Dell Technologies APEX is a breakthrough portfolio of as-a-Service offerings that simplify digital transformation by increasing IT agility and control. APEX simplifies the technology experience by shifting the way we deliver our portfolio to focus more on outcomes and less on infrastructure. Our customers experience this shift primarily through the APEX Console, which provides self-service access to a catalog of infrastructure and cloud services and serves as a hub for managing subscriptions, monitoring service performance, optimizing utilization and spend, and more.
Deploying Infrastructure and Cloud Services
It comes as no surprise that integrating a new hybrid or on-premises infrastructure solution – regardless of where it is physically being deployed – is a process with many steps and numerous players. Identifying all the necessary people and gathering and documenting all the necessary details takes time and diligence. At best, your organization may have tackled this problem often enough to have established processes and centralized information. On the other hand, perhaps new deployments are infrequent, internal organizations are disconnected, or you utilize co-location facilities for whom details are inherently outside of your organization, any of which could lead to wasted time, effort and expense when faced with a new infrastructure project.
This is one of many reasons why simplicity and agility are core tenets of Dell Technologies APEX. The APEX Console, specifically, serves as the interface for your organization to create and consume APEX services. Today, we are excited to announce a new set of features in the APEX Console specifically targeted at streamlining the deployment process so you can drive towards the outcomes you set out to address faster and more efficiently.
Until today, the pre-deployment process included a comprehensive site readiness discussion between Dell services and your site administration, business stakeholders, staff…anyone that may have a role in deployment or hold key information about requirements. During this process, it is not uncommon for new requirements or restrictions to be identified that require some action on your part to be ready for deployment, or that require some degree of reconfiguration of the order itself.
The site readiness survey – now live in the APEX Console – gives you better visibility of the site requirements and helps you know the questions that need answering and people that need to be engaged before an order is even placed. This means you can avoid potential delays down the line and less manual back and forth between your teams and ours before deployment. It gets you to deployment of your APEX service sooner and reduces the risk of unexpected work or expense that might keep you from getting what you really want: datacenter technology to meet your business or project demands, delivered conveniently, as-a-service.
One Place to Manage Your Sites
In addition to the site readiness survey now integrated in the subscription configuration process, APEX Console administrators can also manage your organization’s sites – including each site’s physical, digital and personnel details – proactively, all in one place. That pre-configured site information is then readily available to any user that can configure new subscriptions or expansions to existing subscriptions.
This means your end users can avoid spending time tracking down information like:
- Security Requirements
- Parking Restrictions
- Primary and Secondary site contacts
- Primary and Secondary deployment contacts
- Power supply details
- Network configurations details
…and a host of other information all necessary for a successful deployment but frequently spread across teams within your organization. This issue can be compounded if deploying to a co-location facility where the user requesting the APEX service has little or no awareness of – or connection to – the facility itself or the team managing it.
Modern IT, Faster Outcomes
Together, site management and the site readiness survey in the APEX Console further our mission to create a seamless infrastructure service experience, from service discovery, to deployment, to performance optimization and growth over time with your business. The development team behind the APEX Console runs an agile process to bring our APEX customers new features; delivering meaningful value, regularly. We will continue to innovate to provide you with a self-service experience – backed by our experts when you need them – to give your IT leadership, professionals, and customers a simplified, agile path to outcomes.