Let’s talk about air conditioning. It’s late summer and most days, my AC unit is blasting as I try and stay cool. As I turn my unit on and off as needed, my power company charges me for how much electricity I have used at the end of the month.
Instead, imagine if I had to pre-buy my AC for the coming month. If a heatwave rolled through and I undershot my predictions, I would be sweltering. Or if a cold front showed up, I’d have wasted money while my AC unit was sitting idle. What an awful process.
Many organizations need to go through a similar exercise for their capacity planning – but the risks to businesses are much higher. If they overbuy, they risk millions in wasted IT expenses, jeopardizing other key projects. But if they underbuy, they face missed deadlines and lost revenue. This raises a question – why can’t IT be a similar pay-per-use model?
At Dell Technologies World in May, we shared how APEX Flex on Demand** delivers that promise to your business. Today, we’re revisiting a Silicon Angle chat with Darren Fedorowicz, the SVP of Dell Financial Services, who is joined by a customer to examine an example of this in action.
Bridging the IT Divide
Daily, we hear from business leaders how the cloud operating model has changed their expectations for their IT experience. The financial flexibility of pay-per-use provides more economic agility for businesses. Furthermore, IT teams no longer need to worry about over/under-shooting their capacity planning. Perhaps most importantly, businesses can deliver capacity immediately for high-value projects. Traditionally, these aspects have been provided by hyperscalers, but public cloud environments can lack predictable costs and workload control offered by private environments.
Dell Technologies is bridging this divide with APEX – our portfolio of cloud solutions delivered as-a-Service. And for organizations struggling with capacity planning, we’re excited to offer APEX Flex on Demand. This solution offers Dell Technologies products in a pay-as-you-go model at a single rate, bringing consistency back into financial planning.
The procurement process is simple – organizations work with a Dell expert to select the right product from our infrastructure portfolio, their Committed and Buffer capacity levels, a service term, and any additional professional services. Organizations are billed at one consistent rate, only for what they use.
Just like with my AC unit, APEX Flex on Demand takes away the stress of capacity planning, reducing wasted IT spending. To see what this looks like in real life, let’s look at a customer example:
To Overbuy or Underbuy?
Darren was joined at DTW by Silicon Labs. A semiconductor company, they struggled with capacity planning for their project tape-outs when their usage spiked. This rhythm left them weighing whether to overbuy capacity for the peak or to underbuy and possibly miss delivery of a project. Delays for Silicon Labs have seven-figure impacts, so the natural choice was to always over-provision.
Enter APEX Flex on Demand. Silicon Labs now has a committed capacity of 60 – 80% of their peak needs, consumed in a CAPEX manner. Additionally, they installed burstable capacity to respond quickly to fluctuations in workloads. Now, they can meet unplanned spikes in demand, avoid costly delays during tape-out periods, and simplify their annual capacity planning exercises.
APEX Flex on Demand is our commitment to provide more flexibility and choice to our customers. To learn more about how we can assist your business, watch the full video above and read our APEX Flex on Demand solution brief.
Please be sure to read previous blogs which discussed Dell’s vision for the multicloud future and our latest cybersecurity capabilities.
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