Industrial giant General Electric Co. plans to leverage Dell Technologies Inc.’s information-technology-as-a-service offerings going forward in order to scale up its tech infrastructure across the 170 countries it operates in.

Today’s news is a big boost for Dell, which launched its APEX infrastructure-as-a-service portfolio in 2019. Under APEX, customers essentially rent their technology infrastructure from Dell on demand, so they only pay for what they use. It means they can avoid making expensive onetime investments in on-premises data center hardware that can quickly become dated.

GE said that by using Dell’s on-premises infrastructure cloud it can meet business demand in a more agile way. It said it will be able to transition IT resources quickly without any major reorganizations of its infrastructure. It will also benefit from automated provisioning and data services, enabling it to speed up the deployment of new applications and services.

The Dell APEX portfolio also helps GE to rebalance workloads across its various business units without having a significant impact on spending, the company said.

“We need to have the ability to change as quickly as the world does regardless of whether we’re manufacturing a new jet turbine in Ohio or AI-based ultrasound technology in Bangalore,” said GE Chief Information Officer Nancy Anderson. “With data centers around the world, we are working with Dell to create a consistent way to support all of our business units that ensures the right IT resources are making it to the right teams when they need them most.”

One of the key ingredients within APEX is its Data Center Utility, which GE said will allow it to blend automation and software architecture to support both traditional applications and more advanced data analytics. With the Data Center Utility, which acts as a central console for managing data center infrastructure, GE said it can quickly scale up or down its use of storage and compute resources based on its needs.

Bill Scannell, Dell’s president of global sales and customer operations, said that for a company as large as GE, the simplest changes in IT infrastructure can have a domino effect.

“Since we began working with GE, our goal has been to help them reduce the complexity of their vast interconnected IT resources and deliver a simple way to adapt to the changes in business strategy,” Scannell said. “With APEX Custom Solutions, GE can drive automation and cost savings across its varied businesses and still maintain predictability by aligning its expenses with the business value received from the technology.”

Image: Dell