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

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (85001)	12/12/1998 9:35:00 AM
From: BGR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176388

Michelle, You write: I disagree that Dell needs to get into the bigger systems business. Its too crowded with HP, Sun, SGI/Cray etc Don't forget IBM. Also, it is interesting to note that SGI is still being mentioned. :-) IMO, DELL can afford to ignore the bigger systems business for the time being, perhaps. Presently DELL has enough space to grow in the mid-range server and storage sector for at least the next 2-3 years. Once that is exhausted i.e. they are in the top-two with about 20-25% market share), they have to move ahead. I have conjectured why in the next paragraph. and at the same time the trend in enterprise software is a kind of downsizing of sorts. There is a trend away from large, integrated systems and huge multidimensional data warehouses that were deemed a "necessity" just a few years ago. I strongly disagree. Particularly with the Internet, it is very likely that more integration is going to happen which will need more power. In particular two interesting developments may happen in the enterprise software domain: 1. Virtual integration across companies and customers. Let me make an hypothetical example up, e.g., a drug company's inventory system integrated to a hospital procurement system, the hospital's billing system integrated with a HMO accounting system and finally the drug company's cost and efficacy database linked to the hospital's as well as the HMO's research database to streamline decisions about which drugs the hospital may use for patients using a certain HMO. And all that information may be made available to the patients via the internet for comparative analysis while shopping around for HMO's and hospitals. This is no different that DELL's virtual integration to Intel's chip inventory control systems and letting the customer know in real time what the best cost for a machine is. This kind of a system needs more power, h/w and s/w, not less. I doubt if DELL runs it's internal ERP systems on NT4.0 running SqlServer7. <vbg>. 2. More outsourcing. E.g. several HMOs, hospitals and drug companies may be interested in this kind of a system. So, one particular vendor (or a strategic partnership among vendors) may choose to offer this service to several companies. IBM used to do this for companies in the 70's and 80's in the main-frame model. The internet is much like the mainframe in that while the distribution of data is non-integrated, the volume is so huge that the processing of data has to be integrated as that will likely be more cost-efficient. Now, we are talking of data volumes and richness which will pale the datawarehouses of today in complexity over the next decade. I still like the midrange server space for Dell with an intended market of departmental analytical apps (Hyperion etc) and some specific enterprise packages etc. Forget the high-end Sap realm I say...* So you would prefer that DELL gives up the Internet server space altogether. That may please MSFT as DELL remains a NT/SqlServer devotee when it comes to selling their ware. But as I consider the Internet to be the* future, I cannot see how DELL can afford to preach something different from what they practise. -Apratim.