Dell calls time on IaaS public cloud services

Dell is to discontinue its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering and use its Dell Cloud Partner ecosystem to deliver public cloud services instead.

The hardware vendor will play the role of supplier for a number of cloud services providers, including Joyent, ScaleMatrix and Zerolag in North America, while Sales of its own in-house offering will be wound up.

Nick Hyner, Dell's EMEA cloud services director, said the firm already relies on partners to deliver its public and private cloud services.

"The decision to change the delivery model of public cloud is an expansion of our existing strategy.

"However, by solely focusing on partners to provide public cloud delivery infrastructure in EMEA, Dell can accelerate its cloud business more effectively geographically while lowering operating and capital costs."

Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president of Dell Cloud, said the need to give customers more choice and allow them to benefit from interoperability and flexibility was part of the motivation behind the move.

"The partner approach offers increased value to Dell's customers, channel partners and shareholders, as part of our comprehensive cloud strategy to deliver market-leading, end-to-end cloud solutions," he said.

Simon Robinson, research vice president at 451 Research, told Cloud Pro the change in strategy was a sensible move.

"I always got the sense that Dell's play into the public cloud was testing the water, rather than an all-out assault on the market," he said.

"Having done that, it has decided this is a pretty different and difficult business and it was already a long way behind many of the larger players and more specialist players like Rackspace."

Robinson also commented that it is more difficult for a company to promote a multi-cloud strategy when it has its own cloud, and that he does not expect the company to divest any of its recent cloud-focused acquisitions, including Wyse, SonicWall and Compellent.