Three makes, one estate

Dell for the desks, HP for the field, Surface for the people who asked nicely. One Intune tenant, three sets of hardware rules — and, until now, one person expected to keep them all straight.

The estate nobody designed

Nobody sets out to run a three-vendor fleet. It happens through procurement cycles, a merger, a lease deal that was too good to refuse, and an executive tier that wanted Surface devices specifically. The result is entirely normal and quietly expensive: one Autopilot tenant provisioning three families of hardware, each with its own opinions.

Dell wants its own update tooling on the box. HP has an equivalent that behaves differently. Surface wants neither — its drivers and firmware arrive through Windows Update, and bolting a third-party update agent onto one helps nobody. None of this is difficult in isolation. The difficulty is that it all has to be remembered, correctly, on every build, forever.

Where the variance actually lives

If you wrote down everything that differs across the three makes, the list is longer than anyone admits in the change board:

• OEM tooling — which vendor's driver and firmware mechanism belongs on which device, and which devices must not have one at all.
• Chassis behaviour — a desktop that should never sleep is configured differently from a laptop where lid-close, battery and standby behaviour matter.
• Per-make housekeeping — the preloads to strip, the settings each vendor ships in a state you would not have chosen.

Handled by hand, that becomes three build documents that drift apart, tested unevenly, held together by whoever did the last refresh. The failure mode is not dramatic. It is the HP that got the Dell variant, discovered three weeks later as a helpdesk ticket that takes an hour to decode.

What Decolla does with make and chassis

Decolla's wizard starts by asking what you are actually building: platform, chassis, scenario, make. From those answers, a conditional engine does the tedious part before you touch the catalogue — it defaults the right OEM tooling for the make you selected, sets power behaviour appropriate to the chassis, and adjusts drive strategy, locale, the HVCI gate and existing-versus-new-device handling to match.

The catalogue behind it holds 260+ build items across 21 sections, relevance-filtered — the Surface build simply never offers you another vendor's update agent. The items themselves come from the Library: pre-built, industry-tested policies, scripts and fixes, including the mundane hardening and recurring helpdesk fixes you would otherwise assemble yourself. The assembly work that eats weeks when done by hand happens in seconds; defining a build takes minutes. You are not maintaining three documents — you are answering the same wizard three times and letting the conditions diverge exactly where they should.

You still read the plan

Nothing runs on a default. Every build produces an itemised written plan first, and every item on it shows its delivery method and its reversibility class — automatically reversible, reversible on request, or flagged irreversible so you see it before it happens. Three makes means three plans you can put side by side and diff by eye. That is the review the risk owner actually wants: not trust in an engine, but a document.

Deployment then runs unattended in your tenant, over your own Intune and Autopilot — Decolla is not a parallel platform, and the Graph scopes it uses are published in full before you connect. Installs run at Microsoft's pace, as they always have; the difference is that what is queued is right for the hardware. If something needs undoing, rollback works per item or per build, covering Decolla's own changes.

Variance, encoded

The three-make estate is not going away — procurement will see to that. What can go away is the version of it that lives in one engineer's head. Decolla, from The Cloud Platform, encodes the make and chassis logic once and applies it every time, with a written plan in between you and every change.

Decolla is in private build. If a mixed Dell, HP and Surface estate is your day job, the early-access waitlist is the way in.