Dell Expands as-a-Service Capabilities With Project APEX

Dell Technologies, Inc. expands its as-a-service capabilities with Project APEX to simplify how customers and partners access the company’s technology on-demand-across storage, servers, networking, hyperconverged infrastructure, PCs and broader solutions.

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Project APEX will unify the company’s as-a-service and cloud strategies, technology offerings, and go-to-market efforts. Businesses will have a consistent as-a-service experience wherever they run workloads including on-premises, edge locations and public clouds.

“Project APEX will give our customers choice, simplicity and a consistent experience across PCs and IT infrastructure from one trusted partner-unmatched in the industry,” said Jeff Clarke, COO and vice chairman. “We’re building upon our long history of offering on-demand technology with this initiative. Our goal is to give customers the freedom to scale resources in ways that work best for them, so they can quickly respond to changes and focus less on IT and more on their business needs.“

“By the end of 2021, the agility and adaptability that comes with as-a-service consumption will drive a 3X increase in demand for on-premises infrastructure delivered via flexible consumption/as-a-Service solutions,” said Rick Villars, group VP, WW research, IDC.

Dell as-a-service and cloud advancements
The company’s Cloud Console will provide the foundation for Project APEX and will deliver a single experience for customers to manage their cloud and as-a-service journey. Businesses can browse the marketplace and order cloud services and as-a-service solutions to quickly address their needs. With a few clicks, customers can deploy workloads, manage their multi-cloud resources, monitor their costs in real-time and add capabilities.

Available in 1H21, the company’s Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) is an on-premises, as-a-service portfolio of scalable and elastic storage resources that will offer block and file data services and a range of enterprise features. STaaS is designed for OPEX transactions and allows customers to easily manage their STaaS resources via the Dell Cloud Console.

Expand its Cloud and as-a-service offerings with additional advances:

Cloud platform instance-based offerings– Customers can get started with hybrid cloud for $47 per instance per month⁽²⁾ with subscription pricing, making it easy to buy and scale cloud resources with pre-defined configurations through the Cloud Console.
Geographic Expansions– Extending company’s Cloud Platform subscription availability to the UK, France and Germany with further global expansion coming soon.
Cloud PowerProtect for multi-cloud– This managed service helps customers protect their data and applications across public clouds in a single destination via a low latency connection to the major public clouds. Businesses save costs through the PowerProtect appliance’s deduplication technology and realize additional savings with zero egress fees when retrieving their data from Microsoft Azure.
Pre-approved Flex on demand pricing– The pre-configured pricing makes it simpler for customers to select and deploy the company’s solutions with a pay-per-use experience. The firm’s partners globally will receive a rebate up to 20% on Flex On Demand solutions.

“Our customers expect their applications and Internet services to be always-on, and that requires highly reliable and available storage infrastructure,” said Sandra Rodel, head, SAN storage, Swisscomm AG. “Dell Technologies as-a-service and flexible consumption storage solutions give us affordable, on-demand access to the capacity we need as we need it, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring customer satisfaction. Dell Technologies also retires infrastructure in an environmentally sustainable manner, saving us time and money.“

Continued sustainability focus
The company’s Project APEX will help companies retire infrastructure in a secure and environmentally friendly manner. The firm manages the return and refurbishing of used IT gear while also helping to support customers’ own sustainability goals. The company is making additional strides in achieving its ‘Progress Made Real’ goals by:

Reselling 100% of the returned leased assets.
Refurbishing and reselling 89% of working assets in the North America and EMEA regions.
Reselling 10% of non-working assets to Environmental Disposal Partners who repair, reuse, resell and recycle each asset. Last year, Dell recycled 240,257 kilograms of metal, glass and plastics through this program.
Helping customers resell or recycle their excess hardware and prepare to return leased equipment in a secure and environmentally conscious manner through Dell Asset Resale and Recycling Services.

Availability:

Cloud Console is available as a public preview in the United States with EMEA availability planned for 1Q21.
Storage as-a-Service will be available in the US in 1H21.
Cloud Platform instance-based offerings with subscription pricing are available in the United States, France, Germany and the U.K.
Cloud PowerProtect for Multi-cloud is available in the US, U.K. and Germany.
Flex On Demand is available in select countries in North America, Europe, Latin America and the AsiaPac region.

Resources:
Blog: As-a-Service as It Should Be: Introducing Project APEX
Blog: Dell Technologies Cloud Platform Just Got Better

⁽¹⁾ IDC WW Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, 2020Q2, September 29, 2020
⁽²⁾ Estimate based on the purchase of 500 Compute optimized instances (C-500 instance block) over a 3-year term with All Flash Storage and VMware Cloud Foundation Standard Edition, with an average monthly price of $23,500 as of October 2020. Pricing for pre-configured solutions with subscription may vary depending on the number and type of instance blocks in your configuration. For details on pricing, consult your account manager. United States, UK, France and Germany only.

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