Dell today announced the expansion of its cloud portfolio with a new hybrid cloud solution, featuring technology jointly developed with Microsoft, designed to break down the barriers customers experience on their path to cloud. Additionally, Dell also is offering an industry-unique payment solution to help customers simplify and minimize risks associated with cloud adoption.

According to a recent Dell worldwide poll of IT decision makers (ITDM), 9 in 10 say a hybrid cloud strategy is important to achieve a Future-Ready Enterprise. And, the recently unveiled Dell Global Technology Adoption Index (GTAI 2015) revealed that 55 percent of organizations globally indicated use of more than one type of cloud. The GTAI 2015 also cites cost and security as the biggest barriers to adopting and implementing cloud, and complexity is the barrier most often associated with hybrid cloud.

“The challenges most customers face on their cloud journey are clear. They tell us it’s too complex, the cost-risk is too high, and control isn’t transparent,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell. “When you couple Microsoft’s unique Azure consistency from public to private cloud and Dell Cloud Manager integrated with the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft, customers now have unparalleled cloud governance and control. With our new Cloud Flex Pay program, cost-risk is all but eliminated. These Dell innovations demonstrate we’re the only company today to provide the full range of cloud infrastructure, software, services and payment solutions to help customers unlock the promise of hybrid cloud.”

Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft Rapidly Deploys in Less Than Three Hours

Extending the success of Dell’s exclusive collaboration with Microsoft on its Cloud Platform System Premium, Dell has announced the availability of the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft, which is built around the new Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard, highlighted today in a Dell World keynote discussion between Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. This new system is designed to break through the hybrid cloud adoption barriers of complexity, cost and control.

The Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft is the industry’s first integrated, modular hybrid cloud solution. This new system delivers simplified, automated deployment and maintenance capabilities; a unique payment solution to reduce customer investment risk; and unparalleled hybrid cloud governance, control, and policy-based automation for Microsoft Azure and other cloud environments.

“Customers want to simplify and accelerate their journey to the cloud, and today Microsoft and Dell are extending their collaboration to remove many of the traditional barriers to hybrid cloud,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft. “With CPS Standard, which is at the heart of the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft, we’ve worked together to deliver a solution that goes beyond other integrated systems on the market today, by providing Azure-consistent hybrid cloud services and a fast time to value to help customers enable their hybrid cloud strategy.”

The Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft provides customers with:

• On-premises private cloud, with consistent Azure public cloud access in less than three hours, and minimized downtime with unified system updates that are non-disruptive, fully automated, dependency-aware and smart-sequenced.
• The ability to build and provision workload templates and flexibly deploy business services and governance models of multiple cloud environments from one management construct, via out-of-the-box integration with Dell Cloud Manager (DCM).
• Unified, simplified private-with-public cloud management and consumption control across Windows Azure Pack (WAP), Azure and other cloud services.

The Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft is built around CPS Standard, which combines optimized Dell modular infrastructure with pre-configured Microsoft CPS software, including Microsoft’s proven software stack and Azure Services for back-up, site recovery and operational insights. Additional services from Dell include ProSupport and Managed Cloud Services.

Dell Creates Differentiated Payment Solution for Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft

Dell today added Dell Cloud Flex Pay to its portfolio of Scale Ready Payment Solutions, which Dell uniquely designed to accelerate customer adoption of cloud solutions wherever they are on their cloud journey.

The Dell Cloud Flex Pay program provides customers with an industry-first option to deploy the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft in a flexible, cost-effective way. Dell is making this payment solution available for the Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft so customers can experience the benefits of hybrid cloud without making a long-term commitment. This cost-risk relief helps customers experience hybrid cloud usage levels before committing to the purchase.

For example, an IT decision maker may be challenged in predicting test and development usage levels. Issues such as underuse and unanticipated demand can increase investment risk, lead to services gaps and not maximize capital budgets. Cloud Flex Pay eliminates these risks, gaps and inefficiencies, enabling the IT decision makers to gain practical experience, greater certainty in planning, and make sound future cloud solution investments.

At the end of the initial six-month term, customers have several options available, including the ability to extend the evaluation period, continue to use the solution, return it or take ownership of it.

Dell Cloud Solutions Momentum and Investment

Dell’s investment and innovation in cloud solution development supports varied enterprise data center workloads, applications and operating systems, addressing new customer demands and industry trends that allow customers to find value in cloud wherever they are on their cloud journey. Dell this week unveiled new products and milestones to its cloud solutions portfolio:

• New Dell Administrator for Office 365 enables secure, effective control of Office 365, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business through a consolidated, intuitive console that empowers IT administrators to better manage, report on, and utilize existing collaboration platforms to improve ROI of the Microsoft stack across the business. IT Admins can extend their management to on-premises deployments making this the perfect adaptable platform for any deployment type.
• New Dell Foglight for Virtualization 8.3 gives organizations the power to manage performance from the virtual and physical server layer and optimize to increase the performance of private cloud environments running on Dell servers, all from a single-pane-of-glass view. New Dell OpenManage Essentials integration with patented analytics now found in Foglight for Virtualization allow customers to visually correlate virtual workloads down to the server environment in real-time, as well as historical views to detect performance issues before they impact the business.
• Dell has been chosen by Markit, a leading global financial information services company, to power and support its new platform, Know Your Third Party (KY3P).
• The Dell Cloud Clinical Archive is the industry’s largest cloud-based, vendor-neutral clinical archive, and now manages more than 10 billion images and 100 million medical studies. Dell’s understanding of the current demands on IT, as well as future demands around breakthroughs in healthcare such as genomics, has prompted customers to move their imaging systems to the Dell Cloud Clinical Archive.
• Dell’s fully-managed cloud solution for medical practices and providers has helped lower costs, manage complex healthcare IT systems, address security requirements and handle staffing challenges for hundreds of physicians. During the past four years, Dell has doubled its physician business from 21,000 users to 43,000 users and from 8.6 million to 16.7 million logins.