Dell Technologies kicked off its annual conference, Dell Technologies World, by turning a concept into reality. Announced last fall as a strategy known as Project APEX, Dell’s new as-a-Service offering is now live.
Dell Technologies APEX will be the overarching branding for Dell’s entire portfolio of as-a-Service and cloud offerings.
“We are integrating and innovating edge solutions with VMware and across our capabilities and partner ecosystems, creating the
automated intelligent infrastructure for 5G and the data era,” said Dell Technologies chairman and chief executive officer Michael Dell during his keynote. “We want to give you cycles back by making your infrastructure highly automated, multi-cloud, and as-a-Service so you can dedicate your time and energy and investments to your data, your applications, and creating business results and competitive advantage. That’s where APEX comes in – to bring together our cloud and as a service capabilities.”
Services offered
APEX will initially offer three sets of services: APEX Infrastructure Services, the first of which will be APEX Data Storage Services; APEX Cloud Services; and APEX Custom Solutions.
APEX Custom Solutions launches with two offerings: APEX Flex on Demand from Dell Financial Services, and APEX Data Center Utility, which allows customers to move some or all of their data center operations into a pay-per-use model. The APEX Console provides a self-service way to explore, order, deploy, and monitor all of the APEX services.
Dell says that initially customers can expect 14 days from order to implementation of Data Storage Services and Cloud Services, and capacity upgrades will occur within five days. All storage will be charged at the same rate, with no overage penalties or surge pricing.
APEX Custom Services are available in Canada today, while Data Storage and Cloud Services will be here “soon”, according to Akanksha Mehrotra, vice-president, APEX. And, she said, there will be plenty of partner opportunities.
Partner opportunities
“Partners are absolutely a key route to market for us, both for current as well as future as a service offers,” Mehrotra said. “You can be sure that we’ve got an active partner enablement plan in place, and we’ve been soliciting input from them over the past several years.”
She says that partner opportunities will include being able to take an advisory role and take advantage of lucrative incentives for referring customers to Dell sales teams. They can also host infrastructure workloads for their customers, build solutions, resell Dell offers, or tack on their own value-added services.
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But that’s not all.
“Over time, partners will have access to the console, and will be able to manage the services on behalf of their customers,” she said. “The Apex console uses an API first approach, so in future releases, developers at our partners will be able to access the console capabilities programmatically, through both command line interface as well as a set of publicly available APIs that they can then use to either integrate it into any console that they might have any applications that they might have, or any workflows that they may have.”
Equinix partnership
Dell Technologies also announced a partnership with Equinix that will allow APEX customers to choose Equinix datacentres as their preferred location for APEX data storage services rather than their own datacentres or edge locations.
“As we move forward, all of our future as-a-Service offers from Dell will be branded APEX,” said Sam Grocott, senior vice-president, product marketing. “Customers simply specify the outcomes they desire, and we at Dell take care of the rest. We package the right technology and services to meet these requirements, all in one subscription. And it is an all-inclusive technology experience delivering what the customer needs without a ton of work on their end.
“With APEX, we’re creating the new Dell.”