Organizations are rapidly adopting container technologies to accelerate agile cloud-native application development delivery. However, with the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments, organizations need partners to help them take the guesswork and risk out of DevOps and platform engineering workflows.

That’s an area in which Dell Technologies Inc. and Red Hat Inc. believe they excel. Their enterprise solutions were the focus of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now – Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift” virtual event on October 26.

“The rise of cloud-native concepts created a rush to cloud, enabling a more agile development and deployment for applications,” said theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante. “The challenge is multiple clouds create complexity in terms of variances in operating environments, tools and processes.”

During the event, analysts for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with key Dell executives about the continued shift to hybrid models. They explored how Dell’s APEX portfolio is evolving to address multicloud modernization needs and how that is impacting Dell’s long-term strategy to differentiate its APEX products and services. (* Disclosure below.) 

Here are three key insights you may have missed from the “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now” virtual event:

1. The market is becoming much more balanced.

The movement between public and private cloud continues. But data from Enterprise Technology Research reveals that the market is becoming much more balanced, according to Vellante.

“It’s not really reached an equilibrium yet, but … the balance is tipping back toward on-prem,” he said during the event.

The data shows about 43% usage of public cloud today, growing to 55% by January 2026. It’s important to note that the expected 2026 figure is down from 10 months ago, implying that the market is reaching a more balanced state, which means many workloads are where they belong. The steep momentum to migrate off-prem has stabilized. That’s interesting in the fact that cloud has become not a place, but really an operating model, according to theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay.

“I think a lot of what they’re looking at is the fact that this equilibrium is because there’s better tooling coming to the on-premise,” he said. “Things like the APEX Cloud Platform are one way that people are looking at how they simplify their life.”

Artificial intelligence, of course, is going to be the next battleground for tooling. Other data analyzed by Vellante involved the overlap of Dell inside 144 Red Hat accounts within the ETR dataset.

“We can see that 46% of those 144 Red Hat customers also have Dell infrastructure installed,” Vellante said. “Dell is the dominant player, with a greater share inside of these Red Hat accounts, more so than any other competitor.”

Dell recently announced the expansion of the APEX Cloud Platform with the addition of APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. Customers are looking for how they deal with demand for agility and flexibility, according to Strechay.

“I think that’s at the top of the list,” he said. “And they’re trying to understand, hey, it is a cloud operating model. We’re going to expand, we’re going to keep expanding, how do we really deal with that in an easy way?”

It’s also a shift toward containerized workloads, something Strechay and Vellante have been talking about for some time as people go to microservices and build next-gen applications. A lot of it is in these containerized workloads, where there may be 10 to 20 containers that make up an application, Strechay noted.

“I think there’s also a simplified combination of cloud experiences because they’re not just going on-premise with their cloud,” he said. “They’re going to other places, like they’re going to colocation, they’re going to other hyperscalers. And they need an operating model that goes across all of those.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete analyst segment with Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay:

2. Dell viewed Red Hat as a natural partner.

As a part of the “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now” event, Dell and Red Hat announced details of a joint initiative. The announcement revealed that users can take applications they have containerized to multiple different places, according to Strechay.

For a long time, businesses have struggled with how to get better agility and how to get more flexibility in where they build and deploy their applications, according to Caitlin Gordon (pictured, right), vice president of product management at Dell. Gartner predicts that 95% of enterprises are going to have containers deployed in production by 2028, which is not far away, Gordon noted.

“We knew that we really wanted to help simplify that experience on-prem. And there was clearly only one partner to work with to do that, and that was Red Hat,” Gordon said. “That was really why it was a natural combination of Dell to simplify that experience. Red Hat is the leader of container orchestration on-prem to come together to bring this to our customers.”

The two companies have jointly engineered a platform optimized for bare metal that will sharply reduce application deployment time using OpenShift. The platform brings together the compute, the storage and the container orchestration, all in one turnkey experience, according to Gordon.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Caitlin Gordon and Chris Morgan (pictured, left), senior director of hybrid platforms customer and field engagement at Red Hat:

3. There’s an ongoing goal to address multicloud complexity.

What’s new with the APEX Cloud Platform family, and how is next-generation technology bridging the divide? The number one problem organizations face is more and more operational complexity because it’s multicloud, according to Sudhir Srinivasan, senior vice president of multicloud and data solutions at Dell.

“Most of our customers are still trying to get hybrid done right. And now they’re having to deal with multiple clouds,” he said. “We talked about in the past our multicloud by design strategy. And that really has three legs or three pillars.”

The first is enriching the public clouds by bringing the company’s software-defined storage assets into the public cloud so that the company can offer the same level of enterprise-grade storage capabilities in the cloud, according to Srinivasan.

“The second piece is connecting the cloud operating environments back on-prem, and that’s what we call cloud-to-ground,” he said.

The third piece is optimizing that multicloud experience to be able to give that subscription as a service, no matter whether people are in the cloud or on-prem, according to Srinivasan. Overall, it’s a holistic approach to multicloud that simplifies operations.

“The trick is, how do you deliver that consistency at all layers of the stack — all the way from infrastructure, all the way up to the application layer?” he asked. “That’s where this new stuff comes in.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Sudhir Srinivasan:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now – Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift” virtual event, here’s the full episode:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now” 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