Dell should be focusing on building its Force10 network hardware not cloud services. Further supporting the ONF and taking on Cisco.

Stick to what its relatively good at, mass manufacturing of simple cheap reliable hardware.

Cheers,
Hutchy

EMC, Oracle, IBM, HP et al have acquired big data software/services companies, and have been reasonably successful as a result. But they have used these acquisitions to deliver appliances into the market; the acquired software, running on top-end (expensive) hardware.

Dell’s whole proposition is around more affordable, commodity, kit. It’s far less compelling as an appliance.

Closer partnerships with Cloudera, HortonWorks et al, though? That could work pretty well. As Dell have done with Eucalyptus, Ubuntu, etc, they could sell (cheap) hardware with the software already installed. They could partner, and make it as painless as possible for Cloudera/HortonWorks/MapR/whoever customers to order and deploy clusters of Dell kit.

It’s not a high margin business, and it doesn’t have much (or any!) scope for defensible differentiation, but that’s been Dell’s story from the outset. They’ll succeed by being a little bit easier to deploy than their competitors, a little bit cheaper than their competitors, and (hopefully!) by managing supply chains to ensure their margins are a little bit healthier than their competitors…