Microsoft Azure Founder Deepak Patil To Lead Dell’s Cloud Business

One of the founding members of Microsoft Azure and the recent CTO of Virtustream, Deepak Patil will lead Dell’s bullish Dell Technologies Cloud business.

Cloud visionary Deepak Patil, one of the founding members of Microsoft Azure, has been appointed to lead Dell Technologies’ cloud business as the $91 billion infrastructure giant strives to make its Dell Technologies Cloud the market leading hybrid cloud platform.

“As Dell move to more consumption-based and SaaS-based models that are cloud orientated, Deepak’s background is very helpful to structuring those -- especially based on his experience at Microsoft,” said Scott Miller, senior director of strategic partnerships at Maryland Heights, Mo.-based World Wide Technology, an $11 billion solution provider powerhouse and Dell Technologies partner. “This will be good in terms of licensing, compensation, structuring and channel model. His background is very relevant for Dell here.”

Patil will become senior vice president of Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms and Solutions Group. “He’ll lead this business, driving the innovation and business strategy to deliver hybrid-cloud solutions and services to market,” a Dell Technologies’ spokesman told CRN.

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Patil spent more than 15 years at Microsoft from 2000 to 2015 holding a variety of general manager roles for Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure, Windows Azure Engineering and Global Foundation Services. He was one of the founding members of Microsoft’s public cloud Azure platform, creating the first-ever application to run on Azure while leading the design and growth of Azure, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In early 2016, he left Microsoft to become vice president of development at Oracle, responsible for Oracle’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform business.

Then last year, Patil became CTO and senior vice president of product and engineering at Virtustream, replacing former president and CTO Kevin Reid. The enterprise-class cloud service provider Virtustream falls under the Dell Technologies’ family of businesses.

Miller said Dell Technologies has a “unique” and “competitive advantage” in terms of its ability to appoint and move around various executives to certain business units and organizations. The Round Rock, Texas-based company includes Dell, Dell EMC, VMware, Pivotal Software, SecureWorks, RSA, Boomi and Virtustream.

“When it comes to leadership – whether it’s technical leadership or business development or marketing – it does give them a competitive advantage to being able to pull from these best of breed leaders,” said Miller. “When they’re more treated like a business unit, like Virtustream, it gives you an opportunity to exploit those talents. That would be a huge recruiting effort for their competitions to bring someone in which is expensive and time consuming.”

Patil will take over Dell’s cloud reigns from Matt Baker, senior vice president of Dell EMC strategy and planning. Baker was the focal point for crafting the Dell Technologies Cloud and will now return his focus solely on his strategy and planning, according to Dell.

The $91 billion infrastructure behemoth launched its Dell Technologies Cloud platform earlier this year which provides two similar architectures co-engineered with VMware that both includes hyper-converged infrastructure VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation.

In a recent interview with CRN, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell said nobody can compete against Dell’s cloud platform, in part, because of the broad portfolio of the Dell Technologies.

“This is about putting all the pieces of Dell Technologies together. Certainly, we have the pieces,” said Dell. “If you look at any aspect of hardware or software infrastructure, we’re No. 1. We’re No.1 in public and private cloud IT infrastructure. No. 1 in enterprise storage. No. 1 in storage software. No. 1 in virtualization. No. 1 in all-flash arrays and hyper-converged systems. We’re No. 1 in server units and revenue. The Dell Technologies Cloud brings together Dell EMC’s hardware offerings like VxRail and our validated high-performance arrays with the VMware Cloud Foundation software stack. We have these new validated designs. It’s sort of the easy button for Data Center-as-a-Service.”