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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D.J.Smyth who wrote (156203)	4/8/2000 9:32:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Darrell - SUNW expects its distributors to handle the "small guys". Their corporate focus is on larger opportunities - not necessarily all large companies, but at least companies which have enough infrastructure to require some of Sun's bigger products - UE 4500/5500 and above. DELL of course excels at serving the smaller businesses - and one of their key selling points, which they have used to virtually strip-mine the SMB space, is to offer pretty much the same capability to a small shop that the biggest customers enjoy in terms of extranet support, configuration support, etc. There is not a lot of overlap in the low end of Sun's market and that DELL SMB business except in the general size of the businesses, It's more of a cultural thing - if the people setting up the infrastructure have a RISC Unix bias, Sun is the likely vendor, with HP and IBM as alternates. Linux or SCO Unix on X86 are a different client base. The key to understanding DELL's current storage strategy is first to realize that DELL sells a LOT of storage - but it is all attached to DELL servers via pretty standard interconnects and components. Their last attempt to move to a more independent storage business, via the deal with DG Clariion, was an attempt to build a "virtual storage company" where DELL leveraged its server business and delivery model, and DG supplied the engineering, components and "glue". It was an interesting approach and might have worked if DG had not been bought by EMC. The Convergenet acquisition was a different and equally interesting angle - Convergenet intended to deliver management infrastructure which would simplify the creation, administration and deployment of several classes of storage, which would give DELL an opportunity to work their enterprise products into a solid position in overall storage architectures. Unfortunately, the Convergenet technology is apparently not all it was cracked up to be. I personally question the notion that a company which is not a provider of key components can make the management of those components, in itself, a selling edge - but I suspect DELL had a few other cards to play in that arena. If they take another run at a "virtual storage company", they will probably need a couple of additional technology pieces in the DELL tent. I would expect to see that fleshed out late in 2000, along with the launch of the first IA64 "Itanium" products, assuming they do it.