Dell Plans To Replace Consultants With The Cloud

How much more productive? Ten times? A hundred times? How many fewer consultants will we need?
I can’t give you an exact metric. But think of how many consultants IBM or HP have. Hundreds of thousands. How many does Dell have? With direct consultants and partners, we have quite a few thousands, but nowhere near as many as IBM or HP have.

This time last year, that would have been seen as a weakness.With fewer consultants, large enterprises can’t take you seriously.
Now they will take it as a strength – that we have a differentiated approach to consulting. We can do predictability and rapid ROI projects a lot faster than companies with a larger consulting workforce.

Are people more likely to accept that in a recession?
Eactly right. In the last few years, we have built out proof points, and we’ve made acquisitions in the consulting space. They give us IP and make us productive

In Dell Management Console, how much of that is Dell and how much is Altiris?
The livecycle controller is all Dell IP, and the Dell Management console is all Dell IP. It is built on the Altiris messaging layer. So the single pane of glass is all Dell IP. It is a thin layer of integration, leveraging the Symantec part – and that allows us to integrate third party products.

Is there a paradox? If it is as open as you say, then anyone can do it, surely.
If someone builds a better mousetrap, it plugs in and the customer still comes to the Dell management console – we have taken the eyeballs.

It is more than a dumb terminal into these products., DMC has rules built into it.

Lifecycle Controller is all the drivers you need and upgrades?
It is actually a full server on a server. It has a full stack. It has access to IDRAC – our integrated lights out manager. That’s our out of band management solution,for our servers.

How big is your Lifecycle Controller?
The standard is about 1Gig for drivers and diagnostics. If the customer wants the whole app available, can buy extended memory. And this is really the first time this has been done on servers.. Later this year it will be able to restore the last known good state too. That needs some more software work for rollbacks. All the basic functions are there – we’re just adding features.