Dell introduces Apex Cloud Platform for Microsoft. With this offer, the manufacturer hopes to benefit from customers who want to expand their Microsoft Azure environment into an on-premises data center.

Dell introduces the Dell Apex Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure. This is a solution that allows Dell to integrate hardware into an on-premises data center that then serves as an extension of the customer’s Microsoft Azure environment. In other words, Dell offers Microsoft Azure Stack through Apex. Since Azure Stack is based on its own hardware and Dell is ultimately a hardware manufacturer first and foremost, Michael Dell and his colleagues hope to benefit from an otherwise pure Microsoft story.

Niche target group

Azure Stack is aimed at customers who cannot or do not want to move workloads to the cloud but want to run them in Azure. Extending the Azure environment to the customer’s own hardware creates a hybrid environment that brings many integration and management benefits.

Dell is targeting this offer specifically at customers:

• Choose Microsoft Azure;
• You still want a hybrid model with an on-premises component;
• You don’t want a hybrid environment via solutions from Red Hat or Nutanix, for example, but you want everything in the Azure platform;
• Who else wants to purchase on-premises hardware as a service contract reminiscent of the cloud?

Anyone who meets all of these requirements can now find a partner at Dell through Apex. Of course, the result of such a multi-cloud approach is that you pay both Microsoft and Dell through a subscription formula where you don’t buy freedom from vendor lock-in. While Dell offers some additional management options and prides itself on its flexibility, it’s less than simply putting everything in Microsoft’s data center using Azure.