Why Dell’s New Developer-Focused Strategy Is A ‘Smart Play’

‘The epicenter of focus for many customers is changing from infrastructure to developers,’ says Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell.

Developers are top of mind for Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell in his march to make his $101 billion infrastructure giant a more developer-friendly company.

“The epicenter of focus for many customers is changing from infrastructure to developers,” said Dell during his keynote speech at Dell Technologies World. “And we’re embracing developers by making all of our solutions API-driven, and developer ready.”

Michael Dell said his company is making large investments to make its massive market-leading infrastructure portfolio of servers, storage, data protection and hyperconverged infrastructure more programmable.

“We’re embracing high levels of automation, making our infrastructure programmable to fully support containers and modern applications with developer requirements like Kubernetes, Tanzu, and OpenShift,” said Dell. “Containerized apps are really transforming IT and modern application. We are partnering closely with VMware to deploy Tanzu to transform how you build, deliver, manage, and securely run your applications with consistent operations across private, public and edge locations.”

[Related: Dell Technologies World 2022: 5 Biggest News Announcements]

Sonia St. Charles, CEO of Davenport Group, a top U.S. Dell Titanium partner, said Michael Dell’s drive to make Dell Technologies a more developer-focused company is a “smart play.”

“I think that’s the way the world is going,” said St. Charles. “We’re seeing this in some of our commercial customers. I know even for us personally, during the pandemic we spent quite a bit of money on infrastructure and API plugins, whether it be for our finance team, all the way to our new quoting tool. So I look at us and we’re a perfect example of this. This is what we want: something that’s easy and that can plug in to our existing environment or what we’re building.”

St. Charles touted Dell’s vision to create more programmable products for developers that will be API-enabled.

“We see that all of our customers want to progress and move further along as much as their budget, or whatever the constraints are, with newer technologies and everything needs to be connected,” said St. Charles.

New Developer-Friendly Launches At Dell Technologies World

One new solution unveiled at Dell Technologies World this week is CyberSense for Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS.

The new Dell-AWS offering will give developers the ability to use adaptive analytics, scan metadata and complete files, as well as implement machine learning and forensic tools to detect, diagnose and speed data recovery. Developers can also monitor files and databases to determine if a cyberattack has occurred and identify the last known uncorrupted copy of data to speed a more secure and confidential recovery.

Dell also launched Dell Apex Cyber Recovery Services to help customers recover from cyberattacks. Dell delivers the new Apex as-a-service experience with standardized configurations, simplified Dell-assisted recovery options and expertise from nearly 2,000 isolated vault solutions deployed globally.

“With Apex, we are making everything available as services—focused on outcomes, easily accessibility to developers, speeding time market, and speeding innovation,” said Michael Dell.

Finally, Dell is betting big on developers with Project Alpine.

Project Alpine will provide data mobility and consistent operations across on-premises and public cloud environments with customers able to deploy or easily consume Dell storage software and services that will offer performance in the public cloud efficiency and protection based on industry-leading enterprise storage.

Developers will be able to write applications once and deploy them anywhere they are needed to create a consistent, cloud-native experience across multiple public clouds. Project Alpine is currently in the preview mode with no general availability timeframe.

“I like how Michael [Dell] is embracing the developer community to help better serve our customers,” said St. Charles.

Dell Technologies World runs from May 1 to May 4 in Las Vegas. Here is CRN’s full coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022.