Dell outlines a transition to the cloud at Dell World 2011

Last week, Dell wrapped up an exciting week at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, with keynotes, breakout sessions, and a solution exchange all focused around the topic of enterprise IT. Dell’s inaugural conference kicked off each day with an impressive list of key industry presenters that included Dell chairman and CEO, Michael Dell; Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff; former CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra; VMware CEO, Paul Maritz and Intel president and CEO, Paul Otellini.

Earlier this year, Dell announced a $1 billion investment in technology solutions, extending the company’s global reach into data center, mobile, and cloud environments. And last week, as part of that investment, Dell showcased a host of solutions and technologies at Dell World that would make good on its commitment to delivering value to customers.

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The conference was called Dell World 2011, and it had a theme of “Unlocking Innovation in the Virtual Era.” The show was the company’s first major, worldwide event of its kind. It represented a major shift in strategy for the company, who up until then had been chiefly known for its PC and server hardware. But with the help of this event, Dell is working hard to transform that hardware-only image as it makes its way up the stack and deeper into virtualization and the cloud services market.

According to Michael Dell, that strategic shift means that Dell will be servicing much larger companies by providing a better mix of both software and hardware products.

“We have a new Dell,” he claimed during his keynote announcement. “Technology is no longer the tool that enables business, it is the business.”

As its chief competitor, HP, transitions from one CEO to the next and trying to answer questions around its commitment to the PC business, Dell continues to look forward as it attempts to grab more market share away from HP and others by targeting larger enterprise companies and by becoming an end-to-end solution provider. To do that and to reach its goal of being considered more than just a hardware company, Dell will rely on the technologies that it has been acquiring along the way to solve customer pain. Some of those technologies spotlighted by Michael Dell during his keynote presentation included EqualLogic, KACE, Boomi, Scalent, Compellent, and Force10.

The company is focusing on open solutions, which it believes are essential for transforming IT environments. Those include the upcoming 12th-generation Dell x86-based servers with built-in flash storage; the company’s EqualLogic and Compellent storage offerings with advanced tiering, de-duplication, and management features; its new top-of-rack Force10 networking product; and the Dell enhanced Virtual Integration System, including VIS Creator, for provisioning resources for public clouds.

Dell mentioned that SecureWorks monitors 15 billion security events every day for several thousand customers worldwide and said the company protects $14 trillion in assets in the financial services market alone.

He also signaled out Boomi, a pure SaaS application integration platform, as a key player in the company’s new strategy. Boomi allows customers to integrate multiple cloud services into a single solution by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications with no appliances, no software, and no coding required.

Dell described Boomi by saying, “It’s a very interesting space for us — it’s right at the cutting edge of how you make a cloud service deployable and practical.”

Research and analyst firm Gartner describes the public cloud as one of the “hottest topics in IT” today. The firm claims that spending on public cloud services is growing four times faster than overall IT spending, with a forecast of $89 billion being spent this year and $177 billion being spent by 2015.

Dell is going after its own slice of this market. The company announced it was getting busy in its global data center expansion in an effort to better support its growth into cloud computing services. To that end, they are committed to building 10 new data centers around the world and will be standing up these data centers within the next 24 months. These data centers will be housing public and private cloud capabilities on behalf of their customers.

Dell has already announced plans to open a new data center facility in Slough, a suburb in London. During Dell World, the company disclosed plans to build another major new cloud hosting facility in Quincy, a major hub for data centers in the state of Washington.

In order to reach its 24-month time frame, the data centers are expected to be largely modular in design. Modules can be housed inside lightweight, affordable structures and will house a wide range of densities, workloads, and technologies. This modular design was highlighted at Dell World and was very well received by audience members.

The company said its cloud offerings will target all three tiers of the cloud market, which includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) with the latter also including a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering.

Dell’s cloud strategy will also target private clouds with Dell’s recently launched vStart technology, something more easily described as a “cloud in a rack” solution, which is similar in nature to perhaps the more commonly known Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).

Dell vStart leverages preconfigured Dell servers, storage, and networking — racked and stacked and loaded up with blocks of hundreds or thousands of VMs so that an enterprise customer can quickly and easily build out its own private cloud environment. These pre-populated and configured racks are then rolled into place at the customer’s data center location and come with Dell professional services for easy setup and deployment and quick enablement.

If it wasn’t well understood before, Dell World made it clear — the cloud and virtualization aren’t just transforming end-user computing, they’re also changing Dell. And they are becoming much more interesting to watch as a result.

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