All For One...

Given Dell's success built on the direct sales model, some people might be surprised to hear the company talk about solution sales and alliances. In fact, they are integral to the company's enterprise business.

What is true to say is that the company has a slightly different view of alliances than many of its competitors, one that is driven by customer demand and designed to ensure that any partnerships are delivering real value.

According to Jeff Wartgow, alliance manager EMEA: "Dell's alliance strategy is quite different from other companies because unlike others we don't have our own software. We can give the customer the best technology the industry has to offer, whether it is from Microsoft or Intel or Oracle for example. It gives us combined the largest R&D budget on earth."

That is some boast, but it does not mean that the company takes a scattergun approach to partnerships. Quite the opposite, according to Wartgow. "Dell is very selective in its partnerships, it's very customer driven," he says.

"Because we're direct our customers just outright tell us what they want, for example, we see a lot of customers doing backup of Exchange on Dell, so we go out and find the leader on that, which is Symantec."

In the previous article, looking at how Dell has applied its direct model to the enterprise market, it was noted that the company has positioned itself as the direct link between a customer and its suppliers, managing the complex vendor relationships that come with any enterprise system.

The relationship with Symantec is a good example of that in action, according to Wartgow, as Dell has responded to customer demand to ensure that Symantec and Microsoft work together despite their differences over the issue of 'owning' the security of Microsoft systems.

Wartgow says the biggest drivers for partnerships at the moment are in the areas of security and virtualization. For the former the company has put together its Secure Exchange solutions offering. "We've established a Microsoft-Symantec relationship on our customer's behalf," he explains.

"We've tried to make ourselves the single point of contact via the direct model. We'll also be the single point of contact for your partners. We don't think that customers should have to take on the management of partnerships," adds Wartgow.

Virtualization is another example of that. Customer demand has pointed the focus towards backup and systems management for virtual machines, so alongside relationships with virtualization providers such as VMware, Microsoft and XenSource come partnerships with Double-Take for backup, PlateSpin for automation and Altiris for systems management.

Virtualization is also an example of the potential depth of Dell's relationships, according to Hugh Jenkins, Dell enterprise marketing director. As well as its existing relationship with EMC for storage systems, Dell is building a close relationship with its virtualization subsidiary, VMware, he explains.

"We're working closely with them on working to validate the product, to making the management tools manage virtual machines, to selling the product, and creating services teams to support their environments," he says. "They are not the sort of partnerships where we say 'we can't do this, over to you', it's much more substantial."

According to Wartgow, the reason for that is the nature of Dell's relationships with its partners. They all cover three areas: joint engineering, sales and marketing and internal use.

An important part of any Dell partnership is that the companies involved become each other's customer, and in this regard Oracle is a good example. "We run our supply chain on Oracle. Oracle is one of our biggest customers. We're always using [partner technology] internally. I'm not going to recommend it to a customer if we're not prepared to do it ourselves," says Wartgow.

As an example of close partnership, Wartgow cites the work Dell has done with Oracle to integrate Dell system alerts into Oracle's Grid Control software, which gives administrators an easy way of determining the importance of system alerts based on their impact on the application.

"Usually you're putting a lot of confidence in [the hardware administrator] that he can prioritize what's happening. By feeding Dell alerts into Oracle Grid Engine the Oracle DBA gets alerted just by looking at the Oracle console. And that's offered to customers for free. I don't know of any other companies doing that level of development with Oracle."

In the previous article, CBR covered Dell's approach to research and development, noting that just because the company builds on industry standards, does not mean that the company is not committed to R&D. In that article, Wartgow noted how the company's assemble-to-order approach set it apart from competitors.

"One of the most obvious symbols of our quality is that if you buy a server from one of our competitors it will show up in about 15 different boxes. How can they claim to have better quality than Dell when they haven't finished putting the product together?" he asked.

He goes on to point out that Dell's assemble-to-order approach gives customers confidence that the assembled system will work as it is supposed to do. "The software has to work, customers have to know it's going to work, so we do a lot of benchmarking," he says.

"Everybody should be doing that, but not everybody does," he adds noting that many users are guilty of carrying out certification by association, for example assuming that an application will run on Red Hat because the application vendor is a Red Hat partner.

It's not always that simple, he maintains, which is why Dell ensures that it tests not just the server but the whole environment. "When they look at the amount of testing we're doing it gives them a lot more certainty when they're deploying on Dell," he says.

Testing a single product is one thing, of course, designing and building an enterprise architecture is quite another. It is also an area in which Dell operates, however, thanks to its services business. "What we're doing with the services and solutions team is taking to market an enhanced offering based on our enterprise business," explains Rod Curry, director of service and solutions, UK and Ireland.

As noted in the previous article, Dell's service portfolio covers a number of areas, including infrastructure consulting, enterprise support, deployment, asset recovery, training, client support, managed support, and assessment, design and implementation service.

According to Curry, the Infrastructure Consulting Service practice offers services based around Microsoft (such as Active Directory, Exchange and unified communications strategy), back-up and recovery architecture (such as SAN architecture and front-end consulting) and virtualization.

While the practice may not be large in terms of numbers, Curry maintains that "it's perhaps not the number of people we have in it, it's the way we're able to leverage our partners. We own the solutions architecture and design consulting phase and close out the sales cycle and then deliver through the Dell Project Management Office" which manages the relationship between the partners involved.

Another offering that Curry sees growing, particularly as businesses start to consider the requirements for a move to Vista on the desktop, is application packaging. Dell improved its potential in this market in November 2006 through the acquisition of UK-based ACS, which was focused on providing application integration and setup services as well as consulting around virtualization, security, and Microsoft products, largely to clients in the financial services sector.

"As a result of our acquisition of ACS we have in-house a very effective application packaging business, and we see a desire to engage from large corporates around application packaging," he says, noting that the offering is not as new to Dell as the acquisition date suggests. "We worked with ACS for 18 months before purchasing them," he adds.

While services is seen as a target market for potential growth, the company is also keen to remain true to its core competencies, according to Curry. It's a "Dell-focused services operation," he says. "We're very keen to define what we do, and what we don't do."

The services operation began via the managed services operation, particularly on the desktop, and that remains a key focus for potential growth. "It's an opportunity, especially on some of the initiatives coming from government, such as WEEE. We are now responsible for the green recycling and disposal offering," says Curry.

The green issue has risen up the corporate agenda in recent months and is provided for by Dell's Asset Recovery Services offering, which is available for any manufacturer's hardware, not just its own. The services provides for secure and environmentally-friendly disposal of assets, whether that be by resale, recycling, return-to-lease, or donation.