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 …