In recent months, Dell Technologies Inc. has been evolving its APEX multicloud strategy, responding to modern enterprise demands. For the company, there have been a number of key themes that have emerged.

Businesses are struggling to innovate fast enough, according to Caitlin Gordon (pictured, left), vice president of product management, APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, at Dell. The struggle to keep pace with market changes and obtain proper visibility into workflows is driving the call for simplified hybrid cloud capabilities.

“What we’ve heard loud and clear from our customers … is that they are so happy to hear that our continued partnership with Microsoft is coming to the next level now with this new platform and that we’re really coming together to simplify hybrid cloud operations with Microsoft Azure,” Gordon said.

Gordon and Dean Paron (right), partner director of product for Azure edge infrastructure at Microsoft Corp., spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay at the “Future of Multicloud Lands Now – Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the launch of APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure and why it’s different from anything seen from Dell and Microsoft in the past. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaboratively engineered

What’s the new platform about, and why is it different from what’s been seen from Dell and Microsoft in the past? The on-premises infrastructure platform, which was collaboratively engineered, is a crucial next step for their integration, according to Gordon.

“It’s really all about bringing the best of what Microsoft has in their edge and data center technology with what Dell has brought together with the Azure Stack HCI software,” she said. “The whole magic of this is that we have integrated the full stack from the firmware all the way up to the Microsoft software, and that’s fully automated.”

The secret sauce from Dell is the APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software, hailing the company’s automated management and orchestration making it a “seamless and simple” experience from top to bottom, according to Gordon. 

“Specifically, you can now reduce the steps required to deploy Azure Stack HCI down by 88%,” she said, referring to an internal product analysis. “So, you have that really great automated, simple deployment compared to what you had before with previous kinds of integrated systems. [The Dell/Microsoft] engineering teams … really have been operating as one.”

The partnership won’t stop once the product starts shipping, according to Gordon, as Dell and Microsoft will continuously work together to validate their software stack to ensure interoperability up through the operating system.

“But even better, when there’s an update, when there’s a patch, you don’t have to go search for it,” she said. “You don’t have to wait. We will have it in as few as four hours. Those patches are going to show up natively in the user interface, and they’re going to be ready as soon as you’re ready to apply them.”

Marking new milestones

The companies’ partnership also has marked a significant milestone: Dell is the first partner in Microsoft’s new Premier Solutions for Azure Stack HCI category. 

“[We’re] able to partner to a level where we can bring such meaningful innovation to customers,” Gordon said. “Being the first one in this new category of Microsoft is really representative of the level of partnership here.”

Microsoft and Dell have a long history over decades of working together and bringing new products to market. But what’s different about this particular solution is how far the envelope has been pushed on integration, according to Paron.

“Also, it’s a hybrid product,” he said. “We’ve really taken the best Dell technologies on hardware, on storage, on operations and married it with the best of Microsoft Cloud technologies from Azure.”

It’s all about extending the power of the cloud for Microsoft customers, according to Paron. From the operational constructs of the cloud to the simplicity of its offerings, the APEX-Azure partnership brings those outside of Azure regions into the physical world where customers “expect and demand those same sorts of experiences,” Paron added. 

“The other part of that is really, how do you bring the power of cloud services to bear on solving some of these modern problems customers are looking to solve,” he said. “Through Azure and Azure ARC-enabled services, like storage and data services, combined with Dell storage, customers are enabled to harness the power of all the data they’ve got and unlock a new level of solution and value that they’ve got out in the real world.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Caitlin Gordon and Dean Paron:

You can watch the entire event below:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Future of Multicloud Lands Now – Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE