Multicloud & Edge - New Frontiers
#Multicloud operations and #Edge Computing operations are two emerging needs in enterprise computing space. Almost all major vendors are trying their best to be in front of the market but few vendors are a good contender to lead in these two areas. I believe Dell technologies is one of those vendors which has a good shot at these two emerging areas in enterprise computing. Based on attending last week's Dell Technology Summit , I have identified following 3 factors to back this statement. Having said that, for all vendors, it's going to be a long journey to address the needs of enterprises to simplify overall technology consumption while keeping the economic viability of Digital Transformation Programs of our enterprises.
1. Existing products and services portfolio.
With $52 billion USD in revenue during the 1st half of the year. Both CSG (Client Solutions Group) and ISG (Infrastructure Solution Group) segments grew 13% year over year and operating income grew 41% year over year. Dell is also ranked #1 in commercial PC revenues and had 6 consecutive years of ISG growth. In economic turmoil like the one we are traversing through, technology buyers try to stick to fewer suppliers as focus shifts from growth to costs, vendors like Dell end up gaining market share due to the of breadth of their products & services, a phenomenon I call "Feature Proximity Effect".
2. New R&D investments in Multi-Cloud and Edge domains.
With the renewed focus on Multicloud, Dell is all in on Apex , a Family of Multicloud Products and Services. Multicloud strategy was the focus point during Dell's flagship annual event Dell Tech World , which happened in Las Vegas during May 2022. Apex started with Apex Data storage services. Dell expanded Apex with compute and security offerings with Apex VMware Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Apex Cyber Recovery Services and Apex Backup Services. Dell continues to add more services under Apex, the latest example being Redhat OpenShift Container solution. These Services are provided in 38 countries and has gone past one $1 billion US dollars in ARR (annual recurring revenue). Even though Dell has entered Multicloud market later than HPE, it has caught up steam pretty fast, mainly due to its closeness to VMWare.
Dell continue to expand project Alpine which was announced in May 2022. Project Alpine is Dell's effort to bring native storage services like file, block and object storage software to all the major hyper-scalers, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Apex Cyber Recovery Service is working with 3 major Cloud Service Providers. BTW, I want to caution Dell to have consistent "product & services bucket" naming and avoid "product & services bucket" overlaps. Creative terminologies and names can start to get complicated pretty fast causing confusion amongst customers and making things hard for the partners.
On security side, with the rise of edge workloads, security threat surface has been increasing. Dell Trusted Devices and Dell Trusted Infra solutions are Dell's existing products in Security space and now Cyber Resiliency Assessment Services and their flagship Cyber Vault are also available though Apex. Single control plane for Zero Trust Security is a key requirement to handle ever growing security needs, implied Michael Dell during his address to Analysts last week, on October 12, 2022.
One of the major new announcements at last week's Dell Technology Summit was Project Frontier, a Multicloud friendly "Operating Platform for Edge"
Dell's widening products and services portfolio gives Dell what I call Feature Proximity effect, which is one of the best in non-public cloud providers when it comes to infrastructure.
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3. Widening Ecosystem via New Partnerships
I believe, by having VMware as part of Dell, Dell's ability to partner with any vendor which competed with VMware was limited. After letting go of VMWare in 2021, some (if not all) of these concerns have gone away and last week during Dell Technology Summit, Dell announced a new partnership with Redhat. I believe this is a breath of fresh air for many customers and partners.
"VMWare is at the center of most Multicloud discussions with customers", said Michael Dell while talking to analysts during Dell Technology Summit. "... but they are not the only one solution out there" added Michael Dell. During Dell Technology Summit, Dell's new partnership with Redhat expands container services within Apex. Hybrid (Dell-Redhat) appliances are very similar to VMware VxRail hybrid appliances but these are built with Redhat OpenShift platform to allow customers to easily deploy containers across private data center, hybrid Cloud, Colos and Public Cloud, he added.
In effort to solidify Dell's very first (storage) service under Apex, partnership with #Snowflake was announced during Dell Tech World in May 2022.
Apex product portfolio has brought Dell's solutions to major Cloud Service Providers', AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Marketplaces, removing friction from usage of Dell products & services in Hybrid as well as Public Cloud scenarios. Dell's existing Azure Stack HCI Solution is expanding as well.
Overall, an Enterprise's dream goal is to have one control plane for DC, Colo, Hybrid, Cloud and Edge. having one control plane will help enterprises in leveraging smaller footprint of human capital (leverage existing skills) and it will simplify operations in turn improving economics. We, as an industry are far from realizing such vision but non Public Cloud Provider infrastructure vendors have started to build such Single Control Planes. It's a tall order and it will be built incrementally over-time. One striking issue I see at the industry level is that every vendor is building their own version of one control plane for Multicloud. We need efforts to have standards to ensure maximum (if not 100%) level of interoperability between these "control planes". My observation is that in the absence of having standards, OpenSource emerges as a standard. Dell is making efforts to better coordinate with OpenSource community to contribute and leverage the open source software componentry.
With new announcements, Dell has taken the steps in right direction and have made quick progress! Let's hope that the momentum continues and their ecosystem widens further! ______________________________________________________________________
Dell Technology Summit happens about 6 months after Dell Tech World every year. This year, DTS took place on Wednesday, October 12, 2022.