Summary
Dell is known for its trend of following competition into the market and being late to the game. What is not known is the solutions capability of the Dell brand – a significant negative point. In 2007, Dell had a $6 billion global services revenue (including Virtualization, Microsoft and Storage competencies) that predominantly both current and prospect customers were not aware existed.
Analysis
Dell has both strategically and financially bought into the solutions business over the last three years to compliment the 25 years of hardware experience they have attained. With acquisitions of consulting services companies such as The Networked Storage Company in the UK and ACS headquartered in Scotland, together with the hardware and software acquisitions of EqualLogic and SilverBack Technologies they have better enabled their business with solution consulting capability. Dell state that their focus is ‘disruptive consulting’. By this expression Dell want the customer to achieve the successful end results without the significant and costly consulting demands that a storage solution typically requires. There is no doubt the acquisition of the EqualLogic iSCSI hardware platform has proven successful and is a huge step in declaring their intentions to the market. The question around their storage consulting is “Are they too late”?
Dell is known for its trend of following competition into the market and being late to the game. What is not known in the market is the solutions capability of the Dell brand – a significant negative point. In 2007, Dell had a $6 billion global services revenue (including Virtualization, Microsoft and Storage competencies) that predominantly both current and prospect customers were not aware existed. As well as the widely known and very successful partnership with EMC², Dell has its own small to medium-enterprise storage hardware. The consulting and solutions capability will further drive the market to adopt the Dell platform across multiple tiers of storage. Customers using the Dell solutions capability are in a win-win situation. The customer is able to achieve the desired results without costly consulting typically associated with storage vendor engagements and with today’s message of “do more with less” this plays directly into the hands of Dell.
In the last two years a lot has been achieved by the Dell marketing teams to promote their capabilities and under the executive management of Steve Schuckenbrock (President of Global Services) and Stephen Murdoch (Executive VP – Global Services) Dell have come a long way and the release of the storage solutions is another step in the right direction. With the current confusion between NetApp and EMC² over who will obtain the technology rights to Data Domain, there is a great opportunity for Dell to capitalise with the customer base that are after such solutions.
