Dell are without doubt the masters of taking complex IT hardware and software solutions and turning it into a simple matter of ordering a complete solution through a website, with little or no sales team interaction. While Dell do have a direct sales force, their channel partnerships are much more limited, and you’re unlikely to find a major IT services company pushing Dell as their hardware supplier of choice.
For the last year and a bit, Cisco have been making a splash in the high-end server market with their UCS system, a blade computing system with a highly integrated management platform which can plug into your Cisco network and storage switches and EMC disk arrays to build a dynamic computing platform especially suited to rapidly deploying public or private cloud computing platforms. These UCS systems have generally been sold direct by Cisco, through large IT services companies, and through their Acadia cloud computing joint-venture.
While IBM and HP both have somewhat limited alternatives to Cisco UCS and the fully managed virtualisation “vBlock” package sold by Cisco, EMC and VMware, noone has released a fully developed alternative yet.
In the mean-time, Dell have made some big strides in the public cloud market, with the Dell Data Center Solutions team building custom cloud solutions for customers, andmore recently they’ve purchased Scalent, which provides a high-end system management tool which can configure servers, storage and networking from multiple suppliers. Today they’ve announced their plans to buy 3Par, one of the mid-sized fibre channel storage array suppliers.
3Par may not have the size or financial clout of EMC or NetApp, they definitely have the fundamental technology to compete with them both, and with Dell as the financial backers their R&D budgets should be increased to help them compete both with technology and with pricing.
Post-acquisition, Dell will have almost all the in-house technology to launch an off-the-shelf vBlock competitor, so perhaps the real question is will you be able to buy your new private cloud from the Dell.com online configuration tool, or would Dell rather you engage with a sales team before you buy your new IT platform from them?