EMC World 2011: EMC exec slams Dell's cloud strategy

EMC says it will not become a cloud service provider, but will partner with companies

Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president for EMC Service Providers, has slammed Dell's cloud strategy, labelling it predictable and desperate.

Speaking at EMC World in Las Vegas this week, Hoffman's attack on Dell followed EMC's announcement that it will partner with up to 100 service providers to drive cloud adoption.

"Dell's cloud strategy is a predictable move, it is largely desperation, and I would be surprised if they were successful at it," said Hoffman.

"They are in effect going to go head to head with IBM and HP, and they have neither the scale of those two companies, nor do they have the product technology," he added.

Dell announced in April that it plans to invest up to $1bn (£613m) in its current fiscal year in new datacentres and cloud technologies.

Hoffman said that EMC would not make the same mistake.

"There are three reasons why we won't offer our own cloud services," said Hoffman.

"First, we believe that you can't be an excellent service provider and an excellent product provider at the same time. Secondly, the financial model differs dramatically. And finally, we would have to be convinced that we could become one of the top one or two service providers in the world, and that's hard to imagine," he said.

EMC will team up with service providers over the next year to enable them to create, deploy, market, sell and deliver EMC-powered public and private cloud services.

Service providers already signed up are largely US based, and include the likes of AT&T and Verizon.

However, Hoffman said EMC was not just focusing on US companies, and would announce European partners in the near future.

"The list is only US dominated because we had said that we wouldn't announce companies that haven't yet signed," said Hoffman.

"But there is a flurry of contract signing taking place at the moment, and my prediction is that within the next 60 days we will announce another 30 companies, which will be international."