing Microsoft Azure and other platforms to support our overall cloud strategy.