Dell Takes On Amazon & Microsoft With Subscription Service

Dell, a major partner of JB Hi Fi, who at the same time invests heavily in driving traffic to its own website, is set to roll out a direct sell B2B subscription service in a bid to counter the lure of cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft.

With the new service, Dell will be offering business clients more flexible, on-demand buying options for products like servers and personal computers.

Dell Technologies On-Demand, the new consumption-based and as-a-service offering, provides its customers with more choice, flexibility and consistency in the consumption of delivery of modern IT infrastructure.

“We really think it’s an important time for Dell to simplify the way we offer our portfolio and meet customers’ needs,” Sam Grocott, Dell’s senior vice-president of Product Marketing, told Bloomberg.

“This type of a model – as a service – was born in the cloud. As organisations have leveraged this model in the past, they have come to like it.”

The range of technologies on which Dell offers the pay-per-use model includes storage, computing, virtualisation and networking, and allows for a pricing model where customers only pay for what they use.

Dell is offering three pricing structures – Pay As You Grow, Flex On Demand, and the Data Centre Utility.

With Pay As You Grow, organisations can pay for their estimated IT needs based on their business growth.

Flex On Demand on the other hand offers a plan where enterprises can pay for hybrid cloud support based on their needs, while Data Centre Utility is usually saved for deployments on a massive scale.

“The multi-cloud world is here and will only grow, which means customers need on-demand and consistent infrastructure that yield predictable outcomes across all of their clouds, data centres and edge locations,” Jeff Clarke, Dell Technologies vice-chairman, told TechRadar.

“Dell Technologies On-Demand makes it possible for organisations to plan, deploy and manage their entire IT footprint.”

“They can choose how they consume and pay for IT solutions that meet their needs with the freedom and flexibility to evolve as their needs change over time.”

According to Bloomberg, while Dell’s overall sales climbed 2% in the last quarter, while demand for its servers and networking gear had dropped 12% compared to the same period last year.

Grocott said that Dell still expects the vast majority of customers to pay upfront for products in the next three to five years.