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Public cloud partnerships central to Dell services strategy

Dell plans to keep public cloud partnerships central to its efforts to bulk up its end-to-end services capability, according to Dell Australia and New Zealand managing director Angela Fox.
Written by Leon Spencer, Contributor

Dell is set to continue focusing on strategic partnerships with cloud infrastructure and services providers as it works to build out its end-to-end services portfolio offering.

The company announced two new datacentre locations in Australia on October 15, one in Sydney and the other in Melbourne. The increased storage footprint was made possible by Dell's strategic partnership with Digital Realty, which owns and operates the datacentre infrastructure.

The new datacentre footprint builds upon Dell's existing datacentre location in Canberra, which is operated by Polaris, and another in Brisbane.

Along with the Digital Realty partnership, Dell has also announced that it has entered into a partnership with local cloud solutions player 6YS, which has become the latest member of the Dell Cloud Partner Program, and will allow Dell customers to access a number of cloud-based services, including infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and communications as a service.

While Dell Australia and New Zealand is moving fast to manage its clients' burgeoning cloud requirements, it plans to continue building its datacentre footprint through partnerships with other companies in favour of establishing its own sites, according to Dell Australia and New Zealand managing director Angela Fox.

Fox, who spoke to ZDNet at the Dell User Forum event in Sydney this week, said that the company is focusing on private cloud implementations, while letting its partner organisations handle the public cloud requirements.

"Our aim is to pursue strategies like the Digital Realty approach, as well as the 6YS partnership, in the public cloud space," said Fox. "Our primary focus, directly, is around the private cloud implementations, and we will work in partnership with key organisations in the market on the public cloud."

Fox, who replaced Joe Kremer as Dell's head in Australia and New Zealand in July, said that the company had been working with Digital Realty over a number of months to establish the new locations, which are set to offer Dell a generous measure of flexibility.

"They meet the standards that we want to see in a datacentre, from areas like security, energy efficiency," she said. "They presented a very logical partnership with us. We've got the ability with them to be very elastic, increasing capacity as we drive the provision of cloud-based solutions to our customers and prospects."

When Fox took up the managing director position for Dell's ANZ business, she made no secret of her desire to drive the company's enterprise, software and services divisions going forward.

While hardware continues to play a large part of Dell's global business model, the move to establish itself as a major end-to-end and cloud services player through infrastructure partnerships with other companies highlights the market areas in which its long-term goals lie.

"Infrastructure continues to be a core capability, but really we've continued to focus on the strategy of building up that portfolio capability as an end-to-end solutions provider," said Fox. "Services have been part of our acquisition strategy; a full end-to-end services capability is critical, and we provide quite a breadth of services."

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