Dell Technologies: It’s No Longer a Cloud-First World

The “on premises versus cloud” debate is dead, according to Dell Technologies.

The vendor was talking about the multicloud opportunities for channel partners at a UK roundtable on Wednesday. Among those in attendance were senior VP and UK GM Dayne Turbitt, and UK CTO Elliot Young.

Dell’s Dayne Turbitt

“I’m getting back from my customers … it’s no longer cloud-first. It’s now multicloud, and that puts us in a really great position to help our clients,” said Turbitt.

Young also noted that organizations are opting to find the best destinations for their workloads, whether co-lo, private, public cloud or on-premises. The vendor was advocating for unifying infrastructure management so IT teams can better manage workloads in whatever location they choose.

“They’ve ended up with some capabilities in AWS, some in Azure, some in Google, some on premises, some with partners,” said Young. “The reality for most organizations is that the best combination for them is a combination of all of those. We’ve been hard at work to make sure that we’re giving customers choice. So they can feel free to make that decision and we’ll make it as seamless and easy to achieve this multicloud solution as possible.”

Turbitt said the channel was “incredibly important” to those plans, with 45% of the company’s UK business going through partners.

He said partners’ experience selling public cloud alongside Dell Technologies means they are “the glue that sticks it together. The channel exists to provide value-added services to our technologies. These alliances really bode well for our channel partners and partners of Microsoft and AWS.”

Apex Opportunity for Partners

Dell Technologies’ infrastructure-as-a-service offering, Apex, is about to go live with several UK channel partners. There are several ways Dell partners can offer cloud services through Apex, said Young.

“If you look at Apex, a channel partner could bring an end customer into contact with us and g

Dell’s Elliot Young

et a fee for that. Or they can sell through to the end customer. Or more interestingly, they could set themselves up as a cloud service provider themselves. That way they can aggregate lots of smaller end customers together.

“With the Apex service for compute, or for storage, [they] present that as a multitenant solution back to their end customers,” he continued. “Then they can overlay on top of that some added value-added services. So the partner will include integration services, or they’ll look at adding on the cyber recovery capability. Or they’re looking at reprocessing the data so that it’s fit for artificial intelligence to accelerate how they analyse data. There are so many different ways they can add their own services. It gives them a full portfolio that they can present to their end customers.”

Young added that partners can even become virtual service providers.

“A partner doesn’t need a data centre infrastructure to be able to sell and deliver those kinds of services. We will also make those available through Equinix data centres. Those data centres will stand up the kit, will own the kit, will run the kit for the partner. The partner then overlays their value-add services on top and focuses their people on delivering the benefit to their end customers. So I think it’s a great solution for channel partners.”