AUSTIN, Texas — Dell Technologies announced an on-demand buying model for its products and autonomous infrastructure that includes its servers, networking, and storage integrated with VMware software today at Dell Technologies Summit.

The new Dell Technologies On Demand portfolio will let businesses use Dell products as a service with pricing based on consumption using one of three payment models. Pay As You Grow lets customers pay for hardware based on their forecasted growth. Flex On Demand is the company’s metered payment option, where businesses pay for storage or compute as they use it. And finally, Data Center Utility targets large-scale deployments and comes with a delivery manager that helps enterprises buy technology as they build out capacity.

This on-demand portfolio includes Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and the new Dell EMC PowerOne autonomous infrastructure system the company debuted today. It also includes software-defined and hybrid-cloud products integrated with VMware’s software stack like Dell Technologies Cloud products. Moving forward, Dell says it will offer all of its new products under its on-demand portfolio.

“Dell Technologies On Demand, the industry’s broadest, consumption-based, as-a-service delivery model, is ideally suited for the way on-premises infrastructure and services are consumed today in our on-demand economy,” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman of products and operations for Dell Technologies.

The move comes as more data center infrastructure vendors like Dell face increasing competition from highly scalable public clouds that offer this type of flexible, consumption-based payment model. In fact, Gartner forecasts that by 2022, 15% of new deployments of on-premises computing will involve pay-per-use pricing, up from less than 1% in 2019. And rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in June pledged to offer its entire portfolio as a service by 2022.

Chairman and CEO Michael Dell touted the demand for as-a-service delivery models. “In our last reported quarter, our deferred revenue grew to more than $25 billion and grew 17% year over year,” he said. “This is at least an indication of the demand for these kinds of services. And that number is quite a bit larger than [HPE’s], so we are probably already well ahead of others in this space.”

Also today the company announced Dell EMC PowerOne autonomous infrastructure. It specifically calls it “autonomous” instead of composable infrastructure — HPE has been talking about and shipping “composable” infrastructure for a few years now — but this new Dell system can compose and recompose pools of disaggregated resources on demand.

“All technology and infrastructure is on this path toward autonomous operations,” Michael Dell said.

The new system integrates PowerEdge compute, PowerMax storage, PowerSwitch networking, and VMware virtualization into a single system combined with a built-in intelligence engine to automate manual steps.

This automation and intelligence engine, called the PowerOne Controller, is an onboard appliance. It uses a Kubernetes microservices architecture, and Ansible workflows to automate the configuration, provisioning, and lifecycle management of the components.

John Roese, president and CTO of products and operations for Dell Technologies, described it as the system’s brain. “Roughly 98% of the human intervention to go from nothing to production disappears and becomes automated tasks in the infrastructure using the PowerOne Controller,” he said.

Initial PowerOne customers are large enterprises, primary in the health care and financial sectors, said Tom Burns, SVP of networking and solutions at Dell Technologies. The systems will be globally available Nov. 22

Integrated and autonomous infrastructure was one of the initial drivers behind creating the Dell Technologies brand after the Dell EMC merger, Michael Dell said.

“When we had the initial discussion back in 2014, leading to the announcement in 2015, and completion in 2016, we had this idea that the silos of computing were part of the problem,” he explained. “Just storage and just networking and just compute and just software and just hardware was not the answer. You had to bring them all together…At 98% reduction in the number of steps [with PowerOne], that’s getting fairly autonomous.”