For a vendor like Dell, that has historically made its money selling servers and PCs, the dual trends away from traditional PC’s and the move to cloud computing and commodity hardware has radically shifted the sands upon which their business sits. Given these changes it’s hard to not say that Dell stands upon a burning platform.

Rather than rewrite history and try and avoid the inevitable however, Dell has thrown itself headfirst into a program of transformation – it went private, in part to enable it to make the difficult decisions it needs to away from the glare of the public markets. It made a strategic decision to exit the public cloud business and instead invested in becoming the neutral cloud service layer – the acquisition of enStratius was a part of this move.

The move to be service focused gets extended today with the inking of a deal between Dell and cloud ERP vendor NetSuite. Dell will become a global reseller and implementation partner of NetSuite and will continue the relationship it has as an integration partner via its Dell Boomi business unit.

Dell has invested heavily in building a global services footprint, providing consulting, implementation and post-implementation services. And with their history delivering hardware solutions into areas that are core to NetSuite’s focus, the collaboration should prove mutually beneficial. In terms of how the logistics of the process will work, Dell Services is building and resourcing a complete practice focused on selling and implementing Cloud ERP services based on NetSuite.  I’m told that many of the members of the practice are already on board at Dell, and some may be hired into the practice

On top of this service element, the existing NetSuite/Dell Boomi relationship sees an extensive library of pre-built connectors for NetSuite-to-SaaS and NetSuite-to-on-premises integration being offered meaning that customers can rapidly integrate NetSuite with their existing or co-deployed cloud solutions.

This looks like a mutually beneficial relationship and one that will be interesting to watch – Dell needs to execute upon its reinvention and deals such as this one are the way to do it.

 

 

 

 

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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