Dell Technologies takes on HPE with Project Apex

Dell Technologies has kicked off its annual conference with the announcement of Project Apex, its plan to consolidate its ‘as a service’ offerings.

Described by Sam Grocott, senior vice president of Dell Technologies Business Unit marketing, as a “radically simplified as a service and cloud experience”, the new project acknowledges that the future of enterprise IT is “really going to be a hybrid, multi-cloud world”.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the company’s annual Dell Technologies World conference – which, like most conferences this year is being held as a ‘virtual experience’ – Grocott explained that Apex is a strategy, rather than a product, and is “how [Dell Technologies] is going to take as a service – which is already very successful – and cloud and [make it more unified]”.

The foundation of Apex is Dell Technologies Cloud Console, which acts as both a  provisioning and management platform for cloud and as a service products. The company claims that customers can deploy workloads, manage multi-cloud resources and keep an eye on costs “with a few clicks”.

Sitting atop this is Dell Technologies Storage as-a-Service, an on-premises offering that features elastic block and file storage, which is delivered on an OpEx model and can be dialled up or down as needed via Cloud Console.

Also announced were Dell Technologies Cloud Platform instance-based offerings, which allows customers to start using hybrid cloud from $47 per instance per month. This can also be provisioned and managed from within Cloud Console, based on predefined configurations.

Cloud Console is available in the US as a public preview now, with general availability coming around the world in the first half of 2021. Storage-as-a-Service will also be available from the first half of 2021.