Dell Opens New Unit for Smaller Hyperscale Customers

Dell has opened a new business unit targeting smaller hyperscale customers deploying large but not massive numbers of x86 servers, such as telecommunications service providers, hosting companies, oil and gas, and research organizations.

The new unit, dubbed Dell Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) and housed in Dell’s Enterprise Solutions group, is aimed at the next-level down from huge datacenter installations, a slice of the x86 server market the vendor pegs as a $6 billion opportunity based on its internal data.

Dell’s new initiative is an outgrowth of Dell’s eight-year old Data Center Solutions Group which targets larger hyperscale customers in massive datacenter environments. It aims at a segment a level below the hyperscale space in size but whose needs in terms of buying and building out datacenter capabilities are similar to the bigger players, Dell said.

The vendor intends to tap its enterprise portfolio, support capabilities and supply chain to craft custom, purpose-built hyperscale solutions to meet the needs of smaller customers. In that regard, the new unit has been constructed with the ability to quickly supply customers with additional server and application capacity quickly when needed, Dell said.

“Dell Datacenter Scalable Solutions is a prime example of how Dell, as a private company, is able to be more nimble, make faster decisions and, most importantly, drive innovation on behalf of its customers,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, Dell Server Solutions vice president and general manager.

“While others in the IT industry have been focused on marketing hype or reducing capex costs only, we’ve created a new operating model that is centered around flexibility,” she said. “DSS is about understanding customers’ goals and enabling them to achieve those objectives by giving them purpose-built solutions that are designed when and how they want it.”

Still, as with Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group, it will be difficult to tell how the new DSS unit is performing and whether the vendor is on to something by partitioning its efforts at smaller hyperscale data center customers as well.

As a privately-held company, Dell now discloses its quarterly financial results only to a select group of its debt securities and prospective institutional investors, so without an inside seat at that table it’s difficult to know how the company’s doing.

The vendor will provide insiders with the details of its FQ2 2016 performance on September 3.