Charles’s observations and thoughts on the Azure announcement this week.

Dell’s cloud efforts tend to be one of the company’s best kept secrets. Some vendors’ continual cloud pronouncements tend to blend into a vuvuzela-like drone, but Dell has simply gotten down to the hard work of building workable commercial cloud and hyper-scale data center solutions during the past three years… This new announcement also illustrates a substantial benefit Dell gained from its acquisition of Perot Systems last November. Along with being the leading vendor of healthcare-related IT services (a position that Dell now enjoys) Perot was a longtime player in the hosted IT services market. That experience, combined with Perot’s sizable hosting-focused data center assets, helped Dell to get a substantial jump on its rivals in leveraging Windows Azure for Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.