theCUBE Live at Dell World 2014 Michael Dell

Dell Inc. is known more for selling commodity hardware than providing cloud services, but now that it’s been taken private, the company is making serious strides towards reversing – or at least mitigate – the situation in a push to grow margins and escape mounting competition. The tech titan is moving down the same road as arch-rival Hewlett-Packard Co. has before it, first assembling a portfolio and then trying to combine the different components into a cohesive solution.

A one-stop-shop without the lock-in?

At its annual customer conference in Austin this morning, Dell entered the latter part of its cloud journey with the release of a new portal for consuming and managing services. The Dell Cloud Marketplace is similar to the online store IBM Corp. introduced for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform earlier this year in many ways, except that it supports multiple providers, which turns the hardware maker’s lack of a homegrown IaaS offering into a surprise advantage.

By unifying competing clouds under a one-stop-shop experience, Dell is providing CIOs with a highly compelling reason to go through its marketplace instead of purchasing directly from the source: the ability to consolidate all of their cloud bills into into a single account. At organizations with thousands of employees using external services on a daily basis, that can save a tremendous amount of hassle.

And to sweeten the deal, Dell is also offering customers help with migrating their workloads among the different platforms through a combination of professional services and partner-supplied technologies available through the marketplace. The list includes Docker, which is directly supported in the portal on launch, enabling developers to package their applications into standardized containers that can be seamlessly moved among different clouds.

More pies than fingers

The store also includes networking technology from a startup called Pertino Inc. that allows customers to put a unifying transport overlay on competing services and Delphix Inc.’s data virtualization software, which removes more of the barriers to interoperability. But Dell is not leaving all the hard work – and revenue opportunities – to partners,

In conjunction with the launch of its marketplace, the tech titan also unveiled a slew of new and updated services that take aim at the biggest issues holding organizations back from adopting the cloud: security. On the administration front, Dell is rolling out a hosted version of its Foglight application performance management software adopted for monitoring cloud- and mobile-first services.

And to help users protect those services, the company is also launching a governance solution that provides centralized console for tasks such access control and introducing integrations among its existing security solutions. That further cements Dell’s efforts to unify its cloud portfolio, a vital priority if  it wants to remain competitive as its rivals promote their own suites.

Image via Dell, Inc.