Q&A: Dell on its servers, AMD and recovery

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Then they found that the hardware wasn't able to scale to the needs of virtualisation. With this launch, we see what we are able to do from both processing, I/O and memory capability to allow customers to fully realise the benefits of virtualisation.

The cloud products still offer some of the management capabilities that were within the hardware, but some customers want to manage their environments with the application layer and that is what the cloud products offer.

Pure hardware where I just want to be able to plug and play and manage my workload at the application layer, it is just a different model and we want to offer choice for both ways.

DA: I think virtualisation and cloud both bring a lot of risk with customers going to buy fewer servers now they can do more with less hardware and take advantage of sharing resources.

But we also believe that if we can deliver this solution that they can go deploy, yes we may lose a few unit sales up-front but in the long-term we will be able to build a relationship with the customer that will have them coming back to us for their refreshes.

It is about building the longer term relationships and being seen by our customers as being more of an advisor that can help them make the decisions they need to help their business grow.

What is the attitude towards cloud computing when it comes to your customers?

DA: I think obviously we have a full portfolio of products... and launching some that focus around cloud.

But there is also a huge part of the market that still wants standard server products to take care of the standard workloads that they have in their environment today.

I see that there is some emphasis to go in this direction but I wouldn't say I could qualify that half of our customer base wants to go in that direction. I don't know the numbers, but I would say that we still have a very strong pool for standard products.

This week's product and strategy launch from Dell is at a time where people are just coming out of the recession. With the economy as it stands, do you think people are looking to invest in new products again?

DA: Over the last two years there has not only been a slow down but an absolute stopping of spend in IT. What we are seeing, and if you look at the industry data today, you are starting to see a turn.

We are right at the beginning of what we believe is the transition back into spend from an IT perspective.

We are trying to leverage as much of that as we can to make sure we can be there for our customers. You may have five or six-year-old technology in your environment and you haven't been able to spend, now is the time to spend. And, by the way, look at the economy and scaling you can get now.

We are starting to see [recovery] but it is going to take time.

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