Kathy Gibson reports – Dell Technologies is integrating as-a-service and cloud offerings in its Apex Solutions portfolio.
The offering includes an initial data storage-as-a-service product, unified management of as-a-service solutions, flexible consumption policies and a more seamless, consistent user experience across public and private clouds.
The solution gives companies more control over their environment, while eliminating massive capital expenditure, says Doug Woolley, MD of Dell Technologies South Africa.
“The timing for bringing a solution like this to market is perfect,” he says. “With the changing shifts in business, companies have had to be more agile and flexible.
“And they also need to mitigate risk – you might not know what your capacity needs will look like tomorrow. So we are able to bring flexibility into the working environment, so customers can scale up or down.
“This means businesses can leverage their IT as a core competitive advantage.”
One of the negative impacts from the Covid-19 pandemic and business interruptions has been that businesses’ cash flow has taken a knock, says Monique Watson, account executive of Dell Financial Services.
“A Dell and Intel study shows that as much as 90% of businesses face challenges to implementing digital transformation,” she says. “And the biggest challenges are lack of resources and budget.
“To put IT refresh projects on hold because of a lack of budget is a hard pill to swallow when you know it’s what you need to do to build a successful business.”
Other industry studies show that close to 80% of businesses are asking for all-in-one solutions, and a consumption-based model, Watson adds.
The Apex Flex on Demand solution includes compute, networking, data protection and storage in a scalable and elastic way that lets organisations scale their IT requirements up or down as business needs evolve over time.
“Customers are only billed for what they use each month,” Watson points out. “It eliminates over-provisioning and takes the guesswork out of forecasting.”
Apex delivers complete infrastructure solutions for a range of data and workload requirements, on a pay-for-consumption model.
With Apex Infrastructure Services, resources are owned and maintained by Dell Technologies, while Apex Cloud Services let users subscribe to private and public cloud services with consistent operations regardless of where location. Apec Custom Solutions let organisations create their own on-demand environment with infrastructure and services customised to order.