The company is traditionally known as a hardware vendor but last week vastly expanded its services portfolio with the $3.9 billion of Perot Systems, and plans to draw on this new capability for its SaaS offerings. It will also draw on Perot's datacentres to help boost supply of its SaaS services.

Dell additionally acts as a hardware supplier to other cloud providers, selling its servers and datacentre technology to them.

Cary Gumbert, senior manager at Dell's SaaS unit, told Computerworld UK that in terms of the cloud, offering pure technology-related services gave it differentiation from many competitors that tend to sell strategic IT project services or business applications in the cloud.

"Our biggest competitor in software is on-premise solutions," he said, "but they don't offer the quick deployment, low upfront cost, easy management and scalability."

"Other SaaS people make noise, but they either focus on strategic services or they're not multi-tenant and scalable."