This week Dell announced that it will be opening a new center in its hometown, Round Rock, Texas, to allow potential users to take a test drive of their cloud computing offerings.
The new site, which have dubbed a “solutions center” occupies 10,000 square feet on the company’s sprawling campus. Dell claims that it will allow users to take a “test drive” of their existing applications to see how they perform on Dell’s software and hardware—a process they are marketing as a real-life “proof of concept testing” opportunity.
The Round Rock location will be the first of over twenty planned cites worldwide that will be part of Dell’s international push to bring enterprise users to its cloud. Recall that recently Dell embarked on a $1 billion campaign to boost its visibility and offerings for businesses considering cloud computing—an effort that got underway with the announcement in April of its first round of ten new datacenters in dispersed locations, including Ireland and Shanghai.
Dell is banking on the idea that customers will spend a few days on site at the Round Rock center for their testing and proof of concept operations. This will give them the opportunity to gauge application performance and to see monitor performance when they link to globally distributed Dell datacenters.
As The Statesman reported, Dell is rising on its own cloud. Company officials told the magazine that they are adding to their ranks in Austin and that they expect to see growth on top of the $7.7 billion in revenue they generated last year.