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Dell promises 'radical,' two-year metamorphosis

Angst removal for fun and profit

Analysis IBM has its On Demand, we'll-service-the-hell-out-of-you thing. HP has its Business Technology, we'll-ink-the-hell-out-of-you thing. Sun Microsystems has its Participation Age, red-shifting, we'll-network-the-hell-out-of-you thing. And now Dell has the we're-tired-of-direct-modeling-the-hell-out-of-you Dell 2.0.

Whereas the other major server vendors have already tried their best to define the market, Dell is more of an in-process creature. It's trying to describe what the market desires at the same time as it struggles to figure out what Dell desires to be over the long-term. With any luck, Dell 2.0's perception of the market and perception of itself will meet at a decent place.

Dell's first ever CMO Mark Jarvis has inherited much of this defining and perceiving work. The smooth talker spent 14 years adding sheen to Oracle's databases before reaching escape velocity from Larry Ellison's ego and his own marketing consultancy to join Dell in April. Now, he appears primed to reinvent Dell's image - the one still centered on a grubby teenager making PCs in his dorm room - on a massive scale.

For example, Jarvis has already ratcheted Dell up to Hyperbole 2.0.

"In terms of timing, I am willing to bet that the perception of Dell as a company will be radically different within two years," Jarvis told us, during an interview this week. "We are going to revamp the whole customer perception of Dell."

Dell 1.5

In many ways, this process actually started pre-Jarvis. Dell did the unthinkable by listening to its customers and deciding last year to ship servers based on AMD's Opteron processor - a major blow to Dell's monogamous chip supply chain. Dell also busied itself with some web site cruft removal and the hiring of less abrasive call center staff. More recently, Dell started the IdeaStorm web site to figure out what customers want and discovered that Linux PCs and laptops were all the rage. (Dell made this same discovery on its own in 2000, but you're meant to focus on the power of IdeaStorm to change things, so please do that).

Jarvis talks on a much grander scale than these bits and bobs. He talks about revamping Dell's entire product line over the next two years to get the gear in-line with where Dell and the market, as the company sees it, are heading. He likes to use the word "radical" a lot to describe this transformation. (That's the closest Dell has been to radical since the Dell Dude was arrested with a dime bag).

Irony of ironies, getting radical begins with "in the box" thinking.

The company this week decided to trade in today's partner revenue for tomorrow's loyal customers via a new line of small business products sold under the Vostro brand. This gear puts a halt to icon pimping, giving customers clean, crudware-free machines.

Getting radical also entails creating things such such as server appliance-like systems under the "Project Hybrid" banner. Jarvis confirmed that Dell has eyed a virtualization appliance and a VOIP appliance to date. So, customers should see pre-configured boxes aimed at handling specific tasks rather than having to assemble hardware, OSes and software on their own.

"A company like IBM doesn't want to make hardware and software easy because it will impact their services business," Jarvis said. "That's why WebSphere is 200 different products with the same name.

"We don't have that tension at Dell and expect to ship customers a complete product. We're not going to finish off products at customer sites with our services business."

The first pieces of Project Hybrid should ship during the third quarter.

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