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Michael Dell: it's time to shift to the cloud

By Tim Danton in Austin, Texas

Posted on 12 Dec 2012 at 04:43

It's time to embrace the cloud, Michael Dell told businesses at a conference held by the IT giant.

While claiming Dell's cloud services were already seeing "lots of demand", he said at Dell World in Texas that some companies weren’t moving quickly enough.

"It’s all about how do go from the old world to this virtual cloud infrastructure and get away from managing component ingredients to managing outcomes and results and workloads," he said.

We realised in our business is that having four main products was insufficient for us to be able to address the kinds of challenges that customers were presenting us

"The way I think about this is, how do we help customers move away from ports and switches and processors and memory, and move to workloads and apps and quality of service and extrapolate the problem to a higher level?" he added.

He said customers had been asking for help dealing with such new challenges, citing security, BYOD, big data and modernising infrastructure as major themes.

"And what we realised in our business is that having four main products was insufficient for us to be able to address the kinds of challenges that customers were presenting us," he said. "We needed to go beyond the origins of the company in PCs and servers into software and systems management, into services and really build out our portfolio so that we could address those bigger challenges."

"So that is really at the core of our strategy and why you see this real solutions focus coming together at Dell," he added. "Increasingly we’re changing the nature of what we do – from selling a particular ingredient, instead of servers it’s servers, storage and networking in one product, with the services, with the system management, with the application performance network monitoring built in."

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User comments

No

"It's time to embrace the cloud" - No, sorry, but it's not time. Many, MANY companies are still on Exchange 2003 and have had FAR more value from that one single instance than suddenly jumping on the latest, but now quite old, buzz-word.

Let's all go to the cloud... Then in seix years time it'll be, "On premises is the way to go".

The marketing circle spins on and on.

By rhythm on 12 Dec 2012

Yes

The cloud is inevitable and the transition has begun.

Its time is most certainly now.

The tricky part is that there's currently no common understanding of what we mean by the "Cloud".

It means different things to different vendors and providers. Most Cloud conversations seems to begin with a definition of terms.

By JohnWaller on 12 Dec 2012

Yes

By JohnWaller on 12 Dec 2012

"The cloud is inevitable ... The tricky part is that there's currently no common understanding of what we mean by the 'Cloud'."

So unless you're being ironic, then even though we don't know what the Cloud is, it's definitely inevitable. Huh?

Everything that Michael Dell refers to can be done without the Cloud. It's called outsourcing. And quite how you reach the Cloud without ports and switches, I'm not sure...

By AdrianB on 12 Dec 2012

@JohnWaller

Just make sure you use a provider that has no offices in the USA, if you don't want to open yourself up to possible prosecution by the ICO.

By big_D on 13 Dec 2012

"embrace the cloud"

What a wonderfully comic - and metaphorically apposite - image that phrase conjures up!

By JohnAHind on 13 Dec 2012

Precisely

"So unless you're being ironic, then even though we don't know what the Cloud is, it's definitely inevitable. Huh?"

Precisely. The Cloud is full of irony in my eyes at the moment.

It's inevitable, but we're not quite sure what it is. Different vendors have different solutions which they label "Cloud".

Everything that can be done inside the Cloud, can be done outside the Cloud - yet the transition seems inevitable and we're slowly but surely being pulled towards the Cloud.

Adobe, Microsoft and others seems addicted to the lure of Cloud revenue and may well use it as their sole distribution channel for software soon.

By JohnWaller on 13 Dec 2012