IT departments are under pressure to manage rapidly evolving workloads, supporting traditional applications, like VMs and databases, alongside modern demands such as AI, containers, and edge computing. Rising challenges from AI mandates, unpredictable costs, sustainability priorities, and virtualisation disruptions are reshaping how organisations develop these workload strategies, driving the need for smarter resource use and flexibility.
These challenges are only amplified by the growing rate of change, with 88% of C-level executives, both globally and in South Africa, expecting to experience more change in 2025 than they did in 2024.
One thing is clear across discussions with our South African customers: there is an urgent need for dynamic and adaptable strategies to manage this complex landscape, all while seeking freedom from vendor lock-in and management consistency. These requirements have sparked a shift toward disaggregated infrastructure, which delivers levels of flexibility and scalability that legacy systems can’t match. Dell Technologies is at the forefront of this evolution with our industry-leading hardware, but now we are taking it a step further with software-driven automation built to accelerate deployments and simplify infrastructure operations.
Dell automation platform: We automate, so you can innovate
Today, we are excited to announce Dell Automation Platform, a singular software orchestration platform that combines the strength of Dell’s industry-leading infrastructure with advanced automation to deliver simplified IT operations. The platform’s intuitive experience centralises delivery, management, and orchestration of solutions across AI, private cloud, and edge environments such as Dell NativeEdge and Dell Private Cloud. Dell Automation Platform is the culmination of decades of proven innovation across Dell and our unmatched ecosystem of partnerships, delivering solutions tailored to your needs.
By integrating core capabilities like secure zero-touch onboarding, centralised inventory management, Dell AIOps, and automation up and down the stack, the platform streamlines workflows and accelerates time-to-innovation. Deployed on-premises or through SaaS, Dell Automation Platform offers a curated catalogue of outcomes, solutions, and offers, validated by Dell experts and supported by a global supply chain that enables consistent deployments and seamless update processes. These capabilities extend from Day-0 to Day-2, including full lifecycle management, native ITSM integration, and multisystem storage management capabilities such as an automated Dell PowerStore OS update experience.
Dell Automation Platform offers a better way to build and manage your infrastructure solutions everywhere. Let’s unpack what’s new with the initial key offers enabled by Dell Automation Platform.
Dell Private Cloud: Deploy and manage private cloud without lock-in
Dell Private Cloud is evolving to meet the needs of modern IT environments. Earlier this year, we launched support for VMware, and now we’re excited to expand with support for Red Hat, with Nutanix support coming soon. Built on disaggregated infrastructure, Dell Private Cloud delivers the simplicity of automated lifecycle management while offering the flexibility to independently scale compute and storage. This approach improves resource utilisation, reduces over-provisioning, and lowers costs, all while empowering organisations to adapt to changing needs.
Through the Dell Automation Platform catalogue, organisations can easily access validated blueprints for leading software partners, empowering them to provision their private cloud stack in 90% fewer steps than manual processes, delivering workload-ready clusters in just 2.5 hours with zero manual effort.
Beyond deployment, automated and pre-validated updates ensure infrastructure remains in a continuously validated state, backed by more than 45,000 hours of testing, while tools like LCM prechecks and update advisors simplify planning and reduce risk. Designed to protect investments and adapt as needs evolve, the Dell Private Cloud software subscription is fully transferable between nodes and enables reuse of compute and storage when the software stack needs to change.
Also, you have the freedom to bring your own cloud OS licences and leverage familiar tools such as vCenter and OpenShift Console to maintain continuity and efficiency without retraining.
Dell NativeEdge: Centralise distributed data centre operations
Over the past two years, Dell NativeEdge has become a trusted solution for South African organisations seeking a better way to address the unique needs of edge and distributed environments. It is a full-stack solution that securely centralises the deployment, orchestration, and lifecycle management of diverse infrastructure and applications.
The industry disruption happening in the virtualisation space, paired with distributed data centre security and management complexities, demands a solution that goes beyond traditional infrastructure to deliver a simple and cost-effective option. Dell NativeEdge addresses these challenges by delivering everything expected from traditional HCI appliances for production-grade virtualisation such as high availability, workload balancing, VM snapshots, backup, and migration, while providing differentiated capabilities tailored to distributed data centres.
NativeEdge enables you to deploy applications, monitor VM clusters, and manage workloads, even for your existing VMware environments. This creates a simple migration path from VMware to NativeEdge in a timeframe and budget that suits you. With full application lifecycle management, SaaS-based management, zero-touch deployment, an immutable OS, and flexible architecture options including the option to utilise both legacy Dell and third-party infrastructure, NativeEdge offers the flexibility, security, and cost efficiency needed to modernise and empower distributed data centres.
Now integrated into the broader Dell Automation Platform, NativeEdge extends its powerful benefits, including streamlined management and AI-driven innovation, across your entire IT ecosystem. Whether workloads reside at the edge, across distributed data centres, or in the cloud, this unified approach ensures seamless operations, enhanced security, and a consistent platform for managing your virtualised infrastructure.
Dell AI Solutions: Accelerate time-to-value for AI solutions
Dell AI Solutions simplify and accelerate deployment, management, and scaling of AI with a central catalogue of offerings, including LLM inferencing and RAG AI platforms as well as integrated solutions jointly developed with market-leading AI partners. Dell Automation Platform offers an ‘easy button’ for implementing AI solutions by delivering validated, pre-configured solutions optimised for customer systems, all in one place. This accelerates time-to-value for AI workloads from proof of concept to production and empowers organisations to innovate faster, unlocking the full potential of AI for today and the future.
Delivering for customers today while preparing for future advancements
Dell Automation Platform addresses today’s challenges while unlocking tomorrow’s opportunities. With Dell Private Cloud and Dell NativeEdge integration available now, and Dell AI Solutions integration available in the coming weeks, we are excited about what the future of Dell Automation Platform means for our customers.
This future not only includes these curated and validated offerings, but also customisable solutions that extend flexibility for customers with DevOps and Platform engineering teams which want to orchestrate a more customised and diverse set of technologies. While we will continue to build validated blueprints, tested by our experts, we also want to put the power in your hands to create your own blueprints with access to templates, blueprint AI assistance, and plug-in creation that provides total flexibility for preferred system integrations. This will give you granular control over your bare-metal resources and the ability to reuse existing infrastructure-as-code investments.
This is only the beginning, and we are determined to grow Dell Automation Platform alongside our South African customers as you evolve and plan for the IT of tomorrow.