Dell Technologies has introduced a consumption-based, as-a-service purchasing program designed to help businesses pay for hardware, software, and services as an operating rather than capital expense.
Called Dell Technologies on Demand, the new procurement option covers nearly every client and data center product Dell makes, plus a variety of pre-assembled cloud and other solutions, according to Sam Grocott, senior vice president of product marketing for Dell Technologies.
“We definitely think [with] this new flexibility across the entire portfolio from our data protection to our storage to our servers to our cloud offerings all the way to our PCs as a service, we can address any customer out there that wants to consume in an opex-friendly fashion,” he says.
Customers can place as-a-service orders through partners or directly from Dell itself.
Dell Technologies on Demand debuted on the same day as a hyperconverged infrastructure offering from Dell EMC with autonomous management capabilities. Users can pay for that system through the new as-a-service purchasing program.
According to Grocott, Dell Technologies on Demand responds to mounting demand from organizations of all sizes for predictable IT procurement models that optimize TCO and efficiency.†
“They want flexible consumption solutions to more predictably plan for IT spend and pay for only the technology that is used, and they want to take advantage of cloud-like elastic capacity and eliminate the need to purchase excess capacity upfront,” he says.
Recent data from Gartner, Grocott adds, predicts that 15% of new on-premises IT deployments will involve pay-per-use pricing by 2022, versus 1% this year.
Products now available on demand through the new program include Dell EMC server, storage, data protection, converged infrastructure, and hyperconverged infrastructure systems, plus PCs and edge computing gateways from Dell’s client computing unit.
“This gives customers unmatched flexibility and choice on what technology they want to use and how they want to consume it,” Grocott says.
Businesses can buy a range of pre-integrated solutions through Dell Technologies on Demand as well. Those include the Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Unified Workspace offerings the company unveiled in May as well as a family of “engineered workload solutions” in areas like virtual desktop infrastructure and high-performance computing.
“These deliver purpose-built, validated designs from the start to shorten deployment timelines, taking all the guesswork out of the implementation,” says Grocott of the new offerings, which cover applications from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP as well.
Dell Technologies on Demand users can choose from three payment models. The “pay as you grow” option lets them pay for infrastructure and solutions on an as-a-service basis as they consume it. The “flex on demand” option lets them pre-order capacity in bulk, but still pay for it only as it’s used.
“The customer would simply just select the desired total capacity or compute required to make the right balance of flexibility and cost, and then they can scale elastically up and down as needed,” Grocott says.
The enterprise-oriented “data center utility” option, finally, offers heavily customized, pay-per-use pricing for an entire IT infrastructure. “Customers can scale up or down as required, capacity’s delivered as needed, procurement is streamlined, automated billing is of course simplified, and reporting is standardized across the board,” Grocott says.
Customers can buy optional services along with their on-demand hardware and software, including ProDeploy implementation assistance and ProSupport management, as well as fully outsourced endpoint and infrastructure managed services.
Dell Technologies on Demand is the latest addition to an array of payment solutions available through Dell Financial Services (DFS). According to Dell, over 2,000 resellers utilize DFS offerings at present. Historically, the company adds, partners who finance deals through DFS have grown twice as fast as partners who don’t.
Dell competitor Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers on-demand infrastructure through its GreenLake Flex Capacity program, which the company made available through the channel last June and expanded deeper into the mid-market this spring. Last week, HPE introduced a new “quick quote” process for GreenLake designed to get pricing to partners within a few hours and announced plans to hire new sales specialists tasked with generating partner-led GreenLake leads.
HP Inc. launched a device-as-a-service program for client devices in 2016, and began opening it up to its entire reseller channel this year.
Major distributors, including D&H, Ingram Micro, SYNNEX, and Tech Data, all have subscription-priced, as-a-service purchasing programs in place now as well.
