Dell’s multi-cloud bet boils down to this: Compute will follow data

The debate is over, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell said this week: Multi-cloud is here to stay. The vast majority of Dell’s customers already use both on-premise and on-premise IT infrastructure, and three-quarters already use three or more clouds. 

Even cloud-native companies are moving to multi-cloud architectures, Dell noted during the Dell Technologies World 2022 conference. Simply put, he said, that’s because “compute is going to follow the data.” 

And increasingly, data is being created everywhere. 

That’s why Dell this week introduced a number of new tools and services that push the company further into multi-cloud service delivery, data management, edge and other new businesses. Among other things, Dell announced a new strategic partnership with Snowflake. For the first time, customers will be able to leverage Snowflake’s cloud-based analytics for on-premise data.

Customers will be able to connect Dell’s object storage to Snowflake in two ways. First, they’ll be able to run Snowflake’s analytics against Dell’s on-premise object storage without moving data to the cloud. They’ll also have the ability to copy Dell’s on-premises object data to the Snowflake cloud.

The partnership,  Dell co-COO Chuck Whitten said to ZDNet, showcases how Dell is taking its competitive advantages — in this case, its leadership in storage — to move into new growth areas. 

“We’ve been verly clear that as the leader in storage, we persist more bits than anybody in the industry,” Whitten said. “Now the game in multi-cloud is data mobility, or data management — the ability to move those bits.”

Snowflake, he continued, has “a vision to help companies consume data and make it as easy as cloud operating models have made consuming infrastructure. We share that vision, we just happen to come at it from a different layer in the stack. We’re coming at it from storage to data, while they’re coming at it from data management to data. It’s a perfect match of two companies saying, ‘Let’s blur the public and private cloud worlds and create a true multi-cloud data experience for customers.'”

While Dell is certain multi-cloud strategies are here to stay, the company is building its offerings around the notion that it should be a better experience. 

“Ultimately, [multi-cloud] needs to be organized into something much less complex,” Whitten said during the conference. Dell’s customers came to multi-cloud strategies by default, he said — now the company wants to create a path that allows for “multi-cloud by design.”