There is growing enthusiasm for cloud computing and Dell continues to play an important role as it evolves.

During a recent interview with TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert), Barton George, Dell’s cloud computing evangelist, said that Dell fills two key “buckets” when it comes to cloud computing. It builds out cloud solutions for customers and delivers real business value. And it offers cloud-based solutions.

“You can build them out yourself and we can help you do them,” George said during the interview which took place at Cloud Expo 2011 in New York. “Or, you can gain access from services and solutions from the cloud. And we offer both of those.”

Even with the advances in cloud computing, George says there is still an issue in the field that is summed up with the question, “What the heck is cloud computing?”

Given the enthusiasm for cloud computing, many vendors have been renaming things “cloud this” and “cloud that,” George explains.

In addition, IT staff tells CIOs that they have been running “cloud” for years in data centers, George adds.

In turn, the excitement over the cloud has led to some confusion.

“We’re trying to cut through that and talk about the real business benefit that cloud delivers in the way of becoming more efficient and at the same time driving greater responsiveness to business – which I see as the two biggest values,” George said.

The bigger companies measure these factors in a metric known as PUE, which is a ratio of how much energy goes into the data center versus how much energy a business is losing along the way, George said. The closer that ratio gets to 1:1, the better, he adds.

In addition, George said that market size is growing.

“I think we have a slightly different positioning (at Dell (News - Alert)),” George said. “We’ve been at it for a little bit longer. So we started out actually about four years ago with a data center solutions group and the group there is targeted to the biggest of the big.” Examples are Facebook (News - Alert), Microsoft Azure and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

“We worked with these giant companies to build out custom systems for them so they could build their clouds on top of them,” George said. “The architecture they have is very different than the traditional enterprise.”

More recently, Dell has been building derivative systems for organizations that are slightly smaller than the biggest of the big, George said.

Dell is also partnering with software vendors.

“What’s different between us and some of our competitors is that these solutions are not welded shut. They are not proprietary. … Our solutions are open, capable and affordable,” George said. “It’s not just a proprietary solution that you have to take lock, stock and barrel.”