Dell Technologies' Project Apex Solidifies as-a-Service and Cloud Strategy

Dell Technologies Project Apex, announced Wednesday at Dell Technologies World – Digital Experience, solidifies the company’s as-a-service and cloud strategy both internally and externally for partners and customers.

The vendor refers to Project Apex as its strategy for delivering a radically simplified as-a-service and cloud experience to customers and partners. The pillars of Project Apex are to deliver simplicity, choice and consistency.

Dell’s Sam Grocott

“This will allow us to bring together not only our external message in how we communicate our offers as we go forward, but internally how we align and transform to deliver this as-a-service experience across all the various functions across Dell Technologies,” Sam Grocott, senior vice president, product marketing at Dell Technologies, said. “It’s really a unifying effort.”

Over time, Dell Technologies Project Apex and Dell Technologies Cloud will likely merge as the vendor rationalizes its brands.

Turnkey Offers

The turnkey as-a-service offers will span Dell’s portfolio across storage, servers, networking and hyperconverged infrastructure. They also span PCs and broader solutions on the client side. Dell will fully manage these solutions; they’ll be scalable and managed via the Dell Technologies Cloud Console.

The company boasts delivering consistency, or unifying operations across all multicloud environments, across core, edge and cloud. Additionally, there’s the ability to extend workloads seamlessly to the public cloud.

“Project Apex will also deliver the industry’s most flexible and simplest as-a-service experience for on-premises infrastructure,” said Grocott.

New Products

Dell will deliver four new products. They include the Cloud Console, storage as a service (ST-as-a-service), updates to the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, and updates to Dell’s pre-approved flex on demand program.

The Dell Technologies Cloud Console is a new online platform. It provides the foundation for Project Apex for managing the as-a-service offerings. The Cloud Console is where users can view the marketplace, transact cloud service and as-a-service business. It’s also where customers deploy workloads, manage multicloud resources, monitor costs in real-time and add capabilities.

While Dell will announce the Cloud Console at Dell Technologies World, it will only be open to select customers. Expect general availability in the first half of next year.

Also coming in that time frame is ST-as-a-service. It’s the first turnkey service offering. ST-as-a-service is based on a pay-for-what-you-use model and services are delivered via the Cloud Console. The solution is deployed on premises and is owned and managed by Dell Technologies or a partner.

There’s no road map in hand for the delivery of additional turnkey offers. However, Dell will make available both horizontal and vertical offers. For example, compute as a service, data protection as a service, PC as a service and so on. Eventually, Dell will scale out offers over the entire portfolio. Additionally, vertical solutions are on tap; for example, SAP and VDI as a service.

Enhancements

Instance-based configurations, or workload instances, is a new feature the company is adding to Dell Technologies Cloud Platform.

“This will simplify how customers size, order and deploy on-premises cloud resources, aligning their experience with the public cloud compute offers,” said Grocott.

Finally, Dell is expanding and simplifying ordering for pre-approved …

… Flex on Demand. Businesses get to configure what they need across hardware, systems software, essential deployment capabilities and support services. It is available for Dell Technologies channel partners to resell. And the vendor’s global partners will get a rebate up to 20% on Flex on Demand solutions.

“We see this as a big stepping stone to our cloud and storage as a service, and other as-a-service offers we continue to roll out,” Grocott said.

Partner Opportunity

Dell Technologies’ Project Apex embraces customers and partners, so it’s the way forward for Dell and its partner ecosystem.

Looking at some of today’s specfics, Dell will provide channel partners access to the Cloud Console, as well as APIs. The APIs will allow partners to integrate their own system of record to the Cloud Console.

Dell Technologies’ Varun Chhabra

“This will make it simpler and seamless to provision infrastructure on behalf of their end customer,” said Varum Chhabra, vice president, product marketing, Dell Technologies Cloud.

Today, partners actively participate in Dell’s Flex on Demand program. There are two routes to participate — referral or resale (for titanium or alliance partners).

“With this announcement, what we’re also doing is announcing an increase in the front-end rebate that partners will be eligible for,” said Akanksha Mehrota, vice president, marketing for Dell Technologies on Demand, Services and Dell Digital business units.

That’s up to a 20% rebate of a committed contract value on storage, data protection offers and up to 10% on the services.

“Our hope is the combination of the pre-approved pricing, the broad portfolio that it covers and the profitability that’s baked in will help our channel partners drive traction,” she added.

Referring to announcements made around the Dell Technology Cloud Platform, the company is also extending Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription availability to the U.K., France and Germany. Additional global expansion is coming soon.

All Aboard

Dell Technologies joins the crowded field of big-name vendors putting a transformational stake in the ground.

HPE formally announced its shift to an as-a-service company in June 2019. The multiyear transformation, with a 2022 target date, positioned GreenLake as a key part of that strategy.

In November 2018, Cisco announced its shift as a traditional infrastructure company to software. More recently, in August of this year, the vendor reported that while quarterly revenue was down 9%, at $12.2 billion, 78% of Cisco revenue is sold via subscription — beating its own target of 66%. And, to take $1 billion out of its cost structure, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said to expect to see an acceleration of the company’s portfolio to be delivered as a service.

And while IBM has been morphing its business for years, the company made a bold move announcing a strategic plan to split into two. IBM will separate the managed infrastructure services unit from its Global Technology Services division. IBM is calling the spinoff, a new public company, “NewCo.”