Dell

Overview

Michael Dell has been busy reinventing the company that bears his name. Everyone knows his college dorm-room-to-riches tale, so to discount his vision and drive would be foolish. And, as it turns out, cloud computing is a central piece of his turn-around strategy, along with a push into professional services (the company is spending $3.9 billion to acquire Perot Systems). Perhaps, the stars are once again aligning as the pieces start to fall into place for Dell.

Over the last couple of years, Dell has quietly transformed itself into a technology leader. For example, Dell's Data Center Solutions group has helped some of the largest public clouds, including Amazon, Ask.com, Facebook and Microsoft, to build customized data centers designed for "hyper-scale," along with the unique requirements such operations need in terms of power and cooling. In fact, Data Center Solutions forms the back-bone of Microsoft Azure, the company's very own public cloud platform. Clearly, the company is doing something right when some of the largest cloud providers trust their data center to Dell.

Dell believes they can take their experience and knowledge from building out these customized cloud data centers and bring them down market to enterprise and small and medium-sized (SMB) businesses; they plan to enable these customers to build public, private and hybrid clouds according to their needs. Dell's also been building out Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings to help organizations better manage their IT operations, and has made several acquisitions including MessageOne, Everdream and SilverBack for things like on-demand disaster recovery, desktop, notebook and remote device management, and monitoring and management of servers and storage.

Dell recently announced it's teaming up with Salesforce.com to bring cloud computing to SMBs. The new partnership brings together Dell Integration Services with Salesforce's on-demand software for managing customer relationships. Dell will offer systems integration and data migration services and resell Salesforce's CRM software.

Value Proposition

Dell Salesforce CRM combines the benefits of on-demand software (e.g. ease of use, pay-as-you-go) for managing customer relationships with integration and migration services that help companies quickly get up and running with a solution that integrates with their existing data and applications.

Dell's Cloud Infrastructure solutions, which include its Data Center Solutions, enables customers to "create a custom, integrated solution; help maximize performance and efficiency; gain cloud experience; and help reduce the cost of IT management."

Dell states that it has "over 5,000 customers" using its Cloud Services allowing those customers to "leverage the resiliency of the cloud to minimize the risks of managing IT; get critical services up and running with lower capital expenses; and maintain better control of your resources and infrastructure."

Products & Services

• Dell Salesforce CRM combines Saleforce.com's Sales Cloud for managing customer relationships with turn-key integration and migration services from Dell. Targeted at SMBs the new offering provides a cost-effective and relatively easy way for customers to get up an running with on-demand CRM that works with existing data and applications.
• Cloud Infrastructure includes Dell Virtualization Solutions and Dell Data Center Solutions. The company works with virtualization leaders VMware, Microsoft and Citrix to help companies maximize server resources. Data Center Solutions form the backbone of many leading public clouds, like Microsoft Azure and Facebook, and use a customized approach to building "hyper-scale" data centers with the requisite power and cooling needs of such environments.
• Cloud Services allow customers to centrally manage thousands of PCs, automate and control software licenses, encrypt laptop data, backup and restore data remotely, implement crisis management and alerting services, among other services.