Dell’s Cloud Plans Falls Behind Schedule

Dell announced an aggressive schedule last year to roll out cloud-based application services, but it appears that the schedule was a little too aggressive.

Dell said last August that it planned to launch an online analytics service in the first half of this year for small and midsized businesses, but that service isn’t due now until early next year, a Dell executive said.

“Like a lot of development projects, it can take a bit longer than you think,” Paulette Altmaier, general manager of Dell’s Cloud Business Applications group, said in an interview Thursday.

Dell also said it would launch a platform-as-a-service offering this year based on Microsoft’s Azure platform. On Friday, a Dell spokeswoman said the company no longer has a delivery date for that service.

The delays are a setback for Dell, which is trying to reduce its dependence on PCs and build more profitable businesses in services and software. But a lot of companies are moving slowly to the cloud, so the hold-up isn’t a disaster, said Peter Ffoulkes, an industry analyst with 451 Research Group.

“The move to the cloud is not a fast journey and for most people it is still largely a future. I would not expect a quarter or two to make a big difference in practical terms,” he said.

Dell has also made a string of software acquisitions in the past year that might be causing it to rethink its software-as-a-service strategy. It updated press and analysts on its software plans Thursday.

When it does arrive, the analytics service will offer “cross-app” analytics, meaning customers will be able to import data from one or more applications to a data warehouse that Dell will host for them online, and then perform analysis on that data.

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