Dell A/NZ picking up Windows 8 consulting, tablet work

Hardware giant Dell is starting to see some traction from Windows 8 tablet sales with enterprises across Australia and New Zealand, said local boss Joe Kremer.

Speaking at a press and analyst briefing in Sydney, Kremer said enterprises, educational institutions and consumers had expressed interest in the vendor’s Windows 8 tablets, including the Latitude 10 and XPS 12.

“The greatest interest in the A/NZ market is coming from people who manage [device] fleets. If you are a CIO trying to manage different devices, these tablets can be locked down, they have finger print ID security and they run Windows 8 organically,” he said.

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Kremer said Dell is seeing interest from CIOs in its managed fleet services because they are wary of going to the board and asking for large pools of funds to spend on IT infrastructure.

“If the CIO or CEO partners with someone like Dell, [which] has a fully managed service model, then that fleet management becomes a monthly service fee.”

Kremer said the vendor was also picking up Windows XP and 7 migration consulting work and was being hired by companies that needed help managing a broader fleet, which included Apple and Acer tablet devices.

“For most IT shops, they only think about application packaging or Exchange migration so moving to a new operating system is not something they normally have to do,” he said.

Financial results

Turning to Dell’s global results, Kremer said the vendor delivered US$1.3 billion of cash flow in what he described as a “pretty tough market” around the world.

Servers and services continued to grow for the vendor. This was backed up by recent global server unit statistics from analyst firm Gartner which revealed that server units shipped worldwide increased year over year by 3.6 per cent to 2.46 million.

While HP managed to hang on to the top spot shipping 634,793 servers, Dell shipped 9 per cent more units than it did a year ago, maintaining its number two spot.

“If you look at what has happened globally at Dell over the past five years, the enterprise and services component of the business has grown from 23 to 29 per cent,” Kremer said.

“There is a very steady migration towards offering more comprehensive solutions that tend to come at higher margins.”

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