SMB market prime target for Cloud services: Dell

The data centre of the future will be “an empty room” for many small and medium businesses (SMBs), according to Dell Services software and product development vice president, Mark Bilger.

Speaking at the Take Your Own Path media summit, Bilger cited a Gartner prediction that 50 per cent of all software will be purchased through software-as-a-service (SaaS) by 2020.

“We believe Cloud adoption will be greater in small and medium businesses than in large enterprises,” he said. “For many SMB customers, the data centre of the future is an empty room. It’s a pipe that connects to the internet using the cloud to provide software and services.”

The reason for this, Bilger noted, is that customers find Cloud computing more attractive as it provides the necessary IT infrastructure for SMBs.

“We’ve entered the Cloud computing market and we have 10,000 US customers that we provide SaaS services to,” he said. “Most of those are email services because email is typically not mission critical and it is an enormous user of storage.”

Dell also purchased Cloud integrator Boomi in November 2010 to ramp up its Cloud business.

Bilger said its Cloud service is focused on remote analysis and support, as SMB customers don’t want an “army of consultants” descending on them.

The company has “significant investments” in future Cloud services, Bilger said. One of these is an email management system, which is due to be launched in 2011. Dell is also looking at a broader portfolio in terms of SaaS offerings.

His comments echo those made by CEO, Michael Dell, who earlier in the summit said the company will focus on certain verticals and build private Clouds for vertical customers.

Turning to virtualisation, Bilger said a change from one year ago is the acquisition of services company Perot Systems to provide end-to-end virtualisation services.

“We are doubling our virtualisation consulting business this year, which includes data centre planning, end-user planning and virtualising planning,” he said.

Hamish Barwick travelled to Texas as a guest of Dell.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

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