Today’s announcement from Dell Technologies Inc. that it would expand its APEX portfolio with a new set of products for on-premises deployment of Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Cloud follows a trend away from a cloud-first mindset and toward a more balanced approach.

“Companies and organizations that we talk to are really taking a hard look at where they place their applications going forward, not just going cloud-first or cloud-only,” said Rob Strechay (pictured, left), industry analyst for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s live streaming studio. “They’ve backed way off that strategy. They are looking at colocation, and a lot of on-prem again is becoming more in vogue for those cloud-native apps.”

Strechay spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (right) during an analyst brief on Dell’s APEX Cloud announcements. They discussed key elements of the latest news and what this will mean for future multicloud models. (* Disclosure below.)

Public/private cloud balance

A more balanced approach between cloud and on-premises environments sought by customers is backed up by recent data provided to SiliconANGLE by Enterprise Technology Research, which has been tracking the movement of data between public and private clouds.

“As generally considered a bellwether, the data shows that about 43% usage of public cloud today in this sector is growing to about 55% by January of 2026,” Vellante said. “The 2026 figure is down from just 10 months ago, implying that the market is reaching a more balanced state. Many workloads are where they belong and the steep momentum to migrate off-prem has stabilized.”

The Dell APEX Cloud platform was announced in May, allowing customers to extend their cloud of choice to on-premises ecosystems. APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft offers native integration with Azure Arc to facilitate automated deployment of apps and workloads.

“Azure Arc is a management system developed by Microsoft. It’s heavily integrated with Dell’s management stack,” Strechay said. “You get a consistency of getting up and running really quickly, within four hours and underneath that in some instances, for bringing up new applications. That Arc service also ties into other Azure services, such as AKS, which is Azure Kubernetes Service, and it ties in with Azure and Dell Data Services.”

The announcements from Dell provide a range of infrastructure offerings for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, a hyperconverged infrastructure platform that can be used by customers in on-premises environments.

“The Dell APEX provided solution is a Microsoft Premier solution for Azure Stack HCI, and it’s the first one out there,” Strechay said. “They have the confidence, those customers have the confidence that this is all going to work together.”

The announcements from Dell and Microsoft address customer interest in running workloads across multiple locations, from cloud to edge.

“The early instantiations of Azure stack had this vision, but it didn’t quite have that sort of common experience that we’re now seeing,” Vellante noted. “[Customers] can get that agility on-prem that they’re so used to in the cloud. It starts to blur the lines between public and private.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video analysis:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Future of Multicloud Lands Now – Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE