Page 2 of 4
What are you seeing from customers in terms of demand for a product set that runs from the desktop all the way to the data center?
It varies by customer. Certainly when you get into mid-sized customers and smaller customers it's pretty common to see a vendor of choice across multiple product lines. I'll say the largest companies tend more toward a best of breed strategy.
We have a very large server and data center business now. We have an enterprise business that is almost $20 billion. We are the fastest growing new company in storage with Compellent, EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina and others. Yes, we acquired a few great companies to accelerate our progress, and you can expect we'll acquire more as needed. But that enterprise business was built on a foundation of the origins of the company in the client business.
We have had a consistent commitment to our customers and our business. The client business, which we're still committed to, has allowed us to build a huge server business. We've sold 15 million servers over the last decade. That has allowed us to build what is becoming a tremendous storage business. Now we're growing services and networking and yes, I think it's going to be huge, too. I think there is an integrated nature, a 'better together' story to this that's quite powerful. That's why channel partners will immediately want to engage with Dell if they have not already.
There are also other aspects to this. If one remembers back to the last time a large PC company was spun off or sold, there was a lot of share loss in servers for IBM. We have far greater share than IBM does in X86 servers now. Globally they are 14-15 percent. We are about 26-27 percent. Their [IBM server] share has gone down, down, down since they spun off the PC business.
There are very important reasons for that: one is the integrated nature of client and server sales in many accounts. There are also important economic reasons for it. If you open up a server and look at what's inside a server, it's processor, disk drives and memory. Those are the three primary cost ingredients that go into a server. Where are most of the processors, disk drive and memory in terms of industry volume today? They are still in the client. Actually, about 95 percent of them are in the client. So if you are not in the client business, you have a far, far smaller volume so your costs for those materials just went up.
Who is successful in volume x86 servers today? You would say Dell and also HP. Both of those companies have had this client business volume to go with it. When that goes away for the other guys, it will create opportunity for us.
NEXT: Dell's Supply Chain Advantages Over HP
<< Previous
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
Next >>
