Since announcing Dell Technologies APEX in 2020 and an expansion of our APEX offerings throughout last year, our team has been focused on creating and delivering a transformational user experience. This experience is orchestrated through the APEX Console where our breakthrough portfolio of cloud and as-a-service offers becomes real. The APEX Console spans your entire journey with us, from discovering offers to subscribing to them, and from day one operations to expanding your deployments as you grow. This APEX journey is designed with a focus on five foundational design principles ensuring the Apex Console is self-service, seamless, intuitive, immersive and delightful each step of the way. Let’s dive into each.
Self-Service: There When You Want It
APEX is about delivering a cloud experience that spans your infrastructure and software ecosystem and lives wherever you need it to – your datacenter, the edge, a colocation facility or the public cloud. Absolutely core to this experience is the ability to get what you need when you need it, entirely on your own terms.
The APEX Console provides an online, always-there interface so you can move your projects forward without waiting for anyone. It puts you in the driver’s seat to discover offers that map to the outcomes you need, like getting clear pricing and submitting an order in as little as 30 minutes.¹ While you won’t need to pick up the phone to find what you are looking for, the Dell Technologies experts you have trusted for years just a click away if you need us.
Seamless: All Together, in One Place
APEX and the APEX Console are unifying the entire Dell Technologies ecosystem across products, solutions, services and partners.
Consolidating the customer experience to a single platform online means no logging in to multiple element managers or tracking permissions across platforms. It means you have one space that connects all the services you need. It means direct, embedded access to relevant, helpful content – like knowledge base articles and white papers – to eliminate the need to hunt elsewhere to find the answers you are looking for. The APEX Console ensures that your APEX experience is seamless and unified across all the capabilities that power the APEX portfolio, irrespective of the team that built them.
Intuitive: Workflows That Don’t Feel Like Work
APEX is about transforming every aspect of the IT journey and bringing a uniform user experience (UX) that follows you through every step of your journey with us. We want the language of APEX to be your own, not industry jargon. We ensure flows in the Console are clearly outlined, step-by-step, so you know where you are and what’s next. To accomplish this, we have spent countless hours conducting user research to understand and anticipate your needs. We are making you the center of attention at every step, for every decision we make in building the APEX experience. Like when you are adding capacity to a data service – which service are you expanding? How much more capacity do you need? And when do you need it?
To build the most intuitive workflows possible, we have taken the time and resources to sit down with hundreds of users to understand their needs over the last eighteen months. We have had the long conversations about where they are headed, collaborated on early concepts and iterated with them on the blueprints before starting to lay down the bricks.
Immersive: Everything at Your Fingertips
Immersive means no logging in to multiple element managers or juggling data across platforms. It means you have one space that connects all the services, insights and actions that you need, and provides the ability to further customize APEX capabilities to the shape of your organization.
Our API-first approach enables the data and functions across our entire portfolio to be brought together natively in the APEX Console. It also makes our platform open so you can programmatically access its capabilities from your own tools and applications, capitalizing on existing investments.
Consider an example enabled by the public API for Dell Technologies CloudIQ that is in tech preview and will be releasing in the coming months:
Log into the APEX Console and you see a notification: system health score dipped below normal for an APEX Data Storage Services subscription. Instead of a ticket or Slack to your storage admin (isn’t she on PTO today?) you get a quick digest of what’s creating the score through the Metrics page in the Console. Need more detail? Click down into a comprehensive dashboard leveraging our monitoring innovations in CloudIQ to needle in on exactly the insights you’re looking for.
Delightful: “Now This is Cool”
We are designing APEX to simplify IT. We are pivoting the IT experience from the command-and-control model of the past to an outcome-based future. You don’t need to worry about the differences between processor or memory configurations for server products, for example. Rather, you can focus on your end goal, like “I need a compute-optimized service for my online gaming server.”
Joy and delight are the result of a consistent, deliberate focus on the needs of you, our users. We listen first to hear what you need to support your unique version of digital transformation. Then we work tirelessly aligning our resources to create an experience that meets and exceeds your expectations, anticipating your needs in ways that will pleasantly surprise you.
Innovating UX is a Journey
Join us as we strive to transform the way you work, every day, by curating an immersive, self-service experience that unifies cloud services seamlessly in an intuitive and delightful way. These principles should permeate your experience from your first subscription to an APEX service, all the way to your effortless expansion as APEX grows with your business. I am excited for what’s to come and know we will stop at nothing to drive forward, together.
¹ Source: Principled Technologies Report “Get data center Storage as-a-Service with Dell Technologies APEX Data Storage Services”, Commissioned by Dell Technologies November 2021. Actual results may vary. Full Report here.
