Greg and ALL: Article..Dell launches workstations for Wall Street...
infoworld.com
Wintel on Wall Street: Dell launches workstation line
By Marc Ferranti
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 2:00 PM PT, Jul 28, 1997
NEW YORK -- Dell is aiming to capture a leadership position in the burgeoning Wintel workstation market with a new product line that debuted Monday in the heart of New York's financial community.
The WorkStation 400, offered in both single- and dual-Pentium II processor models, is targeted to meet the requirements of financial, graphics, and software development applications, according to Dell officials.
The thrust of Dell's pitch is that the leadership position in the Wintel workstation arena is up for grabs as growth in the market shifts from the traditional Unix/RISC world.
"What Dell does best is enter a market and take leadership in performance per dollar," said Kevin Rollins, president of Dell Americas.
As evidence, Rollins pointed to Dell's ramping up in the server business, where today its revenue run-rate is about $1 billion per year.
The company is working with third-party application developers to ensure that the new workstations run the leading applications in these areas, according to Rollins. This is the key aspect of Monday's announcement, analysts said.
"The workstation market is driven by applications," said Chris Le Tocq, an analyst with market researcher Dataquest, in San Jose, Calif.
While Dell's price/performance product model can give it an edge in the workstation area, it is the integration with third-party applications that the company needs to work on, agreed other analysts.
"Workstation users tend to go for particular applications, so I don't see how ... it's a commodity market," said Roger Kay, an analyst with market researcher International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass.
Dell's alliance partners will be demonstrating their applications running on Dell workstations, said Linda Hargrove, vice president of workstation sales for Dell.
The Dell WorkStation 400 is priced from $3,705 for a single 266-MHz Pentium II processor system with 64MB of RAM, a Matrox Millennium video adapter, a 2GB hard drive, a 17-inch monitor, and one year of Windows NT support. Pricing ranges to $8,078 for a dual 300-MHz Pentium II system with 128MB of RAM, an ELSA GlintMX-based Gloria graphics adaptor, a 4GB hard drive, a 20-inch monitor, and one year of NT support.
The product is currently available in North America and Europe. Localized versions will be available in Europe and areas of the Asia-Pacific region starting in mid-September. A localized version for Japan will be announced in the third quarter, though the English version of the product will be available in mid-September.
Customers will also be able to get SCO Unix and Sun Solaris operating systems with the Dell workstations, though they will be priced slightly higher, according to Hargrove.
Dell is also staffing support centers in the United States, Europe, and Asia with 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week product support specialists, though officials declined to say how big this staff would be.
Alliance partners, which are testing their applications on the new Dell machines, in the computer-aided design area include Autodesk, Dassault Systemes SA, EDS Unigraphics, Intergraph Software Solutions, Parametric Technology, SolidWorks, and Structural Dynamics Research. In the financial services area partners include The Math Works, Reuters/Tibco, and Neovision Hypersytems.
Rollins and other company officials spoke here at the Nasdaq stock exchange's Market Site showcase room, highlighting the point that the company is aiming for traditional server territory. The room is lined on one side with wall-to-wall monitors powered with Dell machines, according to Nasdaq President Alfred Berkeley, who introduced the Dell speakers Monday.
"Dell has its eyes on the big prize. ... it's entering the higher-end market and this is part of their strategy to address the enterprise," said IDC's Kay. Though Dell has its work cut out to grab leadership in the workstation market, the company has a successful track record in entering markets outside its base of direct-to-order desktop machines, Kay said.
One issue that Kay and other analysts highlighted, however, was that Unix/RISC machines are here to stay for a long time, and Wintel workstations are likely, at least initially, to serve the lower and midrange segments of the market.
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