The more the technology world grows in complexity, the more the key players in it are motivated to find simpler solutions.

This can be seen in generative AI, which is all about simplifying the ability to extract answers and perform tasks using a mountain of data. Today’s cybersecurity landscape is being reshaped by interest on the part of organizations for fewer tools and less complexity. And a steady march toward as-a-service delivery on the part of major enterprises is powered by the need for a simpler way to consume business-critical services.

A quest for simplicity is also what led two major players – Dell Technologies Inc. and Microsoft Corp. – to jointly announce in September an expansion of hardware and software products designed to more closely integrate on-premises systems with the public Azure cloud. Customers are interested in enabling applications, data and workloads to move seamlessly between the two environments and ultimately out to the edge.

In exclusive interviews with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, comments from executives for both companies made the focus on simplicity clear.

“We are really coming together to simplify hybrid cloud operations with Microsoft Azure,” said Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management, APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure at Dell, in an interview with theCUBE. “The secret sauce from Dell is, of course, the combination of our compute, but it’s really our automation management and orchestration, really making that a seamless and simple experience from top to bottom.”

Dell is working to help its customers accelerate their application deployment, simplify operation and meet increasingly stringent security and governance requirements. The key is doing it in a way that actually offers simplicity that meets the reality of what their skills are in the data center today, Gordon added.

This article is part of SiliconANGLE’s ongoing exploration of how organizations are accelerating their cloud modernization journeys in 2023. This piece highlights key developments from Dell APEX, a media partner and sponsor of the Dell APEX event series on theCUBE.net.

Bridging cloud and ground

Dell’s release in September expanded its portfolio of services for the APEX Cloud Platform that was previously announced in May. APEX is designed to deliver product and software offerings on an as-a-service basis, with the flexibility to add and remove systems as requirements adjust.

“We unveiled our APEX storage for public cloud, which really solves the challenge of helping customers enrich their public cloud experience and go from ground-to-cloud,” said Shannon Champion, vice president of product marketing at Dell, in an interview on theCUBE. “We also unveiled our APEX Cloud Platform, a brand new category, a new family in the APEX Portfolio specifically to solve for that cloud-to-ground experience in helping extend the cloud operating environment that our customers choose in that experience and bring that on-prem.”

For Microsoft, the joint release links Dell’s technology in hardware, storage and operations with the cloud provider’s Azure and Azure Arc-enabled services, such as Azure Stack HCI, Azure Machine Learning and Azure Data Services. The goal is to provide one cohesive, deeply integrated product that delivers on the promise of cloud in an on-premises environment.

“From the Microsoft customer perspective, this release is really all about extending the power of the cloud, the operational constructs of the cloud, the simplicity of the cloud, and bringing those outside of our Azure regions out into the physical world where customers are expecting and demanding, frankly, those same sorts of experiences,” said Dean Paron, partner director of product for Azure edge infrastructure at Microsoft, in an exclusive conversation with theCUBE. “We’re thinking about how easy it is to plug the box in, get it set up, the 88% reduction in the number of steps required to do that, the simplicity in things like updates and ongoing validation. Really, that’s about just letting customers operate where they want to operate, which is up the stack.”

Blurring the lines

The Dell/Microsoft collaboration and journey up the stack signals an important shift in how hardware suppliers and public cloud providers view the future IT landscape. The lines between public and private clouds are beginning to blur, as companies such as Dell and Microsoft come together to implement new, deeply integrated solutions.

“What’s different about this particular solution is really how far we’ve pushed the envelope on the integration … that it’s a hybrid product,” Paron noted. “We’ve really taken the best of Dell Technologies on hardware, on storage, on operations and married it with the best of Microsoft cloud technologies.”

This combination is being driven by market movement in the usage of public cloud relative to private cloud among the S&P 500 companies. Recent survey data provided to SiliconANGLE by Enterprise Technology Research showed that usage of the public cloud will only grow from 43% to 55% by January of 2026, implying a more balanced state in the market as the migration of workloads off-premises has stabilized.

“Cloud is an operating model; it’s not a place,” said Rob Strechay, industry analyst for theCUBE, during a discussion of the recent Dell/Microsoft announcements. “Companies and organizations that we talk to are really taking a hard look at where they place their applications going forward, not just going cloud-first or cloud-only. They’ve backed way off that strategy. They are looking at colocation, and a lot of on-prem again is becoming more in vogue for those cloud-native apps.”

Partnerships drive value

Not to be ignored in this ongoing trend is the role of partnerships within the tech industry to make this happen. Dell’s message to its customers boils down to choice: Select the desired stack, and Dell will provide a cross-platform consistent experience to facilitate the desired outcome.

“What the APEX Cloud Platforms are about are designing for those same differentiated outcomes, but with more consistency and control regardless of the partner’s stack that our customers are choosing,” Champion explained. “We’re giving them that commonality and consistency, which gives them the flexibility.”

In addition to Microsoft, Red Hat Inc. and VMware Inc. are current partners with Dell in the delivery of APEX Cloud Platforms, and this has deepened relationships between these major enterprise players in everything from product design and delivery to channel sales.

“We’ve been working with these partners for decades to deliver value for our customers, but what’s different here is the level of partnership required to pack in as much value as we can in these APEX Cloud Platforms,” Champion said. “[It’s] not just from a product and engineering perspective, but all parts of go-to-market. We’re working with these partners to align in the field in how we show up together for our joint customers.”

What exactly are these customers using APEX Cloud Platforms for? Simplification has been a big draw, according to Champion, along with the ability to move data into different operating environments as needed. Workload placement is another favored use case, yet one of the biggest outcomes sought by customers is speed. Organizations are keen to accelerate application delivery, and the APEX solution provides an ability to help customers overcome the complexity inherent in key tools, such as Kubernetes.

“When you have something like the APEX Cloud Platform that can bring together VMs and containers on a single platform, support a range of Kubernetes distributions, whether it’s Azure Kubernetes Stack or Red Hat OpenShift, and provide commonality … there’s a lot of value,” Champion said. “It helps our customers go faster to deliver the application.”

What has powered Dell’s ability to deliver speed is software, specifically APEX Cloud Platform Foundation software that connects the foundation of the infrastructure into the cloud operating stacks. This enables not just integration, but extensive automation of patches, new releases and other elements critical to seamless cross-platform operations.

“It really comes down to what we call the APEX Cloud Platform Foundation software,” said Dell’s Gordon. “That’s the magic automated orchestration software in the platform, and it does incredibly powerful things that really make that time-to-value in an unprecedented way. You can now reduce the steps required to deploy Azure Stack HCI down by 88% … it’s like there’s barely anything left at that point. That’s why we have a whole new level of offer.”

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