Dell Has A New Platform As A Service That Actually Makes Sense

Dell has a new platform as a service (PaaS) and it actually makes sense.

The service is called Project Fast PaaS, part of the new Dell Cloud Labs, which also includes Project Sputnik, the Linux laptop for developers and Crowbar, the open-source cloud deployment framework. Crowbar was originally created to support its “OpenStack- and Hadoop-powered offerings.”

FastPaaS and the new Dell Cloud Labs reflects a paradox that I felt all week at Dell World. While Fast PaaS represents the innovation happening at Dell, as with any big enterprise company, it is dependent on making big deals with high margins that serve the basic demands of large enterprises.

On Tuesday, I moderated a think tank discussion that unfortunately was stacked with Dell managers. One customer attended. To my fault, a few Dell managers took control of the conversation at certain points, which was unfortunate. But they did express some perspectives that reflect the real conflict at Dell these days.

Michael Coté, a former RedMonk analyst who is now Dell’s director of cloud strategy and special programs summed it up well in a blog post yesterday: IT faces a real conflict. It’s a time of rapid technology advancement. Customers want access to the latest and greatest but IT still needs to keep everything running, too. They are expected to make sure the email works and be innovative, too. It’s an impossible mission. In Coté’s words:

The mind set of keeping things stable a reliable (the five nines crowd) doesn’t fit with coming up with new stuff. Practices like Agile and the rapid delivery cycles in DevOps can help, but at some point, the two paths of ensuring stability and profiting from disruption are divergent enough that you can’t perfectly co-mingle them…and yet, that’s what we expect from the IT department.

Fast PaaS is a great example of how Dell is seeking to be innovative in developing a unique strategy but cloaking it as a “solution.” It tells a good story about what Dell is trying to do with its cloud strategy. Dell does not want to be like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and offer a blank virtual machine. It wants to offer solutions. And I think the strategy works.

Project Fast PaaS is built on Cloud Foundry, the open-source PaaS developed initially by VMware and now operating under an Apache license.

The PaaS is on-premise — it’s private. Everything comes fully packaged. A developer fills in some forms that include the programming language, the amount of memory needed and what database to attach to the app. Do that and, bingo, an app is made — “Hello Cloud!” Well. that’s at least what it said when Dell Senior Product Manager Ed Conzel created an app for me in a demo at Dell World. It all looks nice, too. It’s straightforward — once the app goes live, IT can then monitor and shut it down if need be. And it’s mobile. In the demo, I was showed how the app syncs to the Dell PaaS, which IT can then maintain. In the demo, Conzel deployed the app and Tom Davies, director of cloud engineering, controlled it over his smartphone. Pretty damn cool.

The PaaS fits into a host of solutions. Dell has this overarching vision of providing a virtual machine in its OpenStack cloud. They are not targeting developers like HP is doing with its focus on providing a blank VM, which developers then build upon. Dell targets the higher-level use cases where IT may want something more than just a blank slate. These are companies looking to “SaaS” their apps with added services such as billing and identity. Customers don’t want a bill from a number of different vendors. They want a package.

Fast PaaS is an important part of Dell’s cloud story. It fits with the company’s various acquisitions, such as Clarity, as well as homegrown projects like Project Sputnik:

Clarity offers a container for integrated developer environments (IDE). An old-school legacy app can be placed in Clarity and delivered in a container to Fast PaaS. Dell has a reseller relationship with Salesforce.com so the old-shoool software becomes a new world SaaS.Project Sputniok is the Liniux laptop for developers that Dell created with the help of the developer community. It can be configured directly to the PaaS so developers can use it easily with the other profiles they create. Ironically, it is the inverse of the solution strategy. The VM gets all dressed up and the laptop is the blank slate.

I had a good week at Dell World — surprised by its innovation but reminded of the challenge enterprise faces. But Dell may be just in the right spot, balancing the developer movement with the reality of IT.

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Cloud Sherpas Raises $40M And Makes Eighth Acquisition To Broaden Cloud Brokerage Service

Cloud Sherpas has raised $40 million and made its eighth acquisition to expand its cloud brokerage service.

The funding, lead by Greenspring Associates, brings Cloud Sherpas’ total to $62.6 million. Existing investors Columbia Capital and Delta-V Capital joined in the new round. Australia-based Queensland Investment Corporation, an institutional investment manager, also participated.

Atlanta-based Cloud Sherpas used the funding news to announce the acquisition of Cloudtrigger, a consulting group that specializes in serving Salesforce.com Service Cloud customers.

Cloud Sherpas is itself the product of a merger.  In March of this year, the company merged with New York based GlobalOne, also a cloud services company. At the time of the merger, Cloud Sherpas received a $20 million investment from Columbia Capital, which last year had also invested $15 million in Global One.

That’s a lot of money floating around for what essentially amounts to a group holding of service providers that serve as resellers and integrators for Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

But there’s a reason for that. If for some bizarre reason you’ve been locked in a mainframe and haven’t noticed, the cloud has become blindingly hypnotic, lulling businesses by the butt load into moving off their old-school Microsoft Office suites and server sprawling CRM installs. Google Apps and Salesforce.com have emerged as two of the happy benefactors. But like life itself, there is no way to escape the enterprise past. Company IT managers spend months cramped in meeting rooms trying to figure out how the hell to keep the masses happy with shiny new apps while at the same time plugging the data center dyke so the email flows and the sales wheels turn.

That’s where companies like Cloud Sherpas come into play. Cloud Sherpas is not the consulting company of the past that wold charge oodles of cash to bolt that Oracle megadeath database with the IBM big box that took dozens of consultants just to unwrap the goddamn thing.

Nor is it Microsoft’s world as much any more. Their desktop empire resembles the  great holdings of an aging monarchy. They still have tons of gold but the modern world has passed it by. The only solution is to start anew. Thank goodness for Windows Azure, it;s brightest hope to continue its long reign of power.

Cloud Sherpas says it is more than a consulting operation. Its intellectual property stems from the extensions it offers and the business processes it has developed. CloudTrigger, based out of San Diego, has developed an extension that provides geospatial capabilities on top of Salesforce.com Service Cloud. That is the type of IP Cloud Sherpa will continue to develop and acquire going forward.

Cloud Sherpa sits in that giant middle space between the enterprise and the cloud. That’s a different place than where the traditional consulting shops sit as they continue to sell software to the IT stalwarts thinking how they are going to get the most of their existing installations. The traditional solutions providers like Deloitte are not getting prime rib deals any more. The IT manager wants that software for cheap. All they have to do is point to what they can get in the cloud.

Cloud Sherpa and other cloud services companies like Appirio are finding themselves in a good space. From  this point they can start looking at other markets such as the booming human workforce management companies like Workday that need a new kind of channel partner.

Still, Cloud Sherpas has a lot of employees, reflecting its consulting heritage. The count now stands at 350 and executives say they should push north of 500 in the next year.

That’s a lot of people and perhaps why the investors are not the typical ones we see investing in companies in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Cloud Sherpas is a people intensive company and less so one that sells software or services and zero or almost next to zero in consulting.

Still, the cloud brokerage business is probably the closest we are seeing to a cloud cash cow with an almost endless supply of customers that will sure to keep coming for  many years to come.

Cloud Sherpas, recently named the Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year and a Platinum salesforce.com Partner, works with enterprises, educational institutions and government agencies to help them innovate in the social mobile cloud. Since 2008, the company has transitioned over 1.5 million workers from legacy, on-premise systems into the cloud with messaging, collaboration, CRM, social business services and custom development for the web and mobile devices. As a leading Cloud Service Provider, Cloud Sherpas is uniquely positioned to help global...

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