February 15, 2000 12:00am
Dell: Win2K Is A Good Thing
By Mary Jo Foley SMRT
Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell sounded a lot more
upbeat about Windows 2000's prospects on Tuesday
than he did at the end of last week.
Dell, who provided the opening keynote at this week's
Windows 2000 Conference & Expo in San Francisco,
attempted to distance himself from comments he made
last Thursday during Dell Computer's Q4 earnings call.
Dell reportedly said at that time that he foresaw no rush
of corporate customers lining up to embrace Windows
2000.
Today, Dell countered those remarks, claiming that
"there might have been an incorrect connection"
between his remarks and a GartnerGroup report, also
issued at the end of last week, advising customers to
wait for Microsoft's first update to Windows 2000 to
avoid potential application incompatibility problems.
"We're ready for Windows 2000 to happen as soon as
our customers are ready for it to happen," said Dell
during a press question-and-answer session that
followed his remarks at the Bill Graham civic
auditorium.
When asked about his bullish comments on Linux as of
late, Dell added, "The adoption rate of Windows 2000
won't be determined by my speeches. It will be
determined by customers themselves. We believe the
adoption rate [for Windows 2000] will be strong."
But he also noted that "Dell is offering a broad range of
OSes." He said that between Linux and Windows 2000,
both of which Dell Computer is preloading on its
servers, "we believe we are addressing two-thirds of the
market's needs."
Win2K At The Core
Dell told attendees that his company is betting heavily
on Windows 2000 as the core of the Internet
infrastructure upon which Dell Computer and its
customers will base their e-businesses.
In two weeks time, Dell Computer will unveil its
DellHost.com data-center hosting strategy, said Dell.
Windows 2000 will be one of several operating-system
choices that Dell Computer will offer to small-business
customers who want to outsource their IT operations to
Dell Computer, Dell said. He said Dell Computer will
offer both shared and dedicated hosting to interested
customers, and added that the company "also is
looking at the ASP business, as well."
Dell Computer has been a Rapid Deployment Partner
(RDP) for Windows 2000, meaning it has worked
closely with Microsoft throughout the beta testing
process for Windows 2000. The company is offering
Windows 2000 installation and product certification.
Dell's Dell Technology Consulting Group is working with
Microsoft on migration, storage-area-network support
and clustering revolving around Windows 2000. And the
company is offering customers access to Dell's
Windows 2000 Readiness Advisor to determine in
advance any potential migration problems, Dell said.
Dell told keynote attendees that he has been running
Windows 2000 beta versions on his own Latitude
notebook computer for the past six months or so. And
Dell Computer is beginning its conversion of 35,000
internal Dell e-mail accounts to Exchange 2000, the
next version of Exchange based on Active Directory and
optimized for Windows 2000.
Dell added that as of last Wednesday, Dell Computer
began running Dell.com on Windows 2000. He noted
that Dell.com currently generates 50 percent of Dell's
sales, to the tune of $40 million a day.
Dell showed a simulated comparison of 100,000
simultaneous customers accessing Dell.com pages on
Dell PowerEdge 2450 systems running NT 4.0 and
Windows 2000. When accessing both static and
dynamic page content, Dell said Windows 2000
demonstrated a 20 percent average gain in performance
over NT 4.0; when accessing static content only, he
said performance gains of up to 75 percent were
demonstrable. Dell attributed these gains to
improvements that Microsoft has made to the operating
system's TCP/IP stack and its Internet Information
Server middleware.
Dell also showed how Dell Computer is running the
Dellware Value Chain Portal for small-business
customers using Windows 2000 and an alpha version of
Microsoft's BizTalk Server technology. The Value Chain
Portal allows small businesses to place and fulfill
orders for Dell and third-party products over the Web.
Ford: All Systems Go
Dell customer Ford Motor Co. presented its plans for a
phased migration to Windows 2000 and Dell servers
over the next year. Ford, which also is a Windows 2000
RDP customer, has two of its enterprise applications
(engineering-change management and
vehicle-production scheduling) in beta on Windows
2000.
Over the next few months, Ford is planning to convert
600 of its infrastructure servers to Windows 2000, which
it will follow with a move of its corporate e-mail and Web
servers to the operating system. By early 2001, the
company plans to migrate Ford desktops to Windows
2000.
Compaq CEO Michael Capellas will provide an evening
keynote later today at the conference. Microsoft
chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates
officially will launch Windows 2000 on Thursday
morning during his keynote.
Associated products in this news story
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