Karen Quintos, Dell’s new Chief Marketing Officer at a recent Small Business event we attended, at the company’s headquarter in Austin, TX.
Dell Chief Marketing Officer: “The Customer Is At the Core of Everything We Do” (video)
December 16, 2010
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EMC: Dell Needs Storage Specialist 3PAR More Than H-P
August 27, 2010
EMC President Pat Gelsinger weighs in on Dell and H-P's fight to buy data-storage company 3PAR
For EMC President Pat Gelsinger, HP would be able to better monetize the acquisition of storage company 3PAR than Dell because of its current strong position in the high-end enterprise market.
“Clearly they [HP] have a position in the enterprise. They should be able to sell that [3PAR]. But there are always integration issues,” explains Gelsinger. “I think HP has a better position to monetise it because of their stronger position higher in the enterprise. So if you look to who will get more value out of the 3PAR acquisition, I think HP is in better position. But that makes all that important for Dell.”
Despite the strong Dell/EMC partnership, Dell largely don’t have a product at that level, adds Gelsinger.
“So they have to extend their sales capabilities higher in the enterprise to be effective with it. It certainly makes it A fun sport to watch the competition. With HP’s board to prove that they are still active and can move forward despite their CEO.”
And from an EMC perspective, Dell would actually be a much better suitor.
“I would prefer 3PAR not being on HP’s hands because I think they can actually compete with us. They have a salesforce that could sell it,” confides the EMC executive.
If HP ends up acquiring 3PAR, it will certainly hurt its partnership with Hitachi – which currently supplies HP with high-end storage products. On the other hand, with or without 3PAR, EMC is commited to the Dell relationship.
“I certainly prefer that they [Dell] didn’t add this [3PAR] to the complexity of the mix. But wether they do it or not we’re going to be great partners with Dell,” adds Gelsinger.
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[Video] AMD Previews “Sexy” Notebooks In Fall Lineup
July 21, 2010
AMD's Notebook Line Up for the Back to School season looks sexyer than ever!
In a private event in San Francisco, Calif., yesterday, AMD showcased the Fall fashion lineup of notebooks and desktops based on its VISION technology; mostly dual-core machines with an integrated ATI graphics chips.
AMD designed the VISION programme to simplify the PC buying experience by making it easier for consumers to choose the right computer for them based on what they want to do with the product.
“It wasn’t so long ago that if you wanted to find notebook computer with an AMD processor they were all uniformally very plain – I would hesitate to say ugly but they were plain. But now, the system OEMs (like HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Acer…) have put much effort into designing really pretty boxes that have AMD processors as much as they have moved to have attractive designs around the Intel-based processors… It’s clear now that AMD is now equipped to compete non only the basis of their technology but also on the base of their OEMs design,” explains Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64.
AMD’s Vision strategy found useful in retail PC shopping
“I think it [Vision] has worked. It’s made it easier for people to go into a store and figure out what kind of computer they want. And to calibrate their own needs with the system capabilities,” adds Brookwood who finds AMD Vision most successful in retail. “The salespeople don’t get a lot of training… and the Vision programme guides people into making smart choices and not under buying or over buying… and from that standpoint I think it [Vision] had simplified the purchasing process and taken some of the mystery about multi-core and discrete GPU out of the equation. And that’s basically good.”
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SeaMicro’s Minor Revolution In The Data Center
June 14, 2010Not since the advent of virtualization has the data center faced such an opportunity for change.
Low-cost, ultra-low-power servers – sometimes called microservers – may finally get a jolt of legitimacy.
On Monday, secretive Santa Clara start-up SeaMicro formally launched its long-awaited remake of the x86 server: a 512-processor box that doesn’t use Intel’s ubiquitous Xeon chips but low-power Atoms instead. Atoms are the processors sold in $300 netbooks – giving rise to the observation that SeaMicro’s SM10000 is really just a collection of netbooks stuffed in a one box.
Expect vendors such as Dell to begin making microservers. SeaMicro claims it will cut power use by 75 percent.
It’s an observation that is essentially true. The result is a server that uses one-quarter the power and takes up one-quarter the space while performing the same amount of work. CEO Andrew Feldman says Atom is three times more efficient in performance per watt than Xeon. The reason is it can better power down when not in use and doesn’t waste energy trying to anticipate future workloads, as Xeon does.
That is why the SeaMicro box is better suited to the Internet, where traffic is bursty and generally only places lightweight demands on a server.
The SM10000 is the brainchild of Gary Lauterback, a former AMD fellow and Sun Microsystems engineer, and “is an enormous transformation of the data center,” claims Feldman.
He may not be exaggerating. Zeus Kerravala, a long-time tracker of the server industry at Yankee Group, says: “As an analyst I am often skeptical of technologies people tout as revolutionary, but this one I was really impress with.” If Dell and other top tier vendors aren’t already thinking about microservers “I’d be surprised,” he says.
In truth, SeaMicro isn’t the first company to conceive of low-power servers or ones running Atom. Super Micro Computer launched a rack-mounted Atom blade last year, and Hewlett-Packard markets a $400 MediaSmart home-server with Atom. In Austin, TX, Smooth Stone is working on technology to bring even lower-powered ARM processors, those in many cell phones, to the server market.
Improved efficiency is what motivated cloud-computing vendor Rackable Systems to make use of small servers with modest power to handle fluctuating Internet workloads.
However, SeaMicro hopes to take Atom boxes a step further. The company built into the SM10000 a 1.28-terabit communications fabric powerful enough for a super computer and installed a custom ASICs to handle the complex load balancing for 512 processors. A single box can replace 40 dual-socket, quad-core servers, two Ethernet switches and two terminal servers, says Feldman.
It also shrank the size of processor motherboards to the size of a credit card, taking off unnecessary components and reducing the power draw.
According to IDC, the package may catch on with Web 2.0 companies. Companies spend $27 billion globally a year buying energy to run their servers, the research firm says. Most would die to reduce the bill.
“I think it is a radical approach” that Web 2.0 companies will quickly adopt for their public clouds, says research analyst Katherine Broderick.
The SeaMicro, which raised $25 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital and received a $9.3 million Department of Energy grant, will make the box available in July. Selling for $139,000, it is likely to begin earning its investors a return.
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[Video] Dell Message To The Public Sector: We Are Here To Serve!
February 16, 2010
Karen Quintos, VP Marketing for Dell's Public Sector business
At a press event in San Francisco this morning, Dell focused the conversation on its public sector activities, trying hard to detach itself from the image of “just a hardware” company.
And the Texas-based company did show some compelling arguments.
First, Dell’s public sector business which focuses on 3 verticals (Education, Government and Healthcare) is huge: $15 billion a year or 1/4 of the company’s $60 billion total revenues, by delivering hardware (of course!), but most likely bundled as solutions.
The Mobile Clinical Computing for hospitals or the Mobile Computing Station which stores netbooks (Dell Latitude 2100) used in classrooms are some examples of Dell’s newly solution focus.
Also, simply by its sheer size - helped by the Perot Systems’ acquisition – Dell vows to be a catalyst of change for governments worldwide, hospitals, schools, etc.
Public sector more open to sharing than private businesses
In her presentation, marketing vice-president Karen Quintos highlighted how Dell is helping the public sector community interacting with one another through event sponsoring, advisory councils, best practices.
“The public sector community is a much more open and collaborative than the private sector. They don’t have the barrier to share best practices with one another,” adds Quintos.
Follows a video excerpt of Quintos introduction to Dell’s public sector business:
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Dell Confirms U.S. Smartphone Launch In 2010 (video)
October 13, 2009
CEO and founder Michael Dell in a conversation with Wall Street Journal San Francisco deputy bureau chief Don Clark at the Churchill Club
Update: Added the section when Michael Dell confirmed the launch.
At a Churchill Club event tonight, Michael Dell confirmed to me that he plans to launch a smartphone in the U.S. next year.
The computer maker has been rumoured to announce a deal to bring its Android-powered smartphone to AT&T sometime in the future. It is clear now that it will happen probably in the first months of next year.
This summer, Dell launched its mini 3i smartphone with China Mobile, which runs a custom version of Google’s Android software called oPhone OS. However, for the U.S. version, I expect Dell to take a more “classic” Android version and make minor user interface and service tweaks.
The upcoming smartphone launch in the U.S. will come 3-years after Michael Dell hired Motorola’s handset chief Ron Garriques to lead the Texas-company consumer business.
Follows a short video of Garriques I shot last year when I visited Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, and in which he explains that Dell is indeed very keen in launching consumer devices – beyond just PCs and laptops – such as smartphones, music players, etc.
And the section when I asked Michael Dell about the launch of the Dell smartphone in the U.S.:
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Dell CTO: Management Of Virtual Resources Is Hottest Topic For Businesses
August 4, 2009
At a media roundtable on virtualisation, enterprise customers expressed skepticism on the benefits of desktop virtualisation
Desktop virtualisation is not catching up to the hype yet as enterprise customers are just not seeing as much benefits to it than server virtualisation or even cloud computing.
For Dell’s Enterprise division CTO Paul Prince that I met today at a roundtable on virtualisation, along with VMware CTO Steve Herrod and some enterprise customers, the management of virtualisation is the hot topic du jour for enterprise IT users.
Follows a video excerpt of my conversation with Prince on:
- His role as CTO for Dell’s enterprise division, which includes also overseeing CPU technologies for the entire company. Not surprising as Prince was an executive at Intel prior to joining Dell;
- The need to manage virtual resources including storage, networking, high-availability…;
- Dell Consulting’s role in advising IT customers. “Our competitors are all about helping customers think their problem is so big they need the help to solve it, in our case we tend to focus more on helping our customers to understand that made no be as complicated as they thought. Help them to get over the hump and start doing it;”
- Desktop virtualisation and why enterprises are not seeing yet the benefit in deploying it. “It’s clearly a learning curve for customers to get to understand the benefit of desktop virtualisation and start deploying it;”
- The need to plan carefully before deploying virtual machines to avoid VM sprawl;
- How enterprises can save 50% to 2 to 3 times by deploying virtualisation;
- The issue of software licensing and how choosing a more expensive but more flexible version (like Windows Data Center edition) can help enterprises save money in their deployment of virtualisation;
- And finally on Dell’s own IT department, a VMware “shop.”
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Graphics Chips Are A Sign PC Industry Expects A Big Fourth Quarter
July 27, 2009Expectations may be getting ahead of themselves for the personal computer industry.
The business took it on the chin in the first quarter with sales tumbling . But if graphics chips are a sign, manufacturers are expecting a substantial upswing during the year-end holiday and back-to-school seasons.
PC industry prepares to build for a merry Christmas
This optimism may be jumping the gun. Economic signals have been improving modestly in the past month or so. But the spring back in the economy is hardly impressive and remains unsteady to boot.
So could this upbeat assessment end in disaster, with huge inventories of unsold computers clogging to wheels of business come January? It is certainly possible. Let’s hope the H-Ps and Dells have more than faith underlying their business plans.
The glimpse into the PC market optimism is evident in research released Monday from Jon Peddie Research. Computer vendors stopped ordering graphics chips in the third and fourth quarters last year in anticipation of a long worldwide recession, says Jon Peddie.
While the first quarter brought some improvement, the second quarter saw a return to the races. The average second-quarter growth in graphics chip sales over the past eight years was 0.8 percent. This year it was 31 percent, says Jon Peddie, as the industry began preparing to build products for the end of the year.
Obviously the boost could be compensating for the less-than-expected first quarter. But the shipment of 98 million graphics chips can’t be fully explained this way.
The industry won’t return to 2008 levels until next year, says the research firm. But there are good reasons to expect a respectable market this year.
Two new operating systems will come out in the fourth quarter: Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Apple’s Snow Leopard. Graphics chip vendors Nvidia and AMD’s ATI meanwhile will introduce new higher-performing designs made at 40nm.
On top to that, worldwide economic stimulus programs will be in full swing, fueling pent up demand for new machines
It is unclear how the economy will fare during the remaining five months of the year. Let’s hope the computer industry has it right.
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Posted by Mark Boslet
Good News From The PC Market
July 15, 2009The personal computer market topped expectations in the second quarter as resilient consumers shopped for portables, and shipments to China and other Southeast Asian economies reversed course and grew.
The overall market continued to shrink during the three months. But the decline was smaller than anticipated and it gave some analysts hope the market would once again expand by the fourth quarter.
Research firms Gartner and IDC released quarterly numbers on Wednesday afternoon that offered similar market assessments. IDC said the global market fell 3.1 percent, or less than the 6.3 percent decline it expected. Gartner said the market slipped 5 percent, a better performance than the 9.8 percent drop it projected.
“The results can be interpreted as a small sign of a PC market recovery in terms of shipment volumes in some regions,” said Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa. Asia/Pacific and the U.S. came in better than forecast while weakness continued in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Hewlett-Packard widened its lead as the world’s largest PC vendor with almost 20 percent of the market. Dell saw shipments drop sharply, but held the number two spot with an almost 14 percent share.
Acer continued to rival Dell in size with its strategy of selling low-cost portables and netbooks. Toshiba also gained ground.
The two research firms offered differing views on Apple’s place in the U.S. market. Gartner said Apple advanced modestly to 8.7 percent of the market while IDC said Apple lost ground and held 7.6 percent of the U.S. market. Apple generally prices its machines above comparable Windows models.
Top worldwide PC vendors according to IDC
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Telcos Seen Playing A Bigger Role With Mobile PCs
June 2, 2009As consumers becoming increasingly interested in buying PCs from third-party merchants (instead of directly from a Dell or Apple) an important new outlet for computers is expected to grow.
Direct PC marketers seen at a disadvantage
That outlet is the national and global telecom, where people already go to snap up mobile phones and cellular computer connections.
In a press release on Tuesday, Gartner said it expects that 80 percent of PCs will be bought indirectly, or from third-party merchants, in three years. Today about 74 percent of PCs are, which is up from 67 percent five years ago.
This is obviously not good news for Dell. Perhaps this is partly behind the 63 percent profit drop the company reported last week.
In any event, the trend could play to telecoms as they bundle mini-notebooks with 3G cellular access. Gartner said it anticipates companies will become much more active in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.
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