Dell: Selling a new backbone for SMBs

Sam Diaz: I recently had a good chat with some folks from Dell about upgrades to the company's infrastructure offerings. Specifically, we talked about the configurations for small to medium-sized businesses that includes Dell's servers, symantec backup and Microsoft's Virtualization Suite. The beauty of the SMB configuration is that it's the starting point for these businesses, one that can be customized to meet their specific needs. It sounds an awful lot like the strategy that Dell had in place years ago, to put personal computers into the homes of millions, give consumers a handful of basic model configurations to choose from and then let them customize it with maybe a bigger hard drive or some extra RAM. These days, mom and pop businesses, whether it's a diner, a shoe repair shop, or furniture store. They need more than just a website and a PC with QuickBooks installed. These businesses today are learning more about online database just to manage their inventories, social media strategies to promote their products, and ecommerce tools that allow for instant transactions. Many of these businesses need more computing power than they realize. The Dell folks I talked to said they realize that these customers don't necessarily know what they need yet, but understand the importance of getting ahead of the economic recovery and the competition. If Dell can have conversations with these business owners about what they can do with new computing power, there's a chance that Dell can gain some ground in this space while the competitors focus on large enterprise customers.

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