Key message to customers: Whatever floats your boat.
Not content to be left behind by the vision bandwagon, Dell has started to push its own agenda in the enterprise space. At a media briefing in Singapore in late October, Bruce Kornfeld, director of worldwide product marketing in Dell’s Product Group, touted the company’s Scalable Enterprise Computing (SEC) vision, which is supposed to provide flexible solutions for many of today’s enterprise needs, such as lower total cost of ownership and better return on investment.
The solutions, driven by industry standards, will enhance manageability, availability and utilisation capabilities for data centre environments, according to Kornfeld. To deliver these solutions, Dell will rely on its partnerships and alliances with various hardware and software vendors, including Intel, EMC, Microsoft, Red Hat and Oracle. This neutral approach will ensure customer choice, without the risks of vendor lock-in.
However, Kornfeld denied that Dell is simply hammering together a quick fix for the grand scheme of things, which rivals like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems have propagated in equally vague terms. By leveraging common building blocks and the R&D efforts of its partners, Kornfeld said Dell would be well poised to deliver a versatile, dynamic infrastructure that can adapt to changing business requirements.
Furthermore, Kornfeld claimed that Dell’s operational efficiency will give the company a definite edge to sandbag competitors in markets where technology is becoming a commodity.
Still, a sore point remains in the SCE push – it appears that Dell will drive industry standards accepted by customers, even if such standards happen to be proprietary. A case of customers are always right, perhaps?
