Dell Beta Tests Public Cloud Brokerage Service
Due to its enterprise hardware sales, Dell is deeply entrenched with IT managers and executives throughout all different industries. Leveraging these connections will prove pivotal to its newly released Public Cloud Brokerage Service. Dell’s endeavor into selling public cloud gives its clients a one-stop shop for all of its public cloud service needs.
Dell has built a portal that will allow enterprise IT managers to buy public cloud services from Amazon Web Services, Joyent and Google Cloud Platform. This easy to use portal allows organizations to use a vendor neutral platform that will allow them to hone in on their key needs. Since different IaaS and PaaS providers have different features, Dell will provide all of these resources while getting a kick back from the vendors for selling the services.
This new Cloud Brokerage Service hosted by Dell was the vision of Don Ferguson. A veteran of the IT indsutry, Ferguson was brought into Dell to build out this Cloud marketplace. Michael Dell famously mentioned that Dell would not compete in the IaaS market. Michael Dell’s recent comments has been highlighted in regards to the public cloud market being “too crowded.” The Dell Cloud Marketplace is a way for Dell to have their hands in the IaaS market while still maintaining its status as a player in the enterprise hardware arena.
In an interview with ZDNet, James Thomason, Dell’s Cloud Marketplace CTO, commented on the beta release by saying, “We think today, over 90 percent of cloud services that are in use are not officially sanctioned by IT, and IT has no visibility into them; They’re unable to forecast their budget, they spend a lot of their time charging back random people’s credit card to IT budgets, and they don’t have governance, so they can’t guarantee all employee access to company systems and information.”
Dell is rumored to have added offerings from Docker, Delphix, and Pertino into its cloud marketplace. Although Azure is not available, Dell did recently mention that their relationship with Microsoft has allowed them to produce Azure packs backed by Dell Enterprise hardware.
