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SCREEECH! Dell spins in public cloud U-turn – now it'll resell Google, Azure

If you can't beat them, you might as well make them rich

Dell is going to resell cloud tech from enterprise rivals as part of the company's ragged retreat from the capital-intensive public cloud market.

The company disclosed a dramatic expansion to its "Cloud Partner program" at the Dell World conference in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, by announcing that it will now resell Google Cloud Platform, Windows Azure, Savvis CenturyLink, and Accenture cloud tech, among others.

This deal follows Dell's announcement earlier this year that it was giving its customers "freedom from lock-in" by canceling its own OpenStack-based public cloud. Now, along with having ceded the market to better-funded rivals like Google and Microsoft, Dell is going to resell their gear as well.

Aside from giving punters a single throat to choke for support calls, the Cloud Partner reseller deals mean Dell will also help develop custom software services, as well. The company is also bringing its Dell Multi-Cloud Manager tech it gained with its acquisition of Enstratius into play to let punters better manage their various Dell-bought IT services, and flip-flop between them. (Though Enstratius is by all accounts a good piece of technology, it competes with a private company named Rightscale, which has the distinction of being a cloud broker that is not attached to a massive IT company.)

By reselling these cloud competitors, along with services from Joyent, Peer1 Hosting, ScaleMatrix, and ZeroLag, Dell stands to cream a bit of revenue off of the buckets of cloud cash it will be heaving into these companies.

"Putting the power of cloud in our customers' hands – and giving them the choice and flexibility to pursue the right cloud for their unique needs – will not only help individual businesses thrive, but collectively it will drive the whole technology industry forward to a new era of innovation," Nnamdi Orakwue, Dell's veep of Software Strategy, Operations and Cloud, said in a canned statement.

Though the company has stepped almost entirely away from operating its own capital-intensive data centers, it does have vague plans to eventually extend its on-premises "GovCloud" products into a full remotely provisioned service hosted in a Dell facility.

The Google and Microsoft and CenturyLink partnerships are available now, and the Accenture one will come in in mid-2014, Dell said. ®

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