Dell Technologies' Project Frontier edge operations platform is an important piece of its ambitions to “really help customers make multicloud real,” CEO Michael Dell said during the Dell Technologies Summit.

“multicloud is definitely the theme that is resonating across the industry and across all customers that we work with around the world,” he explained. “We are innovating to provide a seamless experience for customers across all the places that they might run their applications and data,” including public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, colo, and edge environments.

He cited the company's Apex cyber recovery service compatibility with every major public cloud and teased “more and more multicloud capabilities” the vendor plans to roll out. Dell also noted his company's relationship with VMware, which is “still very much at the center of a lot of the multicloud discussions that go on with customers.”

“But they're not the only one,” he added, referencing an expanded integration with Red Hat's OpenShift Kubernetes orchestration platform via a Dell-managed, on-premises, container-as-a-service option, which allows developers to write cloud-native applications on Dell infrastructure.

Another key tenant of the vendor's multicloud plans is the edge, which it's tackling with the newly released Project Frontier platform.

“If you think about edge and Dell, this is not new for us,” Sam Grocott, Dell Technologies SVP of product marketing, said during a pre-briefing. That means the vendor understands “the game has got to change,” he said, citing customer-based requirements introduced with Project Frontier, which the company is banking on as the “next frontier” for its multicloud strategy.

Dell expects Project Frontier will aid customers in advanced manufacturing, retail, transportation, and logistic – “all these industries where we're seeing the edge really take off in a big way” – by simplifying, optimizing, and scaling edge apps securely. “And all of that is backed up by our global support and deployment network,” he said.

At the end of the day, the company's roadmap is essentially defined by customer requirements. “In the discussions that we're having, there is a great appetite for multicloud and making multicloud real,” he added.