Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and newly remote workforce sent spending on public cloud infrastructure skyrocketing to an all-time high, Dell Technologies, staunchly carrying the hybrid-cloud torch, insists it didn’t miss the boat.

“Cloud is an operating model,” said Deepak Patil, SVP for cloud platforms and solutions at Dell Technologies. “It’s not a destination.”

Patil sets the strategy and roadmap for Dell’s cloud business, and his team builds the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. This is the vendor’s primary hybrid cloud product, and it combines Dell’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure systems with VMware’s Cloud Foundation software stack.

It’s worth nothing that Dell owns about 81% of VMware, and VMware’s software stack runs on thousands of clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba. If the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform embodies Dell’s cloud strategy, then VMware’s cloud partnerships, software-defined data center, and newer Kubernetes and cloud-native Tanzu portfolio represent its life blood.

Dell’s “cloud strategy is primarily predicated on VMware offerings in terms of VMware’s partnership with AWS  as well their partnership with the other hyperscalers,” said Sid Nag, VP of cloud services and technologies at Gartner. “In addition, VMware’s recent Tanzu offering and their embracing of containers is a good strategy. However, Dell on their own have little to offer from a cloud strategy and solution perspective except for Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP), which is primarily based on VMware software running on Dell’s VxRail product. DTCP is fairly new and remains untested in the market.”

Dell Technologies Cloud

Dell first announced its Dell Technologies Cloud infrastructure portfolio last year at its annual users conference with its flagship Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. This product “has been purchased and provisioned by hundreds of customers over the last seven, eight months that it’s been in the market, and it continues to grow at a very, very fast pace,” Patil said.

And despite the public cloud titans’ huge revenue growth in recent quarters while Dell and other data center IT vendors’ sales declined, the notion that businesses are moving all of their workloads to public clouds is false, Patil said. “Over the last decade-plus, the most popular narrative around clouds been driven and influenced by hyperscalers,” he said. “I was one of those people.”

From Public Cloud to Hybrid Cloud

Patil spent 15 years at Microsoft where he was one of the early members of the Azure development team. After that, he spent three years at Oracle, working on that company’s cloud platform, before moving over to Virtustream, a Dell Technologies’ company that sells cloud computing management software. Patil served as the head of engineering at Virtustream for almost two years before parent company Dell Technologies’ tapped him to lead the cloud business a year ago.

It seems like a strange trajectory that, after spending so much of his life engineering public clouds, Patil would shift gears to hybrid clouds and on-premises infrastructure. But, he explains, customers need diverse IT environments based on workload performance and regulatory requirements.

Patil cites an IDC statistic about 92% of companies having both private and public clouds. “That essentially means that those cloud experiences don’t have to belong only in public cloud environments,” Patil said. “Our customers workloads are going to be all over the place. So we are coming at it from the notion of let’s meet customers where they’re at, and bring the cloud experiences, cloud operating model to wherever their workflows are.”

Opex-Based Consumption Models

He acknowledges that Dell’s cloud strategy, “as with everything else in our lives,” evolved because of COVID-19. “What has changed, is customers’ desire to have more opex-driven mechanics of doing business, so that they can have more control over their costs,” Patil said.

But this type of opex-driven model doesn’t necessarily mean public cloud, Patil added. Dell’s three-pronged approach includes expanding its consumption-based Dell Technologies On Demand portfolio with the goal of making all of its products available as a service. CEO Michael Dell announced this shift to cloud-delivered IT services — this includes its servers, storage, and networking — late last year at an event in Austin, Texas. The company hasn’t yet said when this shift to as a service will be completed.

The company also made available billions of dollars in 0% interest financing to jumpstart IT investment. “It has been embraced extremely well by our customers, especially in light of COVID,” Patil said.

Dell Cloud Ecosystem

“And then the third element is that in the true multicloud, hybrid-cloud world that we find ourselves in the middle of right now, customers don’t want to go to an Azure cloud or a Dell cloud or an AWS cloud,” Patil said. “They increasingly want to go to a Dell cloud ecosystem and Azure cloud ecosystem. And how you bring the ecosystem of partners together to deliver seamless, modern, and integrated solutions is what’s going to differentiate all of us from each other.”

Dell’s partner ecosystem includes almost 5,000 technology vendors, systems integrators, and service providers. Meanwhile, VMware partners with more than 4,300 infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, cloud service providers, application service providers, internet service providers, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers via its Cloud Provider Program. Between the two companies, “we have the largest partner ecosystem that is innovating and integrating together as part of our overall portfolio,” Patil said. “Presenting ours and our partners’ innovations together, in a seamless integrated fashion across our portfolio gives us a pitch that is pretty hard to replicate.”

To Distributed Cloud and Beyond

But will this pitch resonate with customers?

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, says Dell’s cloud strategy “is a little old school.”

“The multicloud story’s been played out,” he said. “We’re on the verge of moving away from multicloud to what Gartner calls distributed cloud, which is the concept that you start running cloud workloads not just in multiple clouds, but also in edges — IoT edge, campus edge, cellular edge, 5G edge, whatever.”

While COVID-19 caused companies to quickly adopt cloud services, “almost in a panic,” Kerravala said that now those companies are moving on to the next thing, and that’s edge computing. “I think you’ll see a lot of the leading companies do the distributed cloud route, and a bunch of other companies will follow suit pretty quickly.”