Two top Dell Technologies executives today announced several new portfolio advancements to industry’s most comprehensive multicloud platform, APEX, which aims to help companies better manage their data and applications wherever they are.
During the keynote session on day one of Dell Technologies World 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada, the company’s CEO Michael Dell and Co-COO Chuck Whitten unveiled three new cloud platforms that are being developed in collaboration with Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.
The tech giant said the APEX multicloud platforms will be available globally by the second half of 2023.
“Partnerships has been at the heart of our philosophy, and no partner has been on this journey longer with us than Microsoft. And today, we have a couple of really exciting announcements to turn the big idea of multi cloud into real innovations for you,” CEO Dell said on May 22. “We’re running on-premise with a new service, our APEX Cloud Platform for Azure.”
“These are great examples of how Dell and Microsoft are working together to give customers the freedom to choose when, where, and how they run their workloads – whether it be public cloud, on-prem, edge, and beyond, proving solely by the needs of their business,” Dell said.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the announcement of Microsoft and Dell’s new cloud partnership is a “breakthrough.”
“What customers really want is the seamlessness of the edge and the public cloud coming together,” Nadella said during the conference. “This technology truly takes all of Dell’s innovation and operational excellence and some of the technologies – we have packaged it together so that all of the sensitive workloads in private and public-sector can now have the options to deploy where they want with the same seamlessness of the control plane.”
Dell’s Co-COO, Whitten, also announced the company’s new collaboration with Red Hat during the keynote session.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift simplifies container-based application development and management, the companies announced, wherever applications are developed and deployed, through full stack software integration and automation with the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.
“I’m excited about this,” Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks said. “Because when we look at something like OpenShift, we have to create this marriage between the application platform that OpenShift provides – built on Kubernetes – and extending it with the actual infrastructure.”
He continued, “That combination with the APEX cloud platform and the deep integration with OpenShift consoles, management, lets you use the skills that you have, and offers more of that choice of being able to run that on-premise and the way that you want to with simplicity there.”
Dell’s Whitten agreed, stating, “And that’s where our partnership in the APEX cloud platform is going to bring so much value: Red Hat brings the open source container ecosystem, and Dell brings the leading infrastructure and automation.”
Finally, Dell Technologies announced the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware – a continuing “tight collaboration,” which Whitten explained aims to move and scale the customer’s workload across the public cloud and on-premise environments and looks to streamline operations by tapping into existing VMware skill sets.
Dell Technologies also announced several other cloud-adjacent initiatives through APEX at the Las Vegas venue – including a block storage for Amazon Web Services, and a new collaboration for data storage between Dell and Databricks.
Dell’s Whitten drilled down the idea that customers should have access to the tools to leverage multicloud by design, not multicloud by default. During the Dell Technologies World conference, he cited multicloud as one of the top five unsolved problems that companies face today. The other four were the future of work, AI, the edge, and security.
But, Whitten said, the new cloud offerings Dell unveiled today with Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware, are about providing multiple options for customers, because no one solution can be one-size-fits-all.
“We’re ultimately here to provide you options, so you can innovate without any limitations,” Whitten said. “We’ve talked today a lot about how we’re solving the tough technical challenges, because that’s how we help you turn ideas into innovation. Which brings me back to where I started our purpose: driving human progress, applying technology to our most pressing challenges – challenges like climate change, and access to healthcare, and education.”
Dell agreed with Whitten, concluding the keynote, “This is really the promise of technology: to solve the unsolved problems, to drive innovation, and ultimately, to make a positive and constructive change in the world with big ideas that can make a big difference.”
