Public cloud costs twice as much as on-premise, claims Michael Dell

Michael Dell talks up importance of 'multi-cloud' world in opening keynote at Dell EMC World

Michael Dell has fired a shout across the bows of AWS, Microsoft, and Google by claiming that, for many customers, "public cloud is twice as expensive as on-premise".

Speaking in the opening keynote at the Dell EMC World event taking place in Las Vegas this week, the Dell Technologies CEO talked up the importance of the "multi-cloud" world. He claimed that, while all styles of cloud computing have their merits and applications, customers that rely too heavily on any one model - particularly public cloud - will hamper themselves.

"If you have a public cloud-first and -only strategy, you will find yourself uncompetitive in the long term. On-premise offers automation capabilities on an unprecedented scale," he said. "Many customers have already told us that the public cloud is twice as expensive as on-premise."

Speaking after Dell, David Goulden, president of Dell EMC, told attendees that his firm's cloud offering addresses not only generalist productivity and business applications, but also core applications that many enterprises would not typically consider suitable for the cloud arena.

"Most clouds target the millions of general-purpose applications," he said. "Our cloud strategy targets those, but also targets performance-intensive, mission-critical applications that most customers would not [otherwise] consider running on a cloud or as-a-service basis. We, uniquely, have a hybrid cloud strategy for all your applications."

Transformers
The watchword for the opening morning's festivities was very much ‘digital transformation'. To boost its credentials in this space, Dell EMC today announced a wide range of new products across its infrastructure portfolio. These included the 14th generation of its PowerEdge range of servers - which are due to hit the market this summer - and the new VMAX 950F all-flash storage array.

The vendor also boosted its VxRail suite of hyper-converged technology, including the launch of a single-processor unit which allows businesses to invest in hyper-converged infrastructure for a capital investment as low as $25,000. Alongside this, Dell Financial Services is to a launch a payment offering for hyper-converged infrastructure providing customers with the option of "cloud-like consumption" of the technology.