The Sky’s the Limit: A Look at Dell’s Cloud

Dell has been a major player in the cloud space but from a HW infrastructure perspective, providing the driving force behind many private and public cloud offerings around the world. The major difference for Dell is that we are entering into the cloud arena with the ability to deliver hardware and services in a consumable fashion that meets our customers’ needs. Why now? Network speeds have increased dramatically, linking the world together in a way that just was not possible before; the types and quality of cloud service providers have risen consistently and an increase in comfort level for businesses to place their crown jewels – their data – outside the traditional four walls, as many CIOs now consider hosted environments to be more secure and stable than their own due to SLAs and overall customer commitments; and a growing number of CIOs seeing technology-as-a-service having the most profound influence, providing scalable methods of managing the IT side of the world. Yes – now is the time for Dell to strengthen its position in this market, facilitating our continuing transition from a hardware and services company into a solutions organization that can bring the best of breed products – hardware, services, application modernization, security, integration and cloud-based offerings – to our customers, helping to transform businesses and enabling new value.

KB: Let’s talk about bringing the cloud down to earth. What solutions and services does Dell offer to not only help organizations maximize their IT investment but also meet their broad-based business demands?

EC: As I mentioned, and probably will again, Dell already provides a very robust set of offerings for delivering cloud infrastructure to its customers. In fact, 18 out of the top 25 Internet companies on the planet use Dell hardware as their backbone for their day-to-day services, so we understand the cloud – from a hardware perspective, a services perspective and an overall infrastructure perspective.

In addition, our IT management Software-as-a-Service [SaaS} offerings – which are a robust set of tools focused on email management, distributed device management, backup, recovery & encryption, monitoring, and alerting allows us to fulfill the needs of customers in areas such as maintaining a cloud based disaster recovery for email. In other words: Simple-to- set-up email continuity, archive and security solutions. If you are upgrading exchange, dealing with email system outages or needing to simplify your disaster recovery process, it pays to have a cloud ‘flip of the switch’ fail over system at your fingertips.

We also have some great services, such as SecureWorks, an amazing security offering that allows us to provide additional security controls for our customers’ organizations such as network log, security devices and other key assets such as monitoring, 24/7 support with alerts, and vulnerability and web application scanning. We also have InSiteOne, which gives us the ability to provide data storage, archive and disaster recovery for medical data and information, along with a integration service called Boomi, which allows us to integrate data across new and legacy applications in a simplified fashion by literally taking information from one application to another application in an cloud enabled automated drag and drop fashion. Boomi and SecureWorks are my favorite acquisitions because when I talk about the cloud, the two biggest concerns we hear from our customers revolve around security and legacy system interoperability: These services solve both better than any other offering in the market.

In the near future, we’ll be offering public cloud offerings that will give us the ability to provide infrastructure as a service to manage elastic demand needs, burst capacity for peak and season demand as well as scalable infrastructure for services providers.

The reality is that we think there’s a lot of hype in the cloud today. What Dell brings is a pure backbone of how to approach the cloud effectively so that our customers feel comfortable about their journeys. We’re finding that every customer’s journey is a little different. Slowing down to completely understand our customers’ ultimate goals and requirements will help us partner together to find the best way to manage their growing data management needs, ever changing compute workloads, applications needs, integration bursting requirements and the associated services to bring it all together.

KB: What exactly does the term ‘cloud’ mean to consumers these days?

EC: Cloud is being used as more of a marketing term versus an offering, so when everybody talks about cloud, and they use it fairly self-servingly. That’s completely understandable and I am certainly guilty of this too. The challenge with the word ‘cloud’ is that it can have so many meanings depending on the lens through which one are looking.

I truly believe that Dell sets itself apart because it has the right set of integrated solutions for its customers. Whether it’s the on or off premise cloud hardware infrastructure, the consulting, the wraparound services, or the application modernization that’s needed to run an organization’s backbone, Dell provides solutions in a way that other providers cannot. Of course, the cloud it not just about savings; it’s also about bringing together a complex environment and making it easier for our customers to manage it, simplifying business processes and enabling an IT delivery model to help transform any organization.

KB: Will Dell’s cloud solutions enable businesses to deploy and manage private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures?

EC: The short answer is ‘yes.’ We have hardware that supports the cloud infrastructure from our Dell Data Center Services [DCS] organization, which allows us to provide the right backbone to our customers through hardware solutions, designed specifically for the cloud.

From a build and operate perspective, we certainly offer all sorts of tools across the infrastructure. For example, we have a self-service Virtual Integrated System [VIS] director program, which allows us to manage virtual environments in a clean, effective way.

These solutions and many more combined with Dell Cloud Solutions HW, IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service], SaaS [Software as a Service], Security, Integration and Consulting give us the ability to deliver on all combinations of hybrid cloud solutions.

KB: Regardless of a business’s size, what is the common denominator when it comes to designing, building and deploying highly efficient cloud solutions?

EC: It really depends where the customers are in their journey. For many customers, consolidating their environments into a centralized location and reducing operating expenses and capital expenditure is a huge step in achieving their goals; I mean, who would not want this? They also see that these services are being designed to bring scalability staff, so their resources can be refocused on other business mission critical activities, thus providing a whole bunch of savings and, more importantly, efficiency. The challenge here is that is does take introspection from customers to identity those parts of their business that will bring them the best results.

Then, there are other customers who are just looking to start leveraging cloud based services and have specific areas of pain where help is needed, so it’s really about a maturity scale and understanding where your customers are on their own journeys.

Dell’s customers are in many different areas. Some are well down the path and have a defined cloud strategy and understand where they can increase savings and how they want to utilize it, while others are still in discovery mode and are looking for that trusted advisor that can come in and help them understand how their environment works and how it will work in the cloud. These customers can use a crawl, walk, run methodology, knowing where that low-hanging fruit is where they can get quick value-added help. Customers ultimately want to learn what to put to and in the cloud that will allow them to create more of a leveraged environment that hopefully should bring with it optimum efficiency. We have a great Cloud Consulting services that utilizes a clear methodology to assess cloud readiness and can help through all aspects of defining an organization’s cloud strategy.

KB: How important is it to consolidate business applications onto one database grid to enable increased scalability?

EC: I don’t think it’s critical that it’s all on a single platform; it’s like saying that my need for a CRM system, HR system and email server need to be all the same data center to work. They do not in today’s world. With the ability to integrate applications across the cloud, customers can lean on the right expertise to maximize their business. Many companies today get payroll services outsourced, use SaaS-based sales tools such as salesforce.com, and use online travel booking service, for example. Why? Because these providers can typically do it better and more efficiently than businesses can do it in house.

It’s about picking the pockets of expertise that allow your company to be the most efficient. For instance, if I had a small liquor distributorship and I decided I wanted to become the biggest liquor distributorship on the planet, well, the first thought in my mind isn’t about IT and the consolidated systems and my backend billing and procurement systems; it’s about my relationships with my vendors and my customer base. Essentially, the IT part of it becomes an afterthought. So, for organizations looking to the cloud, our recommendation is that you go down kind of a diverse path, which allows us to determine what we can do to build and operate, whether that is through a partner or an internally supported organization. Customers need to ask themselves how they can develop and integrate into a program that will not only allow them to build out their cloud platforms but also truly consume and deliver them.

Our goal is to provide a holistic view to our customers, so that when they’re figuring out what their journeys look like, they can have the right competitiveness, the right control and the right choice based on the types of services for which they are looking.

Dell recommends to its customers that they first investigate. This means understanding what’s in their environments and determining what would make the most sense to move to the cloud. Experiment! Look to things where you think you’re going to gain some efficiency within the organization and then figure out how you adopt.

KB: Do you anticipate a single giant emerging and claiming the marketplace in the cloud space? Also, why, in a sky crowded with cloud providers, should businesses entrust their environments to Dell?
EC: As far as if it’s going to be one monolithic owner of the cloud, I don’t think so; I think that the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the industry will allow the market to continue to open and introduce additional wraparound services.

With regards to where we’re at in the cloud today, the industry is still very young. When you look at the different eras of computing – the mainframe era, the PC client server era, the Internet era and the virtual era – all of these changes have brought about new applications, new resources and new ways of adapting to the business.

Dell wants to be the cornerstone of that and we offer a full foundation of cloud services that allows our customers to have choices in their journeys, to pick and choose those services, those applications and those cloud-based tools that allow them to become more efficient in their space and do more with fewer resources.

So I see this as a journey that everyone is going to go through and certainly Dell is putting its footprint down very hard right now. We’re opening up 10 new data centers around the planet with more than a billion dollar investment. We want to take a good portion of the market share by offering the right tools and key strategic partner offerings to our customers.

The fact is that it’s not just about being there first; it’s about offering that right solution and that’s what we’re focused on. We want to make sure our solutions are wrapped around offerings that make it easier for our customers to achieve success however they need to define it. Of course, we must remember, it’s not just about savings; it’s also about bringing together a complex environment and making it easier for our customers to manage through it.

Posted in: Cloud Computing,Computer techonology