PERSONAL COMPUTERS / SELLING DIRECT

Dell grows desktop market here by 33.5%

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Dell Computer's market here grew by 33.5 percent during the previous quarter and the company did well across the Asia Pacific region, especially in its high-growth markets of China, India and Indonesia.

But while senior vice-president and president for Asia-Pacific and Japan Steve Felice conceded that Dell had been dissatisfied with its figures for the same period worldwide when it had been overtaken by HP, he pointed out that Dell had performed very well compared to HP and Lenovo in the region.

Asked about reports that Lenovo had recently shed 1,500 staff and whether this was a crunch time for the industry, Felice told journalists during a Bangkok briefing that Dell's direct sales model was working well and was profitable in China. "We grew three times as fast as Lenovo in their home market. I have a strong feeling we can continue to sustain this," he said.

On the storage front, Felice reaffirmed Dell's partnership to EMC for both storage hardware and software solutions.

"We think there's no better partner than EMC. It's our most successful partnership. Storage growth has been very strong, with 30 to 40 percent annual growth. By partnering with EMC we have a great full product line that goes from the small user through to the enterprise. For virtualisation and EMC's VMware, we are the largest reseller of VMware in the region. For instance, today we partner with EMC, Oracle and Microsoft to put in a comprehensive Exchange solution. Dell is migrating from a provider of hardware to providing a solution," he said.

Felice added that the growth in storage was significantly higher than the company's overall growth and that he expected to see even more storage out there with more regulatory compliance issues, such as JSOX, hitting the market.

Felice explained how the company was transforming into what is often referred to as Dell 2.0. The fundamental principles of Dell 2.0 are to be close to the customer at all levels and provide a comprehensive service to the customer - solutions, software, integration and professional services.

He said that the "Dell Direct" model with no middlemen already meant that Dell was closer to the customer's hardware needs and, he expected this intimacy to continue into products and services up the value chain.

Asked about Dell's lack of enthusiasm around blade technology compared to HP and IBM, Felice said that Dell would not be pushing blades just for the sake of selling blades and that it would only do so when there was a true market need. "Sometimes the blade hasn't given value, but yes, our blade sales are growing and it will be an important market one day," he said.

One of the advantages of the Dell's direct model was made clear with the the launch of Windows Vista. Because there is zero stock, all machines could immediately come with Vista pre-installed. Today, Dell has opened up this pre-loading system to key customers. With "Image Direct", large corporate customers can manage and maintain their own custom disk images that Dell will install and ship with new PCs.

Asked about the market for alternative form factors, Felice said that there were always niches such as a preference for tablet-based form factors in the medical and defence industries and that the all-in-one form factor was very big in Japan with up to 40 percent of the desktop market, which Dell would be introducing soon.

For Thailand last year, Dell's growth was 33.5%. According to IDC figures, for the commercial sector, Dell is number one in desktops and number three in servers. Once the figures for home PCs were added, which in Dell's case is zero, it ended up fourth place overall, he said.

Bangkok Post

Last Updated : Wednesday April 11, 2007