March, 2008

Last week, we announced that Dell will host the 2008 Equity Analyst Meeting here in Round Rock Texas. It will happen on Wednesday and Thursday this week. Dell executives will share details on Dell's five growth initiatives: global consumer, enterprise, notebooks, small and medium enterprise and emerging countries. If you're interested in following the developments at this meeting, I encourage you to visit our Investor Relations blog, DellShares, at www.dell.com/dellshares for details as...

Small businesses are the lifeblood of the British economy, but in the recession they are suffering dearly. The Federation of Small Businesses predicts that over 32,000 small businesses will close this year, with a loss of 150,000 UK jobs. It was therefore with a little trepidation that I approach my speech last weekend at the FSB's annual conference - this is a huge community that is searching for answers on how best to survive the recession and I sincerely hoped I could offer some advice to...

In my post earlier this week, I mentioned that customers could expect more conversations coming from folks at Dell. Well today, we're introducing a new group blog called Inside IT . Take a look at my inaugural post there for an idea what kind of stuff you'll see. For future reference, you can access Inside IT directly by going here: www.direct2dell.com/insideit And if this kind of content is right down your alley, I invite you to add the Inside IT RSS feed to your favorite RSS reader...

Starting today, we're offering customers in the United States, Canada and Europe the Inspiron 1525 equipped with an optional Blu-ray drive under $1000. In the United States, that starting price is $879—specific pricing may vary in other regions. The Inspiron 1525 laptop is the one that Laptop Magazine gave their Editors' Choice award to. It features a 15.4-inch 1280 x 800 resolution (or optional 1440 x 900) wide aspect display means it support up to 720p resolution. It also includes an...

It seems like everyone and everything is going mobile, especially in business. Greater mobility in the workforce, however, is radically changing, which presents some issues for the IT people that have to manage mobile devices. IDC started talking about this a couple years ago, and the blogosphere is starting too. You might be wondering what Dell's view is on this and what we're doing to make mobility better. It's natural to think that we focus on traditional notebook computers, but...

Below is a post from Jacqui Zhou, my counterpart who runs Direct2Dell Chinese, which recently passed the one year point. I thought the occassion and insight was worth sharing with our Direct2Dell English audience. Congratulations to Jacqui and the rest of the Dell China team who support the Direct2Dell Chinese blog. Here is Jacqui's post: One Year into the Chinese Blogosphere Who has the most Internet users in the world? The answer is China. Recently Beijing-based research firm BDA...

Both Gizmodo and Engadget got it right in their read of a Reuters story from earlier this morning about the impact a March 3 fire at LG Chem is having on the global supply of Li-ion cells used in laptop battery packs. It's affecting the industry supply of lithium ion batteries that manufacturers use in laptops and other devices. Currently, we have increased the price of aftermarket or replacement batteries. Unfortunately, constrained supply can mean higher prices, and we're doing what we...

Happy Tuesday everyone; hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend! Recently I contemplated the quote "Imitation is the sincerest of flattery," by Charles Caleb Colton (partly due to the latest in a string of Ideastorm-like sites). Last week, Starbucks became the latest to launch a site that asks for customer feedback through ideas and votes. It is exciting to watch more and more businesses have conversations with their customers and begin to see the value listening. We wish them great success...

Today we unveiled a new service called Client Migration Solution . It's an integrated set of assessment, design, deployment and management services with tools that our service team tells me can reduce migration costs by up to 62 percent and desk-side time and labor by 88 percent. This migration service is designed for organizations planning an operating system migration or hardware deployment of 2,500 systems or more. It simplifies the process by addressing common challenges such as network...

Today we're launching our first retail expansion in India. We will offer certain XPS and Inspiron desktop and laptop products in Croma stores there. Croma is a large chain of consumer electronics stores under the Tata Group umbrella. Beginning this week and into next month, we will be giving consumer customers in India the opportunity to call click or visit and have access to Dell products. To the left is a photo of one of the Croma experiential pods where customers will see Dell products...

Michael Dell recently visited China last week. Some of you may have seen reports in the blogosphere about some things he discussed. For a bit more context, I thought it made sense to share Amit Midha's recent Direct2Dell Chinese post on our English site as well. Here's Amit's post. Amit Midha Dell Greater China President 2008 is a unique and important year for China since it will host the Olympics Games . 2008 is a unique and important year for Dell China as it marks our 10th...

Those of you who have followed Dell's social media journey know that we started these efforts just about two years ago at this time when Michael Dell himself asked our team to find Dell customers in the blogosphere in need of support so we could provide it to them. We've grown a fair amount since then, and I thought this might be a good time to provide a framework for what's coming next. Here are four main areas we will continue to focus on as a team. I'll be blogging about various...

Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting Dave Marmonti, Dell’s President of EMEA, at the opening of our client EMGS ’s new server cluster in Trondheim. The EMGS cluster , used for data processing and modelling, contains 1800 servers and holds the same amount of power as 20,000 high-tech PCs with a total memory of 22 terabytes , yielding an amazing 70 teraflops. This is currently the most powerful cluster in Norway, and a top-10 cluster in Europe, measured in teraflops. Electromagnetic Geoservices...

Data centers are massive users of power.   A single data center can use as much power as a mid-sized town.  So anything that can be done to reduce power use can have a huge impact on the environment.  Gartner estimates that power consumption by computers accounts for 2 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. That's roughly equal to the carbon output of the entire airline industry. The words "sustainable" and "data center" usually don't travel...

Following on from my post and visit to VMworld Europe , I wanted to share a vlog of the disaster recovery demo that Will Urban, Product Marketing Consultant, and the Dell EqualLogic team were conducting on the Dell stand at this virtualization event. For demonstration purposes the two Dell stands on the exhibition floor represented London and Paris offices and the demo goes through the simple a step-by-step process of testing your disaster recovery strategy before you need it. I particularly like...

Sometimes we have to react to information that has no basis in reality. That's what we're dealing with here. A recent analyst document from Avian Securities incorrectly stated that Dell is seeing high return rates (20 - 30%) due to performance issues and failures on solid state disk drives (SSDs). It has been the basis of conversations in the blogosphere like Crave , Gizmodo , Techcrunch and BloggingStocks . Here's the real story: the 20 - 30% failure and return rates cited by Avian...

Late last week we introduced our Dell PRODUCT (RED) options to customers in the U.K. , France and Germany . Customers in those countries now join in the fight against AIDS in Africa along with customers in the United States , Latin America and Japan . Customers in the U.K. France and Germany can also order the non-red version of the XPS One , our all–in-one system that has been available in the Americas and Japan since November . The XPS One was designed with input from customers worldwide...

You told us that you wanted responses to the top ideas, especially those that have been on the front page. With the new status tag boxes, it's a lot easier to see what ideas Dell has evaluated and what our response is. Here is a shot of what the new status box looks like in action -- -- and a few ideas we've reviewed over the past several weeks: Downloadable Tech Specs: It is obvious from benjesuit 's idea and commentary that it should be easier for customers to view detailed...

Many small and medium business customers have similar technology needs as larger companies. Things like performance, reliability and affordability matter just as much or more to small business owners. To meet those requirements, we designed two single-socket servers that support up to a quad-core Xeon processor, unprecedented memory expandability, and several redundancy features. These servers are available to customers worldwide starting today ( Update: These servers will be available to customers...

The most successful businesses constantly seek innovation to give themselves a competitive edge. Innovation in Information Technology (IT) can change the way an organization addresses its market, fills customer requirements, or manages its supply chain. However, the most fundamental requirement of a business is communication. Fast and effective communication between employees enable swift and effective decision making, improving the customer experience or responding to changing market conditions...

If it wasn't clear prior, Dell's recent acquisition of EqualLogic should make it clear that we are big fans of iSCSI. Truth be told, Dell has been a vigorous proponent of iSCSI since the early days. In fact, during my tenure at Intel helping to develop and drive iSCSI products, Dell was one of our main allies. As it stands today, Dell supports iSCSI across nearly all of its storage product lines: Dell EqualLogic PS Series, Dell|EMC AX and CX arrays, and the PowerVault MD and NX lines. However...

Note from Lionel: I know in my initial post about SXSW , I said we would publish updates about specific panels in the SXSW 2008 category, but I'm going to violate my own rule because I know there's a broader interest in accessibility and Dell.com overall. Beyond publishing this post on the main page, I've asked Dodie to blog more about Dell.com and accessibility more in the future. Here is Dodie's post. One of the gripes I have with SXSWi is the amount of panels that sometimes...

Winning Culture... Great place to work... just two phrases most of us at Dell are familiar with and summarise Dell's ambitious goal to be a world-action lawsuit employer. "Just words!" many of you might say. "Every company turns such goals into their credit." Are these just slogans for Dell? Handelsblatt , one of the key business publications in Germany, wanted to find out and came to some interesting and encouraging conclusions. Every year Handelsblatt, along with the...

Dan Fost wrote an article today called Welcome to Conference 2.0 in Fortune online. After experiencing SXSW Interactive for the last several days, I think he just might be onto something. Like lots of folks mentioned , Twitter played a key role in there, even moreso than last year. I also agree with Shel Israel's view that Twitter is a tool that seems to be giving power to individuals, which I see as a really good thing. Here's how it went down. People attending the conference used it...

I mentioned in a previous blog post that we would have more blog posts related to heath care. Some folks on our health care team gave me some statistics to explain the scope of the issue: Physicians write more than 4.5 billion prescriptions each year 7,000 Americans die and 1.5 million Americans are injured annually from preventable medication errors Fewer than 20 percent of physicians use electronic prescribing The cost of errors is $2 billion per year In a typical physician...