Dell may wait until the end of this year to launch its anticipated public cloud, a vice president with the company told Network World sister site ITWorld, a move that puts the company behind other big-name vendors that are already executing on their cloud strategies.
Nnamdi Orakwue, Dell's vice president of cloud, told ITWorld's Nancy Gohring that the OpenStack platform, which Dell hopes to use as a base for its public cloud, is "not where it needs to be." Instead of prematurely launching a public cloud service based on nascent technology, which he says rival HP has done, Dell will wait until later this year to launch its public cloud services.
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If Dell waits until the end of this year to launch an OpenStack public cloud, it will be behind some of the other big names of the OpenStack project in launching a public cloud service though. Rackspace, an original founding member of the OpenStack project, has had an OpenStack powered public cloud up and running since August of 2012. HP launched a public beta of its OpenStack-powered cloud late last year as well. IBM has joined the OpenStack project but has not made any announcements of a public cloud offering yet either.
Orakwue was critical of HP's cloud strategy, saying that because of the immaturity of OpenStack's code, HP has had to innovate significantly on top of it to launch its cloud. Dell's strategy, he says, will be to stay more closely aligned with the OpenStack code so that users of the open source technology will be able to easily connect their on-premise OpenStack clouds with Dell's public cloud.
