Dell Launches First Public Cloud, Adds SaaS Offering

Dell this week launched its first public and hybrid cloud offerings, following on its announcement earlier this year that it would invest $1 billion to deliver cloud computing infrastructure and services. The company also introduced cloud-based application services for small and medium businesses.

On Monday at the annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Dell and VMware jointly released Dell Cloud, which is built upon vCloud Datacenter Services. The two companies said they will jointly offer the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform to enterprises, hosting and outsourcing providers, systems integrators, and service providers.

The service will include automation, security and availability, and offer on-demand capacity, according to Dell. That will allow organizations to scale infrastructures as workloads require. Dell Cloud will be made available in three options:

• Public: Hosted in Dell datacenters, the service will provide on-demand access to computing, storage and network capacity.
  
  
• Private: Dell will construct private clouds either on a customer's premises or run it in a Dell datacenter.
  
  
• Hybrid: Using VMware's vCloud Connector, this configuration offers management of on- and off-premise private clouds and Dell's public cloud offering.

Dell Cloud is in beta now and will be generally available in the United States next quarter. It will be available in Europe and Asia next year.

Separately, the company Tuesday announced Dell Cloud Business Applications Services, a bundle of pre-integrated SaaS applications that can be linked to existing software via its Dell Boomi platform. Dell last year acquired Boomi, a SaaS provider that connects cloud and premises-based applications.

Dell also said it is expanding its partnership with Salesforce.com, where it will offer integration of the Salesforce Sales Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) services with Intuit's QuickBooks and Microsoft's Dynamics GP software packages.

Salesforce.com and Dell are now jointly offering a CRM service for SMBs. Dell intends to offer additional SaaS-based apps such as marketing and accounting next year. Dell also said it plans to offer cross-application dashboards and reporting capabilities delivered as a service. Called Cloud Integrated Analytics, the service will be released in the first half of next year.  

Available now, pricing for the Dell Boomi-Salesforce.com integration starts at $565 per month. Integration service packages start at $5,000.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 01, 2011