The Journey to As-a-Service

Simplicity. That’s the overwhelming need I’ve heard across conversations with customers, partners and analysts over the past several months which was echoed last week during Dell Technologies World Experience. And it’s no wonder – responding to COVID forced organizations to scale infrastructure overnight and accelerate their digital transformation. This rapid adoption of new technologies has uncovered a lot of complexity in how organizations budget for, consume and manage IT, and it has also led to increased interest in on-demand consumption models. In the past year alone, we’ve seen nearly 50% year-over-year growth in the customer base for our flexible consumption and as-a-Service offerings as of the most recent quarter. That’s why I couldn’t be more excited about our announcement of Project APEX, which brings together our as-a-Service and cloud strategy, offerings and go-to-market under a single effort to radically simplify how our customers consume and deliver IT services.

Project APEX builds upon a rich history of giving customers the flexibility and freedom to scale their IT to their business requirements and budgets. In other words, we’ve been on this journey to delivering on-demand IT for decades – we’ve been offering flexible payment solutions through Dell Financial Services for 23 years and managed utility services for 15 years. And last year, we launched Dell Technologies On Demand (DTOD), the industry’s broadest end-to-end portfolio of flexible consumption and as-a-Service solutions aimed at providing organizations the flexibility of cloud with the performance and security of on-prem infrastructure. Since then, we’ve worked continuously to expand DTOD offerings and further simplify the as-a-Service experience for our customers. And we’ve helped our customers and partners fund their critical technology needs through the Payment Flexibility Program, which we are now extending through January 29, 2021.

At Dell Technologies World, we introduced Pre-Approved Pricing for Flex On Demand, making it simpler and faster to order our most popular configurations with a pay-as-you-use pricing model. These configurations include everything organizations need to get started – hardware, system software, essential deployment and support services – and offer baseline pricing, based on real-world numbers, so customers can align the best financial option with their objectives.

In addition, we’ve extended Flex On Demand to cover Dell EMC PowerEdge servers powered by AMD as well as Dell EMC PowerFlex software-defined storage, rounding out its availability on our Power portfolio, including PowerScale and PowerStore. Flex On Demand is also available through our Dell Tech partners, and we are enhancing their ability to earn program benefits with Flex On Demand by increasing our partner incentives. Dell Tech partners can earn a 20% incentive for Flex On Demand on the committed contact value (CCV) of storage, HCI, CI, and Data Protection solutions and a 10 percent front-end incentive on servers. These new incentives are available globally in all locations Flex On Demand is available.**

We’re helping organizations across the globe better predict and manage costs while gaining the agility and flexibility to scale capacity up or down. For example, a large multinational institution we work with to service their enterprise-scale private cloud implementation and storage as-a-service managed utility is seeing incredible results – they’ve achieved 50% more compute power at eight percent less cost, while reducing time to provision date by more than 90%. We’re helping a U.S. state’s department of IT shift to an as-a-Service model, transforming how their infrastructure is managed and consumed so they can avoid overprovisioning storage and compute resources while quickly delivering IT services to stakeholders across the state.

We are making huge strides in our journey to delivering cloud-like, as-a-Service experiences across the full Dell Technologies portfolio. We’ve drastically simplified our customers’ ability to get on-premises cloud resources up and running quickly with the introduction of instance-based offerings for Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. We’re delivering a truly consistent self-service experience for cloud and as-a-Service workloads through a single web interface with Dell Technologies Cloud Console. All of these exciting announcements will propel our vision for Project APEX, bringing together the simplicity, choice and consistency organizations need to deliver IT as a Service and be ready for what’s next.

Source: delltechnologies.com