Interview: Dell's Rollins lays out a road map, from services to AMD

After eight years at the company, Kevin Rollins was appointed president and CEO of the $41.4 billion computer juggernaut Dell Computer last July. Many still think of Dell as a desktop supplier, but the company has become a powerhouse in server and notebooks as well and is making strong moves in the printer and storage markets.

Rollins sat down recently to speak with InfoWorld News Editor Tom Sullivan, Editor-at-Large Ed Scannell, and Senior Writer Bob Francis. During the conversation, Rollins covered a wide range of subjects, from Dell's rapidly growing professional services business to the addition of AMD processors to the company's lineup.

InfoWorld: Dell services business has been growing at a rapid pace. How aggressively do you want to match IBM's Global Services?

Rollins: We are not trying to match them at all. Our services business and strategies are really very different [from IBM's]. Consequently, we do not bump into them very much on the services front. We are usually selling enhanced services that surround the hardware, versus outsourcing or architecture design engagements.

When we are selling a large installation of servers or storage, we will add a menu of services items in order to facilitate the installation and the management of them. It becomes Dell-centric at that point.

InfoWorld: Well can you give us a road map of what your ambitions are for your services and support business for both larger and smaller companies? It can be an expensive proposition, given it is a human-intensive business.

Rollins: Our goal is to leverage what is already out in the field in terms of partners, but then hire in project management capability and a bit of technical capability. Just a little of that can go a long way in terms of leveraging field resources. It has been growing at about twice that of our hardware business and is now in the $4 to $5 billion range, so it is reasonably good-sized.

We are going to continue to do that, but it will grow in tandem with the hardware and at a multiple, because we are penetrating more and more accounts and are adding more and more menu items to the list whether they are professional services or managed services. They are very much tied to hardware; they are not independent. We rarely go after a services-only deal.

InfoWorld: In terms of pursuing opportunities among the larger end-user companies, are you willing to put Dell services and support people inside your customers' sites?

Rollins: We don't put a lot of people in there on-site, although we will put some there. Most of the services staff is for the larger corporations, not so much for small and medium businesses because they cannot afford an extensive services army.

But in the large corporations where most of our service and staff are, they are doing things like storage or server consolidation, or doing an Exchange migration, or migrating off of Unix to Linux or to Microsoft. We also work with them on that to help port applications to help in the rollout of that globally. We have Dell people involved in managing these processes and partners who help do the arm and leg work. In those cases we might have 10 or 15 Dell folks who are focused inside those companies to help do it. But we don't just start putting revenues generating people on-site.

InfoWorld: As the services business grows, do you have any plans to get into the grid-utility game or hosted hardware?