Dell Advances Cloud Efforts and Preps for More Innovation

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Michael Dell kicked off his company’s annual Dell World event today with a series of announcements about new cloud efforts and discussed the nature of innovation with SpaceX and Tesla founder, Elon Musk.

Dell said that his company’s goals moving forward are to transform, inform, connect and protect customer IT environments. At the core of those efforts is the cloud, which Dell described in his keynote as being the new model for IT.

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To that end, Dell announced a series of partnerships to further expand his company’s cloud footprint. One of those partnerships is with Microsoft, which will enable the delivery of the Windows Azure cloud platform to Dell customers.

Dell also announced an agreement with consulting firm Accenture, to deliver cloud services and applications. Accenture and Dell have a joint venture company called avanade that will be leveraged as part of an expanded go-to-market strategy for the cloud.

On the open source front, Dell announced a deal with Linux vendor Red Hat to co-engineer an enterprise-grade OpenStack private cloud solution. Dell is no stranger to the OpenStack world and is an active member of the OpenStack Foundation. Dell also has already had partnerships with Linux vendors in the OpenStack space. Back in April, Dell announced a partnership with SUSE Linux for a private cloud OpenStack solution.

Red Hat spokesperson Stephanie Wonderlick told Datamation that the new Dell partnership does not signify any change to Red Hat’s own OpenStack strategy. Wonderlick explained that the core of the Dell partnership news is that Dell will be OEMing Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

“We see it as a massive milestone for enterprise adoption of OpenStack,” Wonderlick said. “If you think back 10 plus years ago, it was moves by the OEMs (including Dell) that helped make RHEL the dominant player in the enterprise and we see the trajectory for OpenStack being incredibly similar.”

Innovation and Going Private

Dell recently took his company private, which he sees as being a catalyst that will enable him to innovate better.

“Going private is all about making the bold moves and focussing 100 percent on our customers,” Dell said.

As part of his opening keynote, Dell also shared the stage with Elon Musk, founder of electric car vendor Tesla and commercial space exploration firm SpaceX, to discuss innovation. Musk detailed his challenges and explained that innovation has a lot to do with not giving up and trying to do more everyday.

“I think that people self-limit,” Musk said. “The number one thing is people should just keep trying, did you try yesterday? Did you try today? It takes a lot of mental exertion to innovate.”

Dell, who owns a Tesla car himself, saluted Musk as being an inspiring figure.

“We do have an affliction of short term thinking in our society and we need more people like Elon taking big risks,” Dell said.

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