The cloud has transformed the IT industry and has altered IT service delivery options. Cloud has impacted the economics & resource requirements associated with that delivery and has unlocked applications and business opportunities for user organizations of all sizes and industries. We are increasingly immersed in a post-transactional market, where discrete sales of individual products or integrated systems are replaced by agreements to provide IT capacity and business functionality “as-a-Service.” Organizations are increasingly turning to as-a-service models to ensure they have the agility and cost predictability needed to remain competitive. No segment of the IT market is immune to this trend. Sales of on-premises hardware and software are declining and will continue to decline. Inexorably, the market is shifting from one defined by discrete purchase-and-deploy deals aligned with refresh cycles to one where businesses take a ‘hybrid IT’ approach that blends a limited number of on-premises assets with a growing range of on-demand services. Cloud has transitioned from desirable to mandatory. The technology acquisition model is shifting from CAPEX to OPEX. Techaisle’s latest commercial segment survey reveals that 53% of businesses are considering OPEX-based agreements (pay-as-you-go/consumption based/as-a-service), and 26% plan to use a mix of CAPEX and OPEX, depending on which is best for business. As cloud applications proliferate, the demand for hybrid IT – integrating multiple delivery sources into a single, unified fabric so that workloads can be assigned to the best (rather than ‘best possible today’) location and that data and critical services (notably, security) can be connected across platforms, is becoming an urgent requirement. As a result, organizations find themselves in a multi-cloud by default setup, where they have applications and data residing in multiple cloud environments. There is little consistency between these environments, resulting in unpredictable costs and challenges to developer productivity. Techaisle’s cloud adoption study shows that between 45% and 83% of businesses use multiple clouds. The desired objective for each of these businesses is to have a seamless connection between traditional, private, public, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments via automation and orchestration.
The above challenge is what Dell aims to address with Dell APEX, a portfolio of as-a-service offerings that deliver infrastructure, and solutions, wherever needed. It aims to offer a better way to adopt a multi-cloud setup — multi-cloud by design (a term coined by Dell).
Let us first understand how Dell APEX came into existence.
