Gabriel,
Excellent questions!
First, it appears that CPQ must now deal with all the legacy systems it is to acquire with the DEC deal. DEC supports PDP-11 and VAXs as well as the Alpha systems. It is also supporting legion operating systems (MVS, UNIX, etc) which have little or nothing to do with CPQ's market thrust. In addition, CPQ must decide what it is going to do with the ALPHA business. A lot of DEC service business is concerned with hardware and software that has little to do with CPQ's
main business. So, what is a guy like EP to do with all the noise?
Probably, he will have to slice and dice the businesses up and spin them off. Also, DELL will need to migrate its service business from DEC to WANG or other providers because of this purchase.
If I were DELL, I would not attempt to purchase a service organization because of the irrelevant legacy systems that they support. There is also the possibility of Y2000 liability for the service organizations if their solutions fail to work when the new millenium rolls around. After the 2000, I might consider purchasing part or all of a service organization.
For the time being, I would contract through companies such as Wang and Unisys to provide required services and develop my own service model that is optimally efficient for my business focus and which utilizes to the maximum extent the new remote network administration management software and the internet. A carefully designed, well focused, service organization can be a great competitive advantage to DELL. The careful use of other service companies can allow DELL to pick the best suppliers in a given region. This also can be an advantage to relying on a higly centralized service organization.
I am going to make a list of such third party service organizations.
INTEL will provide the hardware in the form of chipsets and motherboards for the MERCED server family.
The operating systems are NT, and UNIX primarily. UNIX will probably be available from SUNW for general use in the MERCED timeframe.
SUNW will probably end up providing support for its UNIX on the MERCED platform.
Regards,
jim kelley |
