Gary, Hi!! Thanks....Nice article...Been hearing this for some time now...IRelations discussed this two years ago on the tour...Once again DELL's coming up the food chain...
RE: DELL The world's No. 1 computer manufacturer and No. 1 Internet retailer is now also the leading producer, for the huge U.S. market, of Intel-based servers that sell for less than $100,000. According to research group IDC, 80% of all the servers now sold are based on Intel chips. Michael Dell is a loud advocate of this trend toward standardization. And he is counting on the server and storage business, estimating that within a few years, it, along with notebooks, will account for 70% of Dell's revenues. That server push has helped this year: the company announced $7.5 billion in third-quarter revenues, only 10% less than last year's--the best result in an industry marked by worse declines.
The Dell strategy is to leverage its manufacturing and marketing talent to enable it to deliver the kind of out-of-the-box, high-volume operation that made it dominant in PCs. Its partnerships with database king Oracle and Linux maven Red Hat (Linux is an increasingly popular--and open--alternative to Windows for Intel-based servers) give customers access to powerful options. And in November Dell announced a co-branding arrangement with data-storage king EMC. Although Dell operates mostly at the low end of the market, the idea is to climb steadily toward faster and more expensive machines as the technology arrives. |