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To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (114896)	10/25/2000 8:49:59 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: I am having trouble making any sense out of your post. IBM and dell entered into a "10 Billion Dollar" technology sharing agreement about two years ago whereby IBM would supply world wide tech support to Dell customers. True? Evidently it has either since changed or never applied to small to mid range servers. It actually is possible, I suppose, since there are so many operating units at IBM. But my friend has a fine sense of Irony and would almost certainly have made much of one part of IBM letting down another part. His group at Global Services performs general IT functions at a company when that company outsources its IT functions to IBM. I would be surprised if that group at IBM were substantially superior at hardware / systems support on Dells compared to another group at IBM that was dedicated to supporting Dell (if such a group were to exist). Dan

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (114896)	10/25/2000 8:27:24 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Duke - you misunderstand the DELL / IBM deal. First, the supply deal was mostly disk drives. Second, DELL does some work with IBM Global services for "pre-sales engineering", and occasional "vertical practice" work, but not for support or break-fix. Unisys used to do some of the enterprise support, but much of it is pieced out to a variety of third-party support providers. The supposed close deal between IBM and DELL was, in my opinion, a figment in the imagination of some overzealous DELL investors. There was never more to it than a supply deal and some minor use of IBM services in a narrow context. DELL has developed a server model which is well suited to the small and medium business market, which is primarily single and dual processor servers. That is where the bulk of their sales are, and that is where their current service capability is also. They have had very limited success in larger servers. CPQ outsells DELL more than 4 to 1 in the 4-processor server market, and about 10 to 1 in the 8-way market. One of the main reasons is the deep enterprise management and fault tolerant support available for CPQ machines. DELL introduced hot-plug PCI when Intel made it available. CPQ designed hot-plug PCI. CPQ machines support transparent failover of disk controllers, NICs, and other I/O components, and those redundant components load share when there is no failure. The management software allows easy configuration and status monitoring. CPQ supports "lights out" remote management where a server can even be power cycled if needed. The entire POST sequence and the whole of the startup can be observed and interrupted as though the user was local - and that support is web-based, not some kind of dial-up link. I think that DELL is playing the server "sweet spot" - the area where they can get the most revenue with the least investment in service, support, software investment, and management subsystems. It has been a good strategy so far, but it has not given them any penetration into the higher end. They will either have to be content with a more generic play or they will have to build more capability to move up the food chain.