5 Keys To Dell’s Revamped As-A-Service Strategy: Dell SVP

Dell Technologies Senior Vice President of Product Marketing Sam Grocott breaks down five key strategies and elements in Dell’s new as-a-service Project Apex launch.

Dell Launches Project Apex

In a blockbuster move to double down on its as-a-service sales and go-to-market strategy, Dell Technologies launched Project Apex Wednesday during its virtual Dell Technologies World Digital Experience.

“It is both an internal and external vision that is essentially the flag we’re planting in the ground on where we’re going from a technology and solutions standpoint for Dell over the coming years,” Sam Grocott, senior vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies, told CRN.

The $92 billion Round Rock, Texas-based company’s new Project Apex will unify the company’s as-a-service and cloud strategies, technology offerings and go-to-market efforts to provide a consistent experience wherever a workload runs, including on-premises, at the edge or in public clouds. Specific product launches for Project Apex include the new Dell Technologies Storage as a Service as well as the Dell Technologies Cloud Console, which provides customers with a single, self-service online interface to manage every aspect of their cloud and as-a-service strategy.

“The value of Apex is simplicity, choice and consistency,” said Grocott.

Grocott breaks down five key strategies Dell is implementing with Project Apex that channel partners should know about.

Project Apex Isn’t Just An External Strategy, But Internal As Well

Project Apex really is that north star and strategy that we’ll be driving externally and internally at Dell Technologies to align to this as-a-service and cloud experience. Project Apex is our strategy to deliver a radically simplified as-a-service and cloud experience to our customers and partners. This will allow us to bring together not only our external message in how we communicate our offers as we go forward, but also internally in how we align and transform to deliver this as-a-service experience across all the various functions across Dell Technologies. It’s a unifying effort.

This is directionally where we’re going with the portfolio that will bring those solutions together and allow us to simplify not only how we message and deliver these solutions to customers, but even internally—this is a transformation across the company. This is how we sell products, how we market products, how we build products, how we finance products—the whole end-to-end value chain is moving toward Project Apex. … It will ultimately deliver the industry’s most flexible and simplest as-a-service experience for on-premises infrastructure.

As-A-Service ‘Simplicity’

The value of Apex is simplicity, choice and consistency. With Apex we’re going to be able to bring that simplicity in how organizations consume and manage infrastructure. We want them more focused on managing their business, not their infrastructure. We’re doing that by delivering turnkey as-a-service solutions that are fully managed by Dell Technologies but that can scale up or down and can be managed under a single web interface to give them that single tool and that ease-of-use experience. … The solution will be deployed, managed and owned by Dell Technologies or a channel partner.

Customer ‘Choice’ And ‘Flexibility’

From a choice standpoint, we’re going to give customers that flexibility to decide what solutions to run as a service and what ones to not, and pay for them the way that they want. So if they want to pay for it as they use it or pay for it as they go, leverage subscriptions and get that Opex flexibility—we’re going to give them the ultimate choice to apply this experience, not only consumed any way they want or deployed anywhere, but across the entire Dell Technologies portfolio as well. So this is going to include everything from our infrastructure offering to storage, server, networking, data protection, HCI, our solutions stack—but also into our client portfolio as well, so across PCs, our cloud offers and so forth. So that choice in flexibility and breadth of portfolio is really important.

‘Consistency’

The third value of Apex is consistency. So being able to deliver that consistent operating experience whether they’re running their as-a-service experience on-premises, or they’re bursting to the cloud, or they’re moving and interacting with workloads at the edge—we’re going to provide them that consistent experience. Project Apex will ultimately deliver the industry’s most flexible and simplest as-a-service experience for on-premises infrastructure. … They’ll be able to utilize this single web [Cloud Console] portal to be able to deploy new resources quickly. Certainly, we’re going to be able to add more capabilities such as being able to deploy, manage and optimize your environment in releases to come.

Big Launches To Come

Dell Technologies Storage as a Service is our first launch. We’ll continue to layer on horizonal capabilities around Compute as a Service, Data Protection as a Service, and PC as a Service in the coming months. So we’re going to scale out our as-a-service offers across the entire portfolio. We’ll also go vertical with this as well, so look for solutions such as SAP as a Service or VDI as a Service that will start to come out as well over time.