Dell execs map growth plans

NEW YORK -- Shaking off the economy's lingering slump, Dell Computer used its annual meeting here with financial analysts to lay out its strategy for doubling its revenue within the next few years.

While other vendors, notably IBM, are focused on expanding their software and services businesses to compensate for what they view as a commoditizing, low-margin hardware sector, Dell is comfortable remaining heavily exposed to that market, said Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell.

"We believe our business model is structurally advantaged," he said.

Which isn't to say Dell isn't pursuing diversification. The company's closely watched drive for a larger presence in the enterprise market is going well, executives said, as Dell establishes partnerships and extends its product line to boost sales of servers, services and storage hardware.

Helping Dell on its enterprise push is rising customer demand for inexpensive hardware on which to run standard operating systems such as Linux or Microsoft's Windows, executives said.

"The push toward industry standards-based systems is moving higher and higher up into the enterprise," Dell said during a Wednesday presentation in New York for customers, journalists and analysts. "Standards are the future of enterprise computing."

Dell has a new cohort helping him evangelize standardization: Oracle Corp. chairman and CEO Larry Ellison.

Already partners, Oracle and Dell said this week they are deepening their alliance. The two companies extended an existing U.S. joint sales agreement to incorporate Europe and Asia, and said their consulting organizations will partner on a new set of professional services aimed at customers migrating from legacy systems to an Oracle9i database deployment on Dell server and storage hardware.

Once a staunch ally of Sun Microsystems Inc., Ellison is now vocally championing Linux as the enterprise operating system of the future. In a joint appearance Wednesday with Dell, Ellison enthusiastically described Oracle's experience with internal migrations from proprietary systems to Linux running on Dell hardware. At a lower cost, Oracle has recorded gains in speed and reliability, he said.

"I believe that in a couple of years, Linux and Dell will be the dominant computing combination in the enterprise," Ellison said.

Storage vendor EMC is another key Dell partner aiding the company's enterprise growth. Dell this week began worldwide manufacturing of jointly branded Dell-EMC storage systems, and introduced new SAN (storage area network) bundles aimed at smaller businesses.

International expansion is also key to Dell's quest to double the company's revenue within the next few years, executives said. In many markets outside the U.S., Dell's market share remains in the single digits, said president and COO Kevin Rollins.