Where Does Dell Go After Losing 3Par?

crimeandpunishment writes "It was the big deal Dell wanted in a big way. But now that it has lost out to Hewlett-Packard in the bidding war it started for 3Par, where does Dell go in its effort to diversify its business and move into the higher-profit area of selling technology to other companies? The company faces significant challenges, largely due to its lower-end focus, and because many of its competitors beat Dell into branching out. One analyst says, 'People see [Dell] as box-pushers'."

Re:I think I can speak for all the Dell customers

[kenrblan]

I really like their server products, but their sales staff, at least in higher education sucks monkey balls. Before I left the higher education IT arena, my university IT group was thinking about doing a big virtualized app/desktop push and was looking to do Citrix or VMware View. My boss emailed our higher-ed representative at Dell to inform him of the project scope and to give them a shot at getting the contract. Dell never called, emailed, or really acknowledged our existence despite having recently won the desktop computing contract for the computer labs in the previous year. At the same time, we were looking at updating our storage environment. A small 3rd party vendor contacted us just to see if there were any projects we were planning that might benefit from things that they resold and provided services. Once we had a working pilot project in place from that vendor, it was decided to go forward with it. Just before we started to make the purchase, the Dell rep got wind of it and tried to come in at the last second to win the contract. In the end it went pretty much like this: "Sorry Dell, you ignored us when we asked what you could do for us. Instead, we are going to buy the same EMC SAN from them that you would have been able to sell. We are going to buy all of those Citrix licenses from them. We are doing it for far less money and hassle than dealing with you." At this point in the game, you can't survive if you ignore customers when they are trying to purchase.

State of Dell

[sycodon]

1.They have little long term vision, but are instead obsessed with making the goals for the next reporting period.

2. The "executives" are a series of "wonder boys" that come in, discard everything that wasn't their doing, and re-invent the wheel with their brand on it. They usually are there long enough to screw things up and then get picked up by another company.

3. Middle management has a siege mentality, never knowing when one of these "wonder boy" executives is going to come in and fire them, replacing them with their buddies.

4. The actual workers spend a lot of time wondering what the hell is going on and who is in charge this week.

Slow train full of pain arrives after years.

[salesgeek]

Dell always was a low cost knock-off product. They were never innovators, and never developed a real R&D function in their company. They basically sold the same thing as the other guy, except for less money. The difference is that HP, IBM, and for a while, Compaq would create products that Dell did no have at all (there was a time where you could get servers from IBM, Compaq and HP, but not from Dell). Dell would wait until the component manufacturers would have the commodity parts (depending on market size that would be weeks, months or a year or so) , and then would bring a less expensive machine to market. For desktops, since Intel provided chipsets and reference boards, there was no lag, and often Dell was quicker than others to put the latest CPU in a desktop. HP, IBM and Compaq had to finance building machines in advance and shipping them to resellers. Dell would take orders this week, and make and ship the PCs next week. This practice worked in Dell's favor as components would drop in price, allowing them to lower prices faster than their "channel bound" competitors.

Ironically, the last of the big 80s and 90s PC makers is Apple, who has continued to invest in R&D, still has a big channel (even though they have retail stores) and is using their ability to create new products (iStuff) and/or superior products (Mac) to extract very healthy profit margins from a recession market. Dell wants some profit, but is stuck being the low cost leader and doesn't have the internal resources to fix the problem, and their friends in Redmond aren't exactly producing the electrifying new software that makes people want a new PC.

Re:I think I can speak for all the Dell customers

[dave562]

I have had an almost identical experience. I have been working with HP hardware my entire career but recently started a new job in a Dell shop. The last two months have been one "Doh!" moment after another. The first issue was when the battery on my Perc controller "failed" (it discharged and had to recharge). The server rebooted and failed to come up. I had the same issue happen a few years ago on an HP Smart Array controller. On the HP box, the driver just logged an error message in the event viewer telling me that the battery had discharged.

HP has a great set of software/firmware update tools for the Windows environment (Proliant Support Pack). I asked my Dell rep for a similar program and he pointed me to the Server Update Utility. The stupid thing simply does not work. It identifies the driver and firmware that needs to be updated, but then when the time comes to update it, the program just hangs and doesn't do anything.

Dell's equivalent of HP Insight Manager is this piece of crap, rebranded Symantec garbage that won't even run on a 64-bit OS (namely, every single server I have).

Every time I go to the data center I'm embarassed to stand in front of my racks of Dell hardware. I pine for the days of Proliant servers that were engineered by a company that actually knows what they are doing.

Re:Dell needs to go back to what made them great

[aztracker1]

I'd consider dell again, even pay a $100 more per machine if I could get a U.S. support person (guaranteed)... I was searching for a new laptop earlier this year, and wanted a premium laptop... I was fairly happy with my netbook's form factor, but wanted something a bit faster, that could handle 4-8GB of ram, and fast enough to run a couple of VMs... I liiked at the Alienware M11, and even had one ordered, but decided to cancel as I felt the Dell Adamo (I know Dell == Alienware now) was a better fit for my needs. The pain of canceling the M11 took 4 phone calls total (the first two calls were right before end of day, so I was mysteriously dropped from queue to call back, and have the outside of normal hours recording going on), the third I got someone who said they cancelled it, but only cancelled the accessories, the fourth call finally got the laptop itself cancelled. I wound up getting a Macbook instead... I wanted a decent laptop in a smaller form factor, and won't buy Sony or HP, so my options are/were limited.

Every few months, I consider getting a spare laptop from Dell, keep getting the email notices... Every time the "chat with a ..." window popping over my browser convinces me not to... I'm not a mac fan by any means, I'm generally pretty platform agnostic... VMWare runs everywhere I need it, and my work is all in VMs, my non-work apps are all cross platform, so I don't care about my host OS, I run what I want... I'd love to have the old Dell back.