The global rivalry between Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise is one of the most entrenched in the information technology industry. There are few market segments in which these companies do not compete with each other and, therefore, without room for reciprocal collaboration.
The central pillars of this intense confrontation are computer servers and storage cabinets, classic business lines to which a growing number of associated services have been added. For example, HPE accumulates five years of introducing a pay-as-you-go “everything as a service” strategy, GreenLake, thus taking advantage of Dell, which waited until 2021 to launch a similar offering under the Apex name. For both multinationals, these formulas are key components of their growth and profitability.
This goes to explain why the announcements from the Dell Tech World conference, held in Las Vegas at the end of May, have gained prominence. The race is between GreenLake – which encompasses its entire infrastructure and services offering – and Apex, which is its equivalent in Dell’s portfolio, set to expand.
We interviewed María Antonia Rodríguez, the new CEO of the Spanish subsidiary of Dell Technologies, the day after the conference. With her we review the Las Vegas announcements, starting with those that directly concern Apex and that most influence the progress of the Spanish market. “Apex, as a concept of flexible IT consumption, reinforces and complements the offer that we already had and after these announcements we can respond to one of the most common demands of Spanish companies: to have the capacity to consume some technologies in their data centers. that are available from the major cloud service providers”.
Rodríguez emphasizes “flexible” because, he says, customers get immediate performance, latency, and security results that necessarily translate into reduced costs. And this is “the first thing they have in their heads as a mandate from their shareholders.”
The Las Vegas balance begins with a cloud storage offer (Apex Storage for Public Cloud) thanks to which customers who have storage agreements with the so-called hyperscalars (refers to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, but not yet to Google Cloud) can “download” them to their own Dell-equipped facility.
It is a different formula for promoting hybridity, a word that the interviewee avoids, perhaps because the sector itself has turned it into a removable topic. A similar scheme is applied to computer servers and at the same conference Apex PC-as-a-service was announced, for the acquisition of computers and peripherals.
Another strategic front is the multicloud modality, consisting of moving loads to and from different clouds and integrating local Dell servers. Rodríguez sums it up like this: “It is the way in which the client decides where he wants to put each of his cards”. He then identifies two advantages of the approach: simpler load management and predictable costs.
It is unthinkable not to dedicate part of the conversation to artificial intelligence, which for Dell Technologies -says its director in Spain- “is not at all a novelty, since we have integrated it into our products for years”. As for the generative variant (GPT) that is spoken and written about by those who know and those who do not, “represents” the opportunity to internally exploit its qualities and help customers to be able to implement it themselves.
