The big picture: Anyone who'south been following IT trends for the last few years has come across the "as a service" moniker. Originally introduced as a radical new way to sell business software (SaaS) in the early 2000s, the as-a-service concept has exploded beyond all areas of IT and fifty-fifty into mainstream consumer life. Groceries as a service? Try Amazon Fresh and Instacart. Music as a service? How nigh Spotify and Apple tree Music. Yous get the thought.

Sometimes all it takes to trigger a big motility is to accept the first step. With its latest Apex "equally a Service" offerings unveiled at Dell Technologies' TechWorld event, it looks like the company is doing but that. To brand sense of it all, let'due south put it in context.

Ane of the last holdouts to the flexible consumption model that underlies various "as a service" offerings has been enterprise It hardware that lives within the walls of an organization. Sure, nosotros've seen cloud computing services from the likes of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, etc. grow enormously over the last decade, and particularly in the last year.

However, even with that astonishing growth, it's well understood that the vast majority of business organisation calculating notwithstanding occurs within corporate data centers or other private locations. The exact percentages vary, but fifty-fifty a bourgeois estimate of 75% onsite and 25% in the cloud highlights how incredibly important "local" computing efforts remain. Of course, this reality has also led to the explosion of interest in hybrid cloud, which attempts to unite these ii groups of computing resources into a cohesive whole.

An of import characteristic of all this local computing infrastructure—which sometimes gets generically relabeled as private cloud—is that well-nigh of information technology has been purchased in a traditional manner: the visitor running or managing the data center makes a capital expense buy (capex) of the necessary equipment, takes ownership of it and, in nigh cases, takes on the responsibility of installing, managing, and maintaining it. That's the manner things have worked for decades, just based on these new Dell Apex offerings, the times, information technology seems, are a' changing.

With its greatly expanded array of Apex services—incorporating storage, compute, networking and more—Dell is giving its customers the ability to move to an operational expense (opex)-based model for using its storage, servers, and other Information technology equipment.

Through the combined portal of its new Apex Console, customers can now buy admission to various types of storage, computing, and other hardware resources on either an equally-needed, consumption-driven basis or a subscription basis.

Dell Tech expanded its range of Apex Data Storage Services and debuted new Noon Hybrid Cloud and Apex Private Cloud offerings (built on Dell's existing Dell Technology Deject). In addition, the company renamed and repositioned some of its consulting, remote management, and flexible usage offerings under the Apex brand. Collectively, these new services move Dell Tech into a more cloud computing-like business model.

A significant difference with Dell'south Apex offer—as with HPE's conceptually similar Greenlake products, or with hardware-based individual cloud offerings such as AWS Outposts or Microsoft'south Azure Stack—is that Dell has to ship equipment to a company's location, set it up, attach information technology to a visitor'due south existing IT resource and configure information technology for use. So, instead of being fix for use in 5 minutes, it tin can take up to 14 days. Given that most of the efforts leveraging these types of technologies will exist more premeditated action and less spontaneous experiment, the additional time is not likely to be a big concern.

At Dell TechWorld, the visitor also discussed a partnership with Equinix, a co-location facility with numerous sites effectually the world. Leveraging that connexion, interested parties could potentially get access to these "as a service" offerings faster, since Dell volition exist stocking these facilities with the necessary hardware. The Equinix connection also allows companies the flexibility to try these "every bit a service" offerings without whatsoever interruptions to their existing environments.

Dell seems to have seen the writing on the wall in terms of how modern IT departments have begun to work and is making this shift a key part of its futurity management

A few interesting, but non necessarily obvious, similarities that the Apex model has to public cloud offerings include the ability to quickly ramp up capabilities as needed. Though the initial install takes longer, Dell provides hardware that has more capabilities than a customer initially requests, giving it the flexibility to immediately plow on additional storage, compute power, etc. as requested. In improver, as with public cloud providers, Dell plans to offers performance guarantees, provide the ability to monitor the functioning of workloads, and upgrade the hardware as necessary.

To be clear, Dell will continue to sell its hardware in the traditional manner for customers who continue to want to purchase it that mode. Given the wide-ranging nature and intensity of the announcements, however, it'due south articulate that the Apex strategy represents a pregnant pin for the company.

Realistically, initial accept-up of the Apex model may only represent a modest percentage of its total sales, equally companies experiment with the opex, consumption-based model on a few projects here or there. Notwithstanding, Dell seems to have seen the writing on the wall in terms of how modern IT departments have begun to work and is making this shift a key part of its hereafter direction.

A full-calibration switch to hardware-as-a-service certainly won't happen overnight, just it does look to be taking some big steps forrad.

Bob O'Donnell is the founder and principal analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the applied science manufacture and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.