Dell announces enterprise services expansion

Dell services vice president, Asia Pacific, Chris Askew said the DPS enhancement focused on customers' core business challenges.

This included professional consulting expertise in infrastructure, serve and storage migration and consolidation; high availability and performance optimisation; and Oracle, Linux and Microsoft migration, implementation and design; and training.

Dell has been gradually ramping up the added services for the last 18 months and decided to launch the enhanced DPS after they felt they already had a "well rounded portfolio" and some customer experience to back the added services.

Askew said that unlike the US, in which Dell only came in second to HP in terms of meeting business customers' expectations, the Australian customers were "delighted with the service" Dell provides and that majority of the feedback they are getting has been positive.

"The beauty of the Dell model is that because a customer talks to a Dell person, we are able to track those rare occasions when it goes wrong and we immediately throw our customer care team into it. We address the immediate problem, rectify that, then we ask how we can fix that in the future," Askew said.

Askew added that they have analysed the US survey results done by Technology Business Research to learn from it and see if there was anything that the Australian office could do to improve their services.

"We measure to an extreme degree every point of contact with our customers," said Steve Norman, Dell business and development and enterprise director for ANZ.

"We are very confident and we are having a lot of success but we are not complacent at all. We will keep adjusting to what the customers want," Norman added.

Askew said the DPS is based on the Dell Direct Model which offers a "total solution incorporating a wide-range of consulting services." This is applied through Dell's 'Virtual Integration' with partners who are subject matter experts in specific solutions or service fields.

The approach enables customers to reduce IT project implementation cost, time and effort by maintaining a single point of contact with Dell, as opposed to managing two or more vendors individually. This allows customers to clarify accountability of the whole project directly with Dell.

Askew said they have seen cost reduction in 2001 to 2003 of up to 63 percent in lifecycle management offerings, 50 percent for Windows migration and 45 percent in SAN deployment through their professional services. He added that under DPS, what used to be a AU$25,000 SAN implementation now only costs AU$13,000 and has been lowered from eight days to less than three days.

"In Australia, we've been growing in multiples with the market growth and we expect that to continue. We see no reason why that would change," Askew said.

"We are excited to extend our services business in Australia and New Zealand and raise awareness of DPS within this important market. Our services business in ANZ is growing at twice the rate of our hardware business and in FY04 we've seen year on year has growth of approximately 70 percent," he added.