Dell Technologies unleashed Apex — formerly Project Apex — its as-a-service offering in the enterprise, today to kick off its annual user conference. 

Apex merges different products and portfolios including Dell Technologies Cloud and the vendor’s consumption-based pricing portfolio Dell Technologies On Demand. This, the company argues, will provide customers with a more consistent experience for workloads across on-premises, edge, and public cloud environments. 

CEO Michael Dell first announced Dell Technologies’ shift to cloud-delivered IT services — which includes servers, storage, and networking — back in 2019. At last year’s Dell Technologies World, the company 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 at the event. “It’s really a unifying effort.”

Today all of that came together as the vendor unboxed its Apex portfolio of as-a-service offerings. These include Apex Data Storage Services, Apex Cloud Services, Apex Custom Solutions, and Apex Console. "At the end of day, with Apex we're creating the new Dell, and everything's got to transform to make that happen," Grocott said.

Moving forward, all future as-a-service offerings from Dell will be Apex branded, Grocott said. This strategy capitalizes on growing demand for data and edge services, with IDC projecting that by 2024, over 50% of all data infrastructure and more than 75% of edge infrastructure will be consumed as-a-service.

Dell delivered on storage-as-a-service as promised. Apex Data Storage Services is an on-premises, scalable, elastic storage service that offers file, block, and soon, object data services. Customers can select between three performance tiers; designate base capacity, which starts at 50 terabytes (TB); set their subscription term, which range from one and three years; and choose the location of their data center. From there, additional changes can be made from the Apex Console.

Dell also expanded its partnership with colocation and interconnect operator Equinix, which manages more than 220 data centers. This gives Apex Data Storage Services customers the option to deploy the platform in an Equinix data center, in the cloud, or on-premises.

“That's all there is to it,” Akanksha Mehrotra, VP of Dell Technologies project Apex marketing, said. “We will take it from this point forward and deliver, manage, and support the resources that our customers want in the location of their choice, and maintain a buffer on site for any unanticipated needs.”

Customers are looking for infrastructure to help bridge the gap between resources on-premises and those in the public cloud, Mehrotra argued, adding that Apex Cloud Services is the proverbial bridge, providing integrated on-premises infrastructure services that support both cloud-native and traditional workloads.

The platform comes in two flavors, Apex Hybrid Cloud and Apex Private Cloud, both of which combine compute, storage, and networking designed for specific workloads. The new Apex Cloud Services piggyback off the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud, and plays into Dell’s larger strategy to help customers deploy to the right cloud, based om business needs. 

Apex Cloud Services are available today in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany and are set to hit other markets soon, the vendor said.

Alongside the Apex Storage and Cloud services, Dell also launched a consumption-based offering called Apex Flex On Demand. Customers can select servers, storage, data protection, and hyperconverged products from Dell’s infrastructure portfolio, deploy them as-a-service, and scale usage up and down as needed.  

Apex Data Center Utility goes a step further and adds an additional layer to move either part of or all of an enterprise to a usage-based model through custom metering and managed services applied across their data center.

Speaking on metering, all of these services will be managed through a unified dashboard called the Apex Console. From this dashboard, customers can deploy workloads, monitor costs and system health, and shop for cloud services via an online marketplace. 

The Apex Console uses an API first approach, which in future releases, Mehrotra said, will allow developers and partners to access console capabilities programmatically through command line interfaces to then integrate them into any console, application, or workflow.