Dell: Ahead of the curves
CEO Michael Dell stresses open architecture as key to future successes in mobile, wireless, storage
By Eric Lundquist & John Dodge, eWEEK
October 2, 2000 12:00 AM ET
Michael dell has been at the helm of the company that bears his name since its founding in 1984. Over the course of the past 16 years, Dell Computer Corp. has led a fundamental change in the way computers are marketed, manufactured and distributed. One of the main reasons for its success is that the company, with Dell as its leader, has made the right calls at the right times, be they the expansion into servers, the Internet or the direction in which it is now expanding, storage. eWeek Editor in Chief Eric Lundquist and Editor John Dodge caught up with Dell in Austin, Texas, two weeks ago at the company's Dell DirectConnect conference to talk about the competitive landscape and, more important, how Dell envisions the company's future.
eWEEK: What's the real significance of the Internet to Dell?
Dell: I think a lot of companies made the mistake of thinking that the Web site was the whole deal. The Web site's actually the front end to [back-end] business processes. Some of the real gains for us have been in the use of the information that we get from customers all the way through the supply chain. In our case, it happens almost instantaneously and [in] the elimination of things like inventory. So, we have six days of inventory; we went to a plant yesterday that got it down to about 7 hours. We have been able to refine our business systems by removing all the friction from the processes, and information is really the key current to do that. All on scalable, open-architecture kinds of systems. So, we haven't had to have a huge upheaval every time we see another level of distance here; we just add more servers into the mix.
eWEEK: What are some of the new technologies you see on the verge of reaching critical mass?
Dell: Storage and servers are still an area that has tremendous growth. ... We think wireless will also have a profound effect on the client side of the business, where we are increasingly moving from a fixed desktop to a mobile wireless movement. And that's a very active part of the business. Really, our job here is to help make it easy for customers to deploy these kinds of solutions using open-architecture platforms. And Dell's been able to bring the model that's been so successful in other products to some of the newer products.
eWEEK: Well, let's take storage, for example. I was sitting with a large Dell customer at lunch today who is working on a big SAN architecture, and Dell was not on the "dance card." When is Dell going to get there, and can the model effectively replicate to storage?
Dell: I think you can certainly find applications where we could be there today, but the fact is we are getting there. In fact, we just did a major installation for the U.S. Census—a 78-terabyte system that involved several hundred servers and several thousand workstations all across the United States. ...
When we originally enter an area like servers or storage, clearly, we are not going to have a whole team of the most high end, [as] competitors might have, but we don't think that we have to, over time. We're liable to see the capabilities, and we do it at levels of price/performance that will effectively open up much larger market space. So today, for example, you got this 120GB network-attached storage device. We sell these for basically $2,700. So, in your network, you could put 42 of these in one rack; that's 10 terabytes for $200,000. It doesn't have all the features that some of the other systems might have, but next year or the year after that, we'll add more and more features, and I think you'll see Dell doing the same thing for the storage market that we've been doing to the server market, and that we've already done to the workstation market and notebooks and desktops.
eWEEK: We've heard you talk a little bit about your future, that you've moved a little bit away from the operations, more into strategy and technology evaluation. So many companies like yours have a dominant personality: Bill Gates and Microsoft [Corp.], Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com, Michael Dell and Dell Computer. Are [you] slowly moving away from the company and getting into other busi nesses and pursuing other interests?
Dell: No, our business is vast and has lots of moving parts to it. And as we've grown, certainly, my ability to make an impact in the company is far less at an operational level and much more at the strategy level. Now, I am still involved in the operations as needed, but we have a fantastic team, and that allows me to spend more time on where the business is going in the future. But my level of involvement in the business hasn't diminished at all, and it's not going to.
eWEEK: Now that Microsoft is moving from a product strategy to this Microsoft .Net servicing strategy, does that change your relationship with them? How is the .Net strategy supposed to overlay their relationship with companies such as yours?
Dell: Well, I think that the full understanding of what this can offer to customers is not exactly there yet. I mean, we and Microsoft and customers are still trying to figure out what the potential is here. The opportunities to essentially open up services in the software service—that is quite an expansive notion, this whole Microsoft .Net idea. But I think this is going to take a while before it is fully fleshed out.
eWEEK: Are you a believer in it?
Dell: Yeah, I think we see a lot of potential to take business logic that otherwise would have been restricted to a small number of very large companies and make that available to lots and lots of people in a much easier way. It's almost like a whole other wave [of] what PCs have done—where information technology and information systems [are] accessible by every business. The linkage across businesses is still not there, and the .Net strategy could definitely accelerate that linkage, which would be a great thing. Because that's where you get real-world benefits.
zdnet.com |
