Dell to go Partner route for public cloud

May 20, 2013

As you may be aware Dell has been offering and hosting a public, multi-tentant IaaS cloud offering.  After getting that business off the ground and many customer conversations,  we’ve come to realize that the greatest way we can provide value for our customers is to focus our investments on more strategic components of the cloud and provide our customers with maximum choice and flexibility.

As a result, rather than building out and supporting our own multi-tenant public cloud, we will partner with companies in order to provide customers access to the cloud(s) of their choice.

Enter Enstratius

A sampling of some of the public clouds Enstratius provides access to.

A sampling of some of the public clouds Enstratius provides access to.

With our recent acquisition of Enstratius not only are we are able to provide our customers with the ability to manage and govern a multi-cloud environment but we are now able to offer access to over 20 prominent clouds from Amazon to Rackspace, to Google, to AT&T.

A new Partner Program

Beyond the partners that Enstratius provides access to, today we are also kicking off today a partner program to provide access to IaaS through an ecosystem of options.  The first three partners we are announcing are:  Joyent, Scale Matrix, Zero Lag:

  • Joyent: An IaaS provider for real-time web and mobile applications. Joyent has out-of-the-box compatibility with Enstratius’ multi-cloud management.
  • ScaleMatrix: Cloud hosting platform, Services are offered from proprietary world-class data centers, and leverage enterprise hardware, storage and cutting-edge security and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation services.
  • ZeroLag: Combines VMware-powered on-demand cloud infrastructure with professional services and custom-designed solutions.

Customers will be able to purchase products from these partners through their Dell sales representatives and you can find out more information at dell.com/cloud-partner-program.

Private Cloud and Project Sputnik

On the Private Cloud front nothing has changed.   We are still huge supporters of OpenStack OpenStack_200.jpg-2f65a9098a7b1dd1and will continue offering our Open Stack-based private clouds.  Additionally  we will continue to provide cloud-to-on-premise connectivity via Boomi.

On the Project Sputnik front the cloud launcher that we continue to work on is being designed to provide access to a host of clouds.

Extra-credit reading

  • Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem – Press Release

Pau for now..

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Posted by Barton George

Where Dell plays in the Cloud and how we got there

November 3, 2011

One of the interviews I did at Dell World was a video with IT in Canada.   I did the video with Paul Cooper, Dell’s country manager for Canada.

In the first half of the video I talk about how Dell got into the cloud and where we play in the space.  In the second half Paul talks about the roll the telcos will play in the delivery of cloud services in Canada as well as issues around privacy and data sovereignty.

Check it out.

From the article itself, here’s a great summary of our cloud participation and shows how we have built, bought and partnered along the way:

Dell’s excursion into cloud began with organic development of server and data centre capability in specialized systems to meet the needs of large cloud providers (Facebook, Microsoft Azure and Bing), progressed through modification of these systems for marketing to the “next 1,000”, and shifted to partnership with software makers such as Joyent to develop complete cloud solutions, and with companies such as VMware for the creation of a full service public cloud offering.

Supporting acquisitions along the way include companies with specific capabilities such as SecureWorks, which was purchased to address web security concerns that continue to dog broader cloud adoption, and BOOMI, a specialist in cloud integration, which enables Dell to better service customers who adopt a hybrid cloud approach to sourcing compute resources.

Extra-Credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Expo: Boomi case study — Enterprise Community Housing

June 6, 2011

Earlier today at Cloud Computing Expo here in New York, Boomi CTO Rick Nucci conducted a session entitled “Cloud Integration: Best practices for IT Executives.”  Rick did a great job sketching out the issues to consider and what to take into account with regards to integration.  The most compelling part of the talk, however came from Pradip Sitaram, CIO of Enterprise Business Partners and Boomi customer.  Enterprise is a not-for-profit that builds affordable housing across the U.S.

After Pradip got off stage I sat down with him and got him to give a condensed version of his talk:

Some of the ground Pradip covers:

  • Enterprise homes house over 1 million people and every 55 minutes somebody moves into an enterprise home.
  • Dealing with the financial and occupancy reports that come from over 1600 properties, on a daily, monthly and yearly basis.  How Boomi provided a solution to dealing with and managing these reports that was a fraction of the quote from the other vendor, and could be implemented in weeks instead of months.
  • Their longer term issue of dealing with over 70 databases that are out dated and need to be modernized.  The answer is to go to the cloud and Boomi will act as their strategic integration platform making sure that all the pieces old and new work together.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Expo: Talking to Rick Nucci, Boomi CTO

June 6, 2011

Today, day one of the Cloud Computing Expo kicked off here at the Javits center in New York city.  The event began with a keynote delivered by Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services.  Dell is the Diamond sponsor at the event and Steve talked about finding the real business value in cloud computing and the business of “Yes, now“.

Another of today’s speaker was the founder and CTO of Boomi, Rick Nucci.  Boomi provides a SaaS-based cloud integration offering and was acquired by Dell about six months ago.  After Rick finished his session I grabbed some time with him to learn more Boomi.

Some of the ground Rick covers:

  • What Boomi is and how it got started in the integration space back in 2000.
  • [01:05] How Boomi’s integration offering evolved from a traditional middleware approach to cloud-based.
  • [02:51] How being acquired by Dell has changed how Boomi run’s its business and serves its customers.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Day 2 of Dell’s analyst event and an SMB perspective from IDC’s Ray Boggs

May 5, 2011

Yesterday was day two of Dell’s two-day industry analyst summit which was held at the W hotel in Austin Texas.  The event brought together over 100 analysts from around the world to hear to about the company’s strategy and vision from Dell’s top execs.

The second day kicked off with a presentation by the President of Dell Services, Steve Schuckenbrock which was then followed by a panel moderated by Michael Dell himself.  The panel that Michael moderated was made up of the heads of four software companies Dell has recently acquired: Boomi, SecureWorks, KACE and Compellent.  The general sessions then concluded with a tag-team presentation by Dell’s CMO Karen Quintos and Andy Lark, VP of global marketing for Public and Large Enterprise.  Karen and Andy’s presentation covered Dell’s brand efforts and marketing initiatives in 2011.

Beyond the general sessions

After the general sessions, the rest of the afternoon featured a series of smaller breakout sessions as well as packed agenda of 1:1’s with analysts and Dell execs.  Between his one one-on-one’s I was able to grab some time with analyst Ray Boggs, VP of IDC‘s SMB and Home office research and get his take on the event:

Some of the ground Ray covers:

  • What were Ray’s expectations coming into the event and to what extent did Dell meet or miss those expectations
  • The key role the medium sized company plays in Dell’s strategy
  • Dell doubling down on acquisitions and R&D
  • What are Ray’s clients asking him about Dell
  • What would Ray like to see from Dell going forward

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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