Dell Technologies extended its Apex cloud platform to Microsoft Azure in a move to accelerate customer time to value and simplify the Microsoft-centric hybrid cloud experience with consistency across public clouds, data centers and the edge.

This new offer marks the Apex portfolio's latest push toward purposefully built multicloud environments. Most of Dell's existing customers operate in multiple types of computing environments, “but they've ended up there by default,” not by design, Dell VP of multicloud product management Caitlin Gordon told SDxCentral. “They haven't necessarily been able to make their on-premises, public clouds and private clouds really come together.”

In Dell's eyes, the solution is to offer a public cloud-like experience in any computing environment, “with the technology that you trust and know,” Gordon said.

Specifically, the Apex cloud platform combines Dell PowerEdge hardware platforms, software-defined storage based on Dell PowerFlex tech, and automated management and orchestration native to Azure. The Microsoft-tailored platform also integrates Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure and collaborative engineering processes between the two vendors.

At the heart is Dell's Apex cloud platform foundation software – the piece that welds Microsoft's cloud software with Dell hardware to make “this experience unique from anything else in the industry,” Gordon said.

On day one of deployment, for example, enterprises will be dealing with 88% fewer steps than in traditional integrated systems deployment, and once it's up and running, this offering represents “the fastest path to get updates to Azure Stack HCI in a turnkey system.” When Microsoft updates or patches its software, that patch will be validated and available to customers within four hours. And “not only are [patches] ready to upgrade, but they are validated to work with the entire stack, so you don't risk having part of the configuration out of sync,” she said.

Plus, with the Apex cloud platform for Microsoft Azure, organizations “can have a very small team and manage a very large environment with the same skill sets – you don't have to have new specialized skills,” she added. Instead, IT teams can focus their resources on building applications rather than managing the underlying infrastructure to support flexibly hybrid cloud workloads.

This offering also represents the first vendor product in Microsoft's Premier Solutions for Azure Stack Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) category. “Microsoft continues to really evolve what they're doing with Azure Stack HCI and their software, and we built this platform to be optimized to integrate with it,” Gordon said.

When deciding which cloud providers to partner with on Apex, Dell deemed Microsoft the No. 1 hyperscaler to work with, thanks to the two companies' long-standing relationship and common interest in driving hybrid cloud innovation. Dell also considers Microsoft to be “the hyperscaler that truly understands how the enterprise data center works,” Gordon said.

The fact that Microsoft recognized Dell's offering as worthy of a new tier in its Azure Stack for HCI hierarchy “shows that we're listening to our customers,” she added.

Dell's status as the first vendor to integrate with Microsoft in this way will set the company up in a “unique place long-term,” Gordon said. “Yes, we are first, but we also feel really good about the level of investment and experience we have between our two companies.”