LAS VEGAS – At the first ever combined Dell EMC World conference, the vendor has introduced new consumption-based pricing and subscription models where prices go down the longer you use the solution along with an exit strategy if the technology does not fit anymore inside your environment.
Jeremy Burton, the CMO of Dell EMC, said the company is “getting aggressive” with cloud-like pricing.
This will be a corporate-wide initiative to further Opex technology procurements. Leading the charge in Dell EMC’s consumption model push is Dell Financial Services Flex on Demand program. Flex was initially for just Dell’s storage solutions but now it will enable customers to pay only for what they need. Flex on Demand also has instant access to additional buffer capacity to handle peak times for organizations.
Erik Strauss, the executive director of software development at Sony Pictures Imageworks, said the movie industry is going through a massive transformation to digital as film making is being produced and distributed digitally. This requirement needs technology to be elastic, Strauss added, for peak processing demand and then cost less when production winds down.
Based in Vancouver, Sony Pictures Imageworks has a multi-million IT budget and a team of hundreds of people. Sony Pictures Imageworks creates digital content for movies using custom engineered software.
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Dell EMC has added to Flex on Demand with a new pricing program called Cloud Flex for HCI. HCI stands for hyper-converged infrastructure and it acts as a cloud subscription model with monthly pricing including built-in price reductions over time. This program has no upfront costs or obligation either.
“As a private company it’s easier for us to do this because we do not have to report every quarter. We can take a longer view of the business. So VxRail will be available in a subscription and if you don’t like it after 12 months you can give it back,” Burton said.
Cloud Flex for HCI will be targeted at VxRail appliances along with Dell EMC XC Series. The new VxRail will be combined with PowerEdge 14G servers at an entry-level price of $25,000.
The strategy behind this new consumption model effort from Dell EMC is to be flexible and not force customers into large capital investments for technology. The company believes that by spreading the costs over time lowers initial investments allowing channel partners to offer other types of solutions for digital transformation projects and IoT.
Dave Pearson, the research manager for IDC Canada on Enterprise Storage and Networking, said Dell EMC touched on all the key modalities for deploying existing and next generation workloads in a hybrid cloud world.
“Customers demand choice, and when Virtustream’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud launches, options will exist for general purpose, cloud native, and high performance mission critical apps across traditional infrastructure, as well as on- and off-premise cloud deployments,” Pearson said.
Dell Financial Services is playing a key role in Dell EMC’s consumption model push and plan to work with channel partners and customers during their IT planning phases. The goal is to enable them to scale up and down capacity requirements along with rolling out new IT projects without depending on large capital investment costs.