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IDG News Service - Dell will launch its first cloud infrastructure service later this year through a partnership with VMware, continuing its push to move beyond PCs and into higher-margin software and services.

The service will be based on VMworld's vCloud platform and delivered from Dell's data center in Plano, Texas. Customers will be able to rent compute and storage capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis, or on longer-term contracts that include reserved or dedicated hardware.

Dell will also offer consulting services for companies to build private clouds in their own data centers, also using vCloud. And it will offer to build "hybrid" clouds using VMware's Connector software, which links private and public cloud environments.

Dell planned to make the announcements Monday at VMware's VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

The moves will intensify Dell's rivalry with IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which are also building public cloud services. And they will put Dell into competition with service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Verizon Business and Terremark -- some of whom are also its customers.

Still, Dell must offer the services to stay competitive in an industry where cloud services are becoming the norm, said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group. All the major IT vendors will be be offering cloud services of some form in the next three years, he predicted.

Dell's "unique value proposition" will be the managed security services it will provide, derived from its acquisition last year of SecureWorks, said Mark Bilger, vice president and CTO of Dell Services. They'll be a standard part of the service, not sold as an add-on, he said.

The service will be aimed primarily at large and midsize organizations, Bilger said. It has the unwieldy name of the Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service. A beta program will start in a few weeks, with general availability planned for the fourth quarter in the U.S. and next year in Europe and Asia.

Dell plans to add a platform-as-a-service offering next year using Microsoft's Azure software and another cloud infrastructure service based an open source platform -- possibly OpenStack or Eucalyptus, but Dell hasn't decided yet, Bilger said.

Through its Perot acquisition, Dell already provides application hosting services that generate about $1 billion per year in revenue. As those customers' contracts come up for renewal, Dell hopes to move them onto its standardized public cloud, Bilger said.

The more modern, VMware-based environment should mean lower costs for both Dell and its customers, he said. Many of Perot's customers were in the health-care industry, however, and Dell will need to make the service HIPPA compliant before they can switch over. It plans to do that next year, Bilger said.