Dell

Big changes for spawn of Perot

Wow.  it was quite a week for the IT brainchildren of H. Ross Perot.

On Monday, Dell announces a $3.9 billion buyout of Perot Systems to bulk up its enterprise IT services against nemesis Hewlett Packard. Two day later, that same HP drops the venerable EDS moniker it acquired a few years ago for a cool $12 billion and change. Continued »

Sneak peek at Dell Android phone?

Want a blurry peek at Dell’s long-rumored cell phone? Here it is courtesy of PDAfans via Engadget. This picture must have been taken with the Barbara-Walters-soft-focus cam. But hey, it’s something.

Reports of this work in progress have circulated long and hard. You gotta hand it to Google, it’s drummed up Android rumors to a fever pitch. Positively Microsoftian.

Top five questions about Sun-Oracle

Here’s a completely non-scientific list of my top five questions arising from Oracle’s $7.4 billion buy out of Sun Microsystems.

5: How could it have been surprising that Oracle was the white knight here? Larry Ellison is the go-to guy for distressed tech companies who don’t want or cannot be acquired by IBM or Microsoft (hell, better throw Google into the mix for the new millenium. ) This goes way, way back. Back in the paleozoic era, Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi tried like all get out to get Oracle to buy Lotus so it wouldn’t end up in IBM’s clutches. That didn’t work out so well.

4: What happens to Oracle’s ardent courtship of Dell and Hewlett-Packard? One can only guess that the HP-Oracle Exadata “Database machine” is a goner now. Not that it was setting any sales records.

3: Which virtualization play will survive the inevitable putsch?

2: How soon will a big hunk of Oracle’s revenue be going by way of hardware bundles with Sun servers? This is very much a page ripped right out of IBM’s DB2 playbook. And Ellison could barely contain himself when talking about that “shelfware.”

1: What was deal with Scott McNealy on the call?  He sounded ummmm, medicated.  Even though this signals the end of the McNealy era in tech (hell, Jonathan Schwartz and the open source pony tail epic already rang the bell on that one.) Still for $7.4 billion, couldn’t Scooter have mustered a little enthusiasm for three minutes? Listen to the playback. It’s shocking

Dell’s New Year’s Eve surprise

Dell Inc. launched a major reorg on December 31. The move “globalizes” operations around three major customer segments — large enterprise, public sector, and small and medium businesses (SMBs). The press release posted quietly on Wednesday morning, making the Dell just the latest tech vendor to attempt to bury major news that could be construed as negative, before a holiday. Or so it seems. (The consumer segment was already handled globally.)

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Black Friday turns bloody

Whoa. Retailers can’t catch a break this year.

First of all there’s this little thing called a recession, which we’re now officially in,  according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, otherwise known as NBER. (Thanks for the heads up guys!)

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Dell: HP playing catch-up with LeftHand acquisition

There’s an Oreo commercial that’s been out for a few weeks now, where Venus and Serena Williams hold a press conference to announce they’re joining some cookie-eating league.

Then the camera pans over to Peyton and Eli Manning, who starred in the ad campaign last year, and Peyton smugly says: “My brother and I are proud to announce this was a great idea when WE thought of it, like, a year ago.”

That was basically Dell’s repsonse to yesterday’s news that Hewlett-Packard will acquire LeftHand Networks. Two company bloggers wrote posts yesterday, both saying that HP made the move to catch up with Dell — which acquired LeftHand’s iSCSI SAN competitor, EqualLogic, back in January.

“With the purchase of EqualLogic over a year ago, our Partners were offered an ease-of-use, intelligence and automation of EqualLogic’s systems,” wrote Amie Paxton, Dell’s channel community manager.

And David Graves, editor of Dell’s Inside IT blog, wrote, “Obviously HP is coming to recognize what Dell did a long time ago - simple, intelligent, automated storage is what the mid-market wants.”

The Oreo ad devolves into a lame back-and-forth trash-talk session with phrases like “you’re goin’ down” and “ooooh, we’re scared.” Let’s hope Dell and HP have a little more serious competition … although it would give me a lot more blog fodder if they didn’t.

A complete 180: Dell virtualization news highlights partners

Dell made its big virtualization announcement today, and the channel is an important part of it — despite the bad impression Dell gave during last week’s embargoed press briefing.

Before we get to the channel play, let’s go over the news: For the first time, Dell has PowerEdge blade servers optimized for virtualization, including support for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors. There’s a new EqualLogic storage array that includes a VMware Auto-Snapshot Manager. And Dell is offering consulting services to help customers manage their virtual environments.

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Dell gets it right

After slamming Dell last week for ignoring partners in its news announcements, it’s only fair to point this out: Dell gives its channel partners prominent mention in today’s press release about the new PowerEdge T100 server.

The second sentence of the release says: “Starting at $449 and available from Dell and its more than 40,000 channel partners, the T100 is an ideal first server for businesses looking to build a networked server environment to enhance productivity, flexibility and security - a top-of-mind issue among SMBs globally.”

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Microsoft’s virtualization party

Microsoft wants customers and partners to know that it’s really, really REALLY ready to virtualize. So it’s hosting its “Get Virtual Now” event Monday.

It’s invited a few dozen of its best-friend vendors (if that’s not an oxymoron) to Bellevue for its big day.  Among the Platinum sponsors the usual suspects are well represented. Intel? Check. Dell? Hewlett-Packard? IBM? Hitachi Data Systems. Check, check, check and check. That makes sense. The server guys will claim their boxes are Hyper-V ready or Hyper-V capable or Hyper-V elite. Whatever the label is, it means little except in marketing terms.  (”Hey HP, what’s technologically different between this server today and your server last week? Nothing?” And so it goes.)

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Surprise, surprise: Dell ignores partners yet again

It’s official: Dell’s practice of ignoring channel partners in its news announcements is a trend.

For the third time since May, Dell made no mention of its resellers during a major* news announcement. And as any journalist will tell you, if something happens three times, that’s a trend.

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