Dell – Cloud for dummies.

Finally an innovation from Dell but it needs to be made available to the right customer.

• For the last few years Dell has appeared to randomly make acquisitions in an attempt to stave off the ravages of hardware commoditisation by branching out into software.
• To date this hasn’t helped much as the problems that the company faces in PCs have vastly outweighed any improvements on the software side.
• However, last week the Dell unveiled something that I think could be of interest.
• Project FastPaaS is a new take on the traditional PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering that makes the creation and management of applications much more straight forward.
• Typically PaaS is a blank virtual machine plus a tool kit and the customer builds or ports his own applications to run on it.
• This is what Amazon Web Services (AWS) and HPQ offer.
• FastPaaS is not targeted at developers, but at higher level users who are involved in designing IT rather than just coding.
• Users basically decide what infrastructure they want including the databases, runtimes and what applications they want and the whole system is delivered with a minimum of fuss.
• This has two distinct advantages that I can see.
• First. It looks very easy to use, doing away with the need for armies of in house developers.
• Second. It’s a one stop shop making the job of systems integration much easier.
• In short this is an innovative approach that I think could resonate well with customers who are new to cloud and want a hassle free implementation.
• The disadvantage as I see it is that it is on-premise.
• This means that the customer owns all the hardware meaning that one of the great selling points of cloud computing, fixed IT cost becomes variable, does not apply.
• For a large company, I don’t think on-premise matters because it is really the SMEs that benefit from having a variable IT cost.
• However, I think that the nature of this solution will appeal much more to smaller customers.
• Large organisations already have a lot of in-house development and as long as it is cost efficient, there will be no real saving or benefit by outsourcing it to Dell.
• A smaller organisation with no in-house development will find this much more appealing but a small organisation is unlikely to want a private cloud.
• Hence, if FastPaas was to be made available off-premise, then I think it would have a lot more appeal as the IT cost would then become variable depending on usage.
• This may not be as straight forward as it sounds as the off-premise cloud solution really works when everyone runs the same instance of software on common infrastructure.
• FastPaas is highly customised which is why the solution seems to be limited to on premise only.
• This offering has promise but it needs to be directed at the right customer, as in its current iteration, I think it will remain beyond the reach of those that stand to benefit most from it.