Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) latest battleground in their ongoing war of words and market share is the lucrative as-a-service sector.

This market has become increasingly popular as the COVID-19 pandemic drove thousands of enterprise employees into remote work from home while also driving enterprise workloads, applications, and services to the cloud.

While Dell’s cloud-delivered services took center stage at its Dell Technologies World event this week, HPE wasted no time firing return shots.

Dell first rolled out its pay-as-you-go infrastructure program, which is similar to HPE’s GreenLake portfolio, at last year’s Dell Technologies World. About six months later CEO Michael Dell plugged Dell Technologies’ shift to cloud-delivered IT services — this includes its servers, storage, and networking —at an event in Austin, Texas. However, the company hasn’t yet said when this shift to as a service will be completed.

At this week’s Dell Technologies World, executives rebranded this effort as Project Apex. “Project Apex really is that North Star strategy that we’ll be driving externally and internally across Dell Technologies to align to this as-a-service and cloud experience,” Dell Technologies SVP Sam Grocott said. “It’s really a unifying effort.”

Project Apex will merge different products and portfolios including Dell Technologies Cloud, and the vendor’s various consumption-based pricing portfolios under its Dell Technologies On Demand.

Grocott claimed that the vendor already has more than 2,000 as-a-service customers. Additionally, Dell’s as-a-service and flexible consumption products generate $1.3 billion in recurring revenue, which represents a 30% increase year over year.

HPE, meanwhile, started its as-a-service pivot about three years ago. CEO Antonio Neri previously said GreenLake is HPE’s fastest-growing business, and he has pledged to offer HPE’s entire portfolio as a service by 2022.

While HPE reports fewer as-a-service customers, it says its business shows faster growth — and claims victory.

Keith White, SVP and GM of HPE GreenLake, says GreenLake boasts 850 customers including Wells Fargo, Porsche Informatik, Nokia, and Lyondell Basell. This as-a-service business holds over $4 billion in total contract value, and its growth accelerates every quarter, he added.

On its most recent earnings call, Neri said GreenLake generated 82% growth in customer orders year over year. “We have yet to see others come close to this kind of growth in as-a-service,” White wrote in an email to SDxCentral. “HPE GreenLake is the cloud experience that comes to you.”

While this sounds very similar to Dell’s as-a-service strategy, White said “it’s important to distinguish between Dell’s ‘new way’ to finance infrastructure and the true cloud experience on-prem that customers are really looking for. At HPE, we continue to focus on our customers. Our approach includes truly automated, scalable cloud services comprising compute, storage, VMs, containers, MLOps and more, in addition to a unified, operations console with HPE GreenLake Central from which customers can manage their entire hybrid IT estate.”

Again, still sounds similar to Dell’s pitch. “Cloud is an operating model,” said Deepak Patil, SVP for cloud platforms and solutions at Dell Technologies, in an earlier interview. “It’s not a destination.”

Dell also, during Dell Technologies World, announced Cloud Console, which is an operations console that customers can use to unify and manage their environments, deploy workloads, monitor costs, and shop for cloud services via an online marketplace.

It is worth noting that, unlike GreenLake Central, which is generally available now, Dell’s Cloud Console is only available in public preview for select customers.

Competition — and fighting words — between the two vendors is nothing new. Dell and HPE have long battled in the server and storge markets, and that has continued into hyperconverged infrastructure.

The vendors’ sparring matches then pushed to the edge, with HPE’s Neri saying “Dell doesn’t have an edge-to-cloud approach,” and into the cloud with Michael Dell telling reporters that HPE’s multi-cloud strategy “isn’t going so well.”

At VMworld 2019, HPE began offering VMware’s full software stack as a service. And on the same day, Dell, which owns about 81% of VMware, made available its Cloud Data Center as a Service running VMware’s software stack.