The big news at the recent Dell Technologies World Digital Experience was the launch of Project APEX. Powered by Dell’s Cloud Console engagement platform, Project APEX is key to Dell Technologies Inc.’s future strategy, accelerating the company’s switch to offering its huge information technology portfolio on demand.

As the event drew to a close, Deepak Patil (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of Dell Technologies Cloud at Dell Technologies, and Jen Felch (left), chief digital officer and chief information officer of Dell Technologies, joined Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a virtual conversation on how Project APEX is positioning Dell to help businesses transform today and setting organizations on a course for success in a digitally native future. Answers were edited for clarity. (* Disclosure below.)

We heard a lot during Dell World about Project APEX powered by Cloud Console, and how it is a shift in Dell’s strategy to deliver as a service. What can you tell us about that?   

Patil: Project APEX essentially brings all the efforts across the entire Dell Technologies [portfolio], from product development to services to go to market motions, marketing, finance under the Project APEX umbrella. It marks a strategic milestone for us and our company in three specific areas. Number one is we are on a path to significantly accelerate our transformation into an as-a-service world. Number two, we are investing in radically simplify the way our customers engage with us — discover, purchase, manage offers from us. And number three is that we are continuing our commitment to provide more flexibility and more choice to our customers.

The Cloud Console is a key component of taking Project APEX to our customers. With a few clicks, our customers can browse through a catalog of cloud services from us as well as our partners, using a self-serve immersive experience. They can then purchase products like the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription, and IT professionals can provision and deploy workloads, including hybrid solutions like VMware Tanzu. So in many ways, the Cloud Console really brings the power of Project APEX and the entire cloud operating model to our customer’s fingertips.

How has Dell’s information technology team enabled this shift to the as-a-service model?

Felch: As the internal IT team, we play two roles. One is that we’re an internal customer of all of the Dell technology products and solutions. So, we get to offer a lot of feedback about how we would like to work.  And we get to be an early adopter for our product groups to be able to give that early feedback and contribute to great solutions.

The second part of it is actually doing the enablement of as-a-service of the underlying components that go into the engagement platform — the Cloud Console. How does that leverage the scale of Dell yet create those really simple consistent, transparent choices for our customers?

So, [the IT and Project APEX] teams get to sit side by side in terms of how we develop these solutions and how we’re bringing Project APEX to life, both as a customer and as a development partner.

Patil: The work that Jen’s team and my team are doing sitting side by side is a shining example of how we are putting the power of unified Dell Technologies behind this effort.

The as-a-service market is highly competitive and has been for some time. What part of the market is Dell looking at capturing with Project APEX?

Patil: We are in a massive shift across the industry to a simple, flexible operating model full of choices with respect to this as-a-service cloud transformation. Over the next few years, whoever essentially captures the market is going to have to deliver three core promises.

Number one is we know that we’re in the middle of a multicloud, hybrid cloud world. Any service provider, any cloud provider that eliminates the seams across different cloud environments and makes a multicloud experience truly consistent and simple and modern and seamless is going to have a massive advantage.

Number two is that customers’ workloads are going to be all over the place. A good portion of their workloads are going to be in their data centers, good portions of workloads are going to be on the edge, and then are going to be good portions of workloads that are going to be in the public cloud. Anybody who meets customers where they’re at so that customers don’t have to invest massively in reengineering and re-architecture and re-factoring, but still enjoy the benefits of this new cloud operating model, from performance and reliability to scalability and efficiency, with the minimum possible efforts is going to create a significant value proposition.

And number three, anybody who essentially focuses on outcomes and experiences and workloads rather than products and specific offers is going to have a significant benefit.

The work we’re doing under the umbrella of Project APEX essentially delivers on all three of those promises. We radically and massively simplify and eliminate the seams across different cloud environments. We focus on outcome-based conversation, and with the work that we’re doing with VMware on our massive 4,200-plus partner ecosystem, we are working to meet customers where they’re at. So instead of forcing them to reengineer and re-architect and move to the cloud, instead the cloud is coming to meet them wherever they’re at.

Jeff Clarke, who’s the chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies, talked about six areas of IT innovation that Dell is focusing on hybrid cloud, edge, 5G, AI and ML, data management, and security. In your opinion, which of this suite of six areas of IT innovation sets Dell up for success?

Felch: We design, manufacturer, service and manage IT solutions all over the world for large customers, small customers, and consumers. We have an incredible breadth and reach of what we’re doing today both from the solutions that we provide and the experiences that our customers are driving. So we have an opportunity, unlike many others, to bring the technical expertise from the products and services that we offer, along with the experience from really working with the best and brightest of customers, as well as this ecosystem of partners. This creates a real opportunity for innovation as things like 5G emerge, and we have the power behind the data management analytics to support ML and AI.

So, what sets us up for success is not something that just happened yesterday. It’s something that’s been happening at Dell for a very long time, which is the deep technical expertise and close engagements with our customers so that we can focus on bringing technology to solve the problems of today and set us up for the future.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE