Dmitry Vereshchagin - stock.adob
Dell boosts as a service approach with Apex
Vendor reveals details of Project Apex and its plans to provide a more consistent as a service approach for partners
Dell Technologies has kicked off its World Experience event with a focus on everything as a service and its Project APEX.
The vendor has offered some elements of its portfolio as a service in the past, but it is expanding that with APEX, as it brings together its different efforts under one banner. In Q2, Dell reported 30% year-over-year growth in as a service and flexible consumption recurring revenues.
Everything as a service has emerged as one of the themes of the year with a number of vendors rallying round the concept along with launches of offerings from some distributors.
Dell Technologies senior vice-president of product marketing Sam Grocott said the move to as a service had been happening for a while but the coronavirus pandemic had accelerated it.
“The as a service experience was really born out of the public cloud over the last decade as organisations looked to take advantage of the public cloud to have this as a service experience to help them simplify and help give them more agility,” he said. “The pandemic, and what we're going trough, has certainly thrown it into overdrive.”
The Dell approach is to pitch a consistent approach to those looking for as a service consumption in a hybrid world, with a straightforward way of choosing and rolling out services. In a hybrid world there are opportunities, he argued, to bring the as a service experience into the on-premise environment.
“They’re looking at ways to bring as a service on premises and if you think about if from a market expansion standpoint IDC is saying that by 2024 more than 75% of infrastructure at the edge and more than 50% of infrastructure in the core data centre will be consumed as a service,” he said.
A simplified experience
Project Apex is what it all looks like and Grocott gave the definition of what it all means: “It is our strategy to deliver a radically simplified as a service and cloud experience to our customers and partners,” he said.
The vendor is underpinning the approach with a Cloud Console, a cloud-based management platform, which will come in the first half of next year and it is extending its cloud platform subscription availability to the UK, France and Germany.
The vendor is also looking to launch storage as a service in the US in the first half of 2021. That will be followed by compute as a service, data protection as a service, and PC as a service in the future.
Dell is also taking steps to simplify its Flex On Demand pricing to make it easier for orders to be processed that are based around pre-configured pricing covering the most popular products. Partners will be able to gain additional rebates up to 20% on those on demand solutions.
“So for organisations or customers that are looking to go down that path, to let Dell Technologies manage that deploy that provide that service to them, so they can focus more on their business, we’ve got the as a service path for them,” he said.
“We’re very excited about being able to deliver this Apex as a service experience,” said Grocott. “We think it’s going to deliver the simplicity, the choice and the consistent operating model that customers are looking for as they look to simplify their on-premise infrastructure and extend out to a multicloud public cloud environment – and certainly as we extend out into the edge.”
