Once or twice a week I like to put the takeout menus away and make dinner. I love chopping vegetables, sautéing onions, and putting a meal together.
But I never – ever – make chicken stock from scratch.
I know how, and mine tastes pretty good. But it’s labor-intensive, time-intensive, and I’ve decided that it’s just easier to buy that already made and focus on the parts of cooking that I’m good at and that I like.
I’ve always thought of Dell OEM Solutionsas chicken stock. When I joined Dell in 2005, I visited several OEM customers who were using Dell to manufacture appliances by having us provide customized bezels, pre-imaging, and hardware support. Using our chicken stock – err, expertise around hardware and manufacturing – got them out of the hardware business, freeing up more time to focus on what they were good at: software.
Fast forward to 2011, and Dell is emerging as a leader in storage. We’ve invested $2B on storage acquisitions (such as EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, and Compellent), not to mention plans to have 1,000 storage sales specialists and 800 storage developers spanning 5 global R&D centers by the end of the year.
So how can that investment in storage can benefit our OEM customers? When I look at the industriesour OEM team focuses on, a few opportunities immediately come to mind.
For example lets look at a potential communicationscustomer scenario:
We know that often your solutions are built on transactional databases –like Microsoft SQL or MySQL – and that figuring out how to optimize performance for those databases can be complicated.
What if your appliances included a small storage system that combined both solid state and traditional spindles? And what if this storage system were able to automatically adjust the location of different parts of the database (think logs and tables) based on how busy it was?
Or how about a healthcarecustomer scenario:
We know that healthcare environments often have long retention policies on data; and once those images or files are created, they often aren’t accessed much (or at all) during this prescribed retention period.
What if your solutions included a storage platform that was purpose-built for long-term retention of static files? What if your customers no longer had to manage retention policies, unwieldy file systems, or aging hardware systems?
These are just a couple examples of how OEMs can leverage Dell's storage portfolio. In my next few posts, I’ll offer up some specific products that can help you enhance your solution offerings by including storage components like these and others. For now, we want to hear from you – would solutions like those make your customers’ experience better?
Now, where did I put those takeout menus?