Dell has changed its public-cloud strategy, announcing on Monday that it will no longer act as a public-cloud provider, becoming instead somewhat of a broker of cloud services provided by other companies.

Putting technology of the recently acquired cloud-management firm Enstriatus at the spearhead of its new public-cloud strategy, Dell will resell other providers' cloud services to clients and sell Enstriatus as the management platform for the infrastructure customers deploy in those clouds. These can be single- or multi-cloud deployments, Dell said.

Nnamdi Orakwue, VP of Dell Cloud, said the company made the change to avoid locking customers into single-vendor cloud solutions. “Many Dell customers plan to expand their use of public cloud, but in order to truly reap the benefits, they want a choice of providers, flexibility and interoperability across platforms and models, the ability to compare cloud economics and workload performance and a cohesive way to manage all of it,” Orakwue said.

Dell launched its Cloud Partner Program on Monday, starting with three US public-cloud providers – Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag – who will serve customers in North America. The company is taking similar approach in Europe, Middle East and Africa, but has not named any providers it intends to work with.

Dell announced the acquisition of Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Enstiratus earlier this month. The company's cloud-management platform automates application provisioning and scaling, configuration management, usage governance and cloud-utilization monitoring.

The technology supports a wide variety of cloud platforms, including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. Another recent acquisition (of Gale Technologies) provided Dell with multi-cloud management and configuration capabilities.

Dell first announced its intent to become a public-cloud provider in August 2011. Then, the company said it was building out an infrastructure within its data centers around the world based on VMware's cloud technology to provide the services.

Later, however, it changed its technological approach to public cloud, choosing to build the infrastructure for its offering on OpenStack. In January of this year, Orakwue told Computer Weekly that Dell was going to launch the OpenStack-based public cloud in the fourth quarter.

Monday's announcement is an effort to expand the company's public-cloud play beyond a single platform.