Dell Aims for the Clouds

With the acquisition of Boomi this week to add middleware services in the cloud, Dell is signaling its intent to compete across the spectrum of public and private cloud computing services and deployments.

Earlier this year, Dell said it would be bringing to market cloud computing offerings and services based on the Azure cloud computing platform created by Microsoft. Prior to that, Dell had partnered with Canonical to create a turnkey Linux server platform for deployment in cloud computing scenarios using Ubuntu and, most recently, the company rolled out its Virtual Integrated System (VIS) platform for cloud computing.

In addition, Dell has added a number of managed services to its portfolio, including the former Everdream services for managing desktops and the platform from Silverback Technologies that Dell acquired for managing the overall IT environment.

While Dell has yet to put all the parts in place, it’s evident that the company plans to play a big role in helping IT organizations build private clouds while also providing services on public could infrastructure.

As these offerings evolve, it’s also clear that Dell will be integrating public and private cloud computing offerings to create a hybrid set of cloud computing services that will span both private and public cloud infrastructure.

Paulette Almaier, vice president and general manager for Dell SMB solutions, says Dell will have a lot more to say about cloud computing in 2011. But what will be interesting to see is how Dell goes about turning cloud computing services into products. The history of Dell is to catch technologies at just the point when they are about to peak in terms of mainstream adoption.

Cloud computing should be hitting its stride in 2011, and as Dell adds its weight to the economics of the cloud, chances are more than fair that pricing for cloud computing services in 2011 will continue to fall rapidly.