Dell’s acquisition of EMC may have jump-started the hardware titan’s enterprise cloud efforts, but it was open source development platforms that helped pave Dell’s path to customers in new markets, including telecommunications. Many of Dell’s customers were vocal about wanting some sort of open-source cloud platform on which to build those enterprise solutions, said Armughan Ahmad (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of solutions and alliances at Dell EMC.

For those customers Dell turned to OpenStack, an open-source software platform for cloud computing.

“OpenStack puts a very big differentiation forward,” said Ahmad. “Our customers are telling us in a very, very clear way, and the channel partners who are here, that they’re looking looking for Dell EMC to really provide open-source-based solutions in telecom markets.”

Ahmad spoke to Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. He spoke about Dell’s merger with EMC and the resulting entry into the enterprise market, what area of that market Dell is focusing on and what the company’s strategy is surrounding open-source-based solutions. (Disclosure below.)

Since telecom is an area of the enterprise market in which Dell EMC is aggressively pursuing market share, Ahmad went a bit further in explaining Dell’s position here. “When you take a look at telecom and it’s moving from 3G to 4G to now 5G coming on, it’s really going to be the applications and how those applications become scale-out versus just infrastructure becoming scale-out,” he explained.

Gaining market share by acquisition and adoption

Dell never had a desire to create its own open ecosystem, choosing instead to merge with EMC to immediately gain the infrastructure created by that company, according to Ahmad. Dell also never sought to build its own version of the OpenStack platform, choosing instead to adopt Red Hat’s version of OpenStack.

These acquisitions and adoptions quickly made Dell a player in the enterprise market by essentially purchasing market share, Ahmad explained.

“We’ve always stood by Red Hat OpenStack-based solutions to say, ‘Hey, if they’re number one in OpenStack markets and they’re already tuning that, why can’t we tune our infrastructure solutions the exact same way?'” Ahmad said. “We feel that our differentiation at Dell EMC really then ends up becoming our tested, validated offerings — so that customers don’t really have to worry about the infrastructure layer or even the software layer.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE