AUSTIN, TEX. – Dell is heading to the cloud with a little help from its friends. The vendor announced used its Dell World conference last week to announce cloud-related partnerships with Microsoft, Dropbox, Google and Red Hat.
Speaking to Dell World attendees during his keynote address, CEO Michael Dell declared cloud computing as the new model for technology.
“At Dell, we’re making sure you’re positioned to lead in a cloud-based world,” said Dell. “We’re helping customers use and manage the private cloud. And we’re also big in the private cloud. The Dell Cloud Partner Program offers you more choice and flexibility to make sure that, between your public and private cloud of choice, all your information and services are being managed in a seamless manner.”
In an announcement with Microsoft Corp, Dell said it will be bringing Windows Azure, Microsoft’s infrastructure as a service cloud platform, to its customers through the Dell Cloud Partner Program. It builds on their previously announced alliance around application development services on Windows Azure.
“At the heart of Dell’s cloud strategy are customer choice and flexibility,” said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice-president, Dell software strategy, operations and cloud, in a statement. “The evolution of our Windows Azure alliance combined with Dell’s end-to-end solutions, services and support will help Dell customers globally truly reap the benefits of cloud to achieve tangible business results.”
Also coming to Dell’s Cloud Partner Program in the New Year will be the Google Cloud Platform and its compute, storage and application services for developers and businesses. The companies say it will give developers the flexibility to architect applications with both managed and unmanaged services that run on Google’s infrastructure, and includes access to Google Compute Engine, App Engine, storage and APIs so developers and business can deploy applications from a public cloud.
Dell also announced that it’s working with Red Hat to jointly engineer enterprise-grade, private cloud solutions based on OpenStack. Dell will OEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and their co-engineered solution will be built on Dell infrastructure and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and delivered by a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform practice within Dell Cloud Services.
The joint solution should be available in 2014.
“Dell has been a long-time advocate and participant in the open source and OpenStack communities … our agreement to co-engineer OpenStack solutions with Red Hat takes our commitment a step further in helping customers obtain and deploy OpenStack solutions for an enterprise-grade, private cloud infrastructure to meet their evolving business needs,” said Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions at Dell, in a statement. “We’ll extend our work with Red Hat to apply our combined experience in commercializing open source for the benefit of our mutual customers as well as the open-source community on its development of networking, storage and compute capabilities.”
At the heart of Dell’s cloud strategy, said Michael Dell, is offering customers choice and flexibility.
“When you go with cloud, go with Dell,” said Dell. “Kaboom.”