Dell flaunts Cloud alliances + $300M startup commitment at Dell World 2013
At this week’s Dell World 2013 summit in Austin, Michael Dell gave attendees a glimpse into his plans to catch up with the cloud and reinvent his namesake firm. The newly privatized computer maker is repositioning itself as an enterprise vendor in a bid to regain technology dominance, a journey with its fair share of bumps. High on the hit list is Amazon, which threatens to radically alter the economics for on-premise IT and leave traditional hardware suppliers in the dust. Following rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Dell announced on Tuesday that has joined forces with Red Hat to help the OpenStack community push back against AWS.
Originally developed by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack is pegged as a massively scalable cloud operating system for the data center. As part of the collaboration with Red Hat, Dell will offer purpose-built solutions running the Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and establish a dedicated practice within its services organizations. The pair also intends to work closely on the software-defined networking and monitoring components of the project.
“We will extend our work with Red Hat to apply our combined experience in commercializing open source for the benefit of our mutual customers as well as the open-source community on its development of networking, storage and compute capabilities,” Dell Enterprise Solutions president Marius Haas said in a statement.
The vendor is attacking from all angles, through reseller agreements with Microsoft, Google, CenturyLink and on the opposite end of the cloud spectrum, Dropbox. Dell will offer the cloud storage provider’s Business product through its channel “so customers can provide their employees with a secure enterprise file sharing and collaboration solution.”
“At Dell, we pride ourselves on listening to customers’ needs and providing simple, efficient technology solutions to meet those needs and stay ahead of the curve,” noted end user computing head Brett Hansen.
Dell won’t be limiting its ecosystem to big name vendors. The company announced these latest partnerships in conjunction with a $300 million Strategic Innovation Venture Fund that extends its existing $60 million Fluid Data Storage Fund to cloud computing, Big Data and mobility. Startups in these areas now have a shot at funding, channel resources and go-to-market know-how from one the world’s largest technology companies.
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