Dell Heads Off to the Hybrid Cloud With VMware, Azure

LAS VEGAS — When Dell Technologies acquired storage giant EMC and its associated companies in a blockbuster deal that came in well north of $60 billion, the argument CEO Michael Dell and other executives often made was that the potential integrations of the various technologies would make the company even stronger in a rapidly changing IT landscape.

On the first day of the Dell Technologies World 2019 show here, Dell executives put that idea in motion by announcing tightly integrated offerings with VMware — one of the companies they inherited in the deal — that they said will make Dell a larger player in the rapidly expanding multicloud and hybrid cloud worlds.

Dell’s Michael Dell

Michael Dell in his keynote address unveiled Dell Technologies Cloud, a program that includes not only running VMware’s Cloud Foundation software on Dell’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and other systems, but also VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, a fully managed data center-as-a-service offering will bring VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center software on VxRail into customers’ on-premises environments.

In addition, during the keynote, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that VMware’s Cloud Foundation offering will now run natively on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud, expanding the reach of Dell and VMware in the public cloud and adding to the hybrid cloud strategy. VMware Cloud currently runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alibaba’s cloud and other provider clouds.

All of this comes at a time when enterprises continue to embrace not only a multicloud strategy — where they’re using more than one public cloud provider — but also a hybrid cloud model, where among those cloud environments being used are private clouds on-premises. In a report earlier this year, Flexera found that 84% of businesses have adopted a multicloud model, with 69% embracing hybrid cloud.

With this in mind, public cloud providers are working to bring their offerings on-premises. Microsoft has done that with its Azure Stack and, more recently, Google Cloud Platform offered that with Anthos. Both efforts are designed to enable customers to leverage these cloud services on hardware that runs in their data centers. AWS last year introduced its Outposts, which are racks of Amazon-develop hardware that can run on-premises and easily link back to the AWS cloud.

“You’re seeing this trend of a lot of the public cloud services finding their ways on-premises and it’s the true definition of multicloud,” Michael Dell said during a press conference.

Through their tightly integrated offerings, Dell and VMware are now trying to do the same thing. VMware officials first spoke about the idea of running VMware cloud software in customer data centers last year when they introduced Project Dimension. Now the effort has an official name and is in beta with plans to…