The latest services that Dell has added to its broad portfolio focus on one of the more persistent megatrends reshaping the industry, namely the cloud.

Dell has been steadily transforming itself as a company over the past few years, with its focus on services playing a particular pivotal role in the company’s effort to reinvent itself. Thus it perhaps came as little surprise that the company would revitalise its offerings around cloud.

Flexibility first

However, one of the most notable aspects of the launch of its Cloud Services in Melrose last month, was just how much of a flexible approach the company has taken. In essence, Dell has taken it on itself to offer businesses who want to venture into the cloud the means to do so in any number of ways. The company elaborated that its new offering enables customers to choose between private, public and hybrid cloud environments, according to their needs.

Nick Hyner, the director of cloud services for EMEA at Dell, explained that the new offering further enables customers to access local cloud services if desired as well as global platforms from the likes of Google or Amazon, through one provider (Dell). Furthermore, Dell’s newly announced Cloud Services solution enables customers to manage different cloud environments with one management tool. Hyner continued that, with its new service, Dell could build a private cloud on whatever platform their customer desired. While Dell has a strong relationship with Microsoft, he stressed that the service was completely platform agnostic, as determined by the customer’s preference.

A return to mainframe?

Addressing the presumption that business’ takeup of cloud services signifies a return to the mainframe era, Hyner disagreed, explaining that the point of cloud services was to use the internet to access a greater range of IT. Hyner asserted that Dell’s raft of acquisitions place the company in a strong position to manage a variety of cloud environments for its customers securely, thus addressing what has traditionally been a key concern for those migrating to the technology. 

“Dell Cloud Services is an unmissable opportunity for customers in Africa to explore the technologies, techniques and strategies that they need to accelerate modernisation by ways of virtualisation, convergence and the cloud,” he concluded. For more information visit www.dell.co.za