Dell Plans To Replace Consultants With The Cloud

Can you measure the improvement that offers?
Absolutely, depending on what kind of capabilities you are talking about. If you think about distributed device management we have about a fifty percent improvement in what it takes to manage the device. It costs half as much to manage them our way.

We acquired EverDream – that is the basis for our integration platform. We bought Silverback – and this is the basis of our active monitoring, provided in the data centre direct to customers, as well as through the channel.

The biggest growth is happening in storage – and the biggest driver for that is email, so we acquired Message One, a distributed data management company, with a rules based engine. That lets a customer decide which data should be on his premises, and which data should be out on the cloud.

The total cost of owning that data is lowered, because you can leverage cloud economics for one part, and you still have on-premise storage economics for the other part. We applied that to email archiving. This gives you email continuity. If your email goes down, you can bounce over to Dell – and get your emails back.

So it adds up to a cloud based email solution without having to trust Google? Is it difficult to sell these services in Europe, where there are rules about storing data across national boundaries?
We are sensitive to that. We have data centres in the UK and Germany for EMEA, and we also have data centres in Asia Pacific, Canada and the US. We are conscious of data privacy laws.The data is owned by the customer, not by Dell.

We offer the same thing for laptop data. If you lost your laptop, we can ship you a new laptop with your data on it. It can get you productive right away.

OEMs can build a value proposition with these services.It is SaaS and cloud – a business model that issubscription based, pay as you go, turn-on/turn-off. It’s modular and flexible.

OK, so how can you do consulting in a meaningful way without armies of consultants?
Because we are so technology intensive, in ProManage and ProConsult, we can do a quick discovery of a customer’s data centre. We have a pretty robust rules base, and best practices are built in.We get CPU utilisation and hard drive utilisation. We can quickly come back with a recommendation which we call “point of proof”. It’s technology-based assessments, rules-based analysis which has structure and repeatability.

We can go back to the customer and say, “these are three things you ought to do”. They could be things that might not be on their roadmap. Or we might tell them that, for them, a heavy-duty grid computing architecture is a good idea but not ready for primetime.

So is your business model doing for consultants what your desktop sales model did for computer shops?
That’s exactly right. But we’re not routing round the consultants – we’re making them incredibly productive.