Michael Dell Outlines Cloud Strategy
Michael Dell, the CEO and founder of Dell, recently made comments about the future of Dell at a press event located in Brussels. Dell candidly commented that the move to take the company out of shareholder control has contributed to the success of Dell. Dell decried that cloud is at the center of the strategy for Dell. Going forward, the company has begun to focus more on enterprise business while shifting away from the direct to consumer model.
Dell mentioned, “Everything is going to the cloud. Virtualization is running across the datacenter. We see layers 3 through 7 becoming applications running in virtual machines in the server. And increasingly we’re seeing this idea of the integrated appliance taking hold.”
While Dell hasn’t entered the IaaS market, Dell acts as a cloud service broker for its enterprise clientele. Dell also owns a tool called Boomi that helps integrate applications into the cloud. Dell goes on to say, “We’re also seeing a lot of interest in private cloud, many customers want to build a public cloud capability into their data centers themselves.”
Another tidbit of news coming from this event is the fact that Dell casually mentioned that he wouldn’t rule out using ARM chips in the Dell enterprise server line ups versus the Intel chips that ship with most Dell servers. Dell mentioned, “As ARM moves to 64-bit it becomes much more interesting; If ARM works well and costs less, we’re happy to use ARM.”
Industry experts agree that by Dell beginning to use ARM chips instead of Intel chips, the cloud server market could experience a transformation of sorts. Dell isn’t the only one considering the new ARM technology. Facebook, Google and AWS have all expressed interest in the power saving chips. If Dell’s interest in ARM is legitimate, Intel will need to develop a solution that competes with ARM on both cost and power efficiency.
