David Floyer - Oracle OpenWorld 2014 - theCUBE Studio QLogic

David Floyer, Wikibon, at Oracle OpenWorld 2014 with Dave Vellante

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Dell made an interesting move this week. The vendor launched a partner program that will allow customers to buy cloud services through its ecosystem, an important change of strategy that Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer views positively. He explained why in a recent interview with SiliconAngle’s Kristen Feledy.

The way he sees it, Dell is downsizing its portfolio in a big transformation from a cloud service provider to a cloud service supplier. There’s a big difference between the two models. Floyer says that vendor’s transition to the latter will reduce unnecessary friction with the highly lucrative service provider market, where demand for its low-cost Intel servers and other data center equipment is soaring in the wake of increased competition from AWS. Another upshot of the program is that Dell to be able to gradually shrink its services group and double down on its core businesses.

Dell’s first three partners are ScaleMatrix, ZeroLag and Joyent. Floyer predicts that the program will gain momentum in the U.S. and abroad as time passes. He notes that of the three only ScaleMtrix offers a VMware-based solution – this tells him that Dell is not putting all of its eggs in one basket.

Floyer explains that the hardware giant plans to support a variety of different cloud stacks, including VMware, OpenStack and even Facebook’s Open Compute Project, because it doesn’t want to become dependent on the success of any particular platform . This approach will give Dell the freedom to choose the winning horse when it emerges, and enable it to stay relevant until it does.