Dell Striving To ‘Embrace Developers In A Big Way’: Michael Dell
‘Making all of our products and services available on a consumption basis, in a very developer-friendly way, is a big priority for [us],’ says Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell in an interview with CRN.
Dell Technologies CEO and founder Michael Dell says his $101 billion company is striving to modernize its business by making Dell solutions more accessible to developers.
“We’re prioritizing outcomes and modernizing our business, making it more accessible to developers and more available in a consumption model with Apex,” said Dell in an interview with CRN.
A big focus for Dell in 2022 is a “change in our orientation to embrace developers in a big way” with plans to make “it easy for developers to interact” with all of Dell’s solutions in a subscription way, he said.
“This is something you’ll hear much more about at Dell Technologies World, but the epicenter—along with the consumption, subscription, as-a-service move—the epicenter of focus inside many customers is changing from infrastructure to developers,” said Dell. “So making all of our products and services available on a consumption basis, in a very developer-friendly way, is a big priority for [us].”
[Related: Michael Dell On VMware, Ukraine, Apex, PCs And Channel Partners]
Stephen Ayoub, president of Ahead, a Chicago-based Dell Titanium Black partner that is one of Dell’s most strategic channel partners, said he absolutely agrees with Michael Dell that customer focus is shifting from infrastructure to developer capabilities.
“We’re absolutely seeing that from our customers. Open development is key in getting the technical teams aligned with a long-term strategy for developers to be able to build more applications and our own IP on top of Dells’—or any manufacturers—core technology,” said Ayoub.
Ayoub said and that a more developer friendly Dell would benefit channel partners.
“I think developers do want the ability to build their own IP, and then their competitive advantage on top of any kind of platform company,” said Ayoub.
Michael Dell told CRN that it wasn’t necessarily a brand new focus for Dell, as Dell’s Developer Portal and other developer capabilities have been available for years, but channel partners should expect potentially new capabilities or offerings to come from Dell later this year.
“There will be a lot of discussion about this at Dell Technologies World. We’re making it easy for developers to interact with all of our solutions in a subscription way,” said Dell.
Dell Technologies World 2022 marks the first in-person event the company will host since the global COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020. Dell Technologies World 2022 will run from May 2 to May 5 in Las Vegas.
Dell’s developer push comes as the Round Rock, Texas-based company doubles down on investment and channel enablement around Dell Apex.
Apex is Dell’s new as-a-service portfolio of consumption-based solutions based on Dell’s market leading portfolio of storage, server, data protection and hyperconverged infrastructure products. Dell Apex is one of the company’s biggest focus areas and a top strategy in the hybrid- and multi-cloud era.
Dell told CRN this month that the company recently launched a new team specifically dedicated to better enabling channel partners to sell its Apex portfolio of as-a-service solutions.
“We’ve introduced a channel Apex cross-functional team whose primary focus is on the partners,” said Rola Dagher, Dell Technologies global channel chief, in an interview with CRN this week.
“When we launched Apex last year, we were still actually building it into the channel. We didn’t have a dedicated team. So now we’re investing more in the channel and the Apex team,” said Dagher. “What we did is we actually invested in putting dedicated resources to Apex to help accelerate Apex in the channel through our partners.”
Additionally, Dell this year unveiled a new Apex Multi-Cloud Data Services offering that provides file, block and data protection services for simultaneous access to all major public clouds from a single source of data, as well as a new Dell SaaS-based Apex Backup Services which offers end-to-end scalable, secure data protection with centralized monitoring and management for SaaS applications, endpoints and hybrid workloads.
“Less than two months from now, we have Dell Technologies World. Yeah, you can be sure there will be a blizzard of new announcements and many of them Apex-related,” said Michael Dell.