We're all on the road to Dell

Michael Dell wants to be a mid-market player. But is he right about corporates moving to standardised technology?

Michael Dell continued his quest for global domination by stating the obvious when he told a press conference that corporate chief information officers were looking for standardised technologies to drive down the costs of their IT infrastructure.

By "standardised", he meant Intel-based hardware, and he went on to say that Linux was the world's fastest growing operating system. Notable for its absence was any reference to Microsoft, an oversight easily explained by the fact that Dell was sharing a platform with Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison - no friend of Microsoft.

The technology and investment analysts listen to Mr Dell because, amid all the bloodletting, he continues to hit the numbers. But is he right about corporates moving to standardised technology? To hit his $60bn revenue target he will have to be.

Today, standards only exist at the very highest level, with IBM mainframes running the MVS operating system, and at the lowest level, where the desktop has standardised on Microsoft Windows.

Between these extremes sits the mid-range market, and let's be honest, Mr Dell can only be talking about tackling the mid range. Data centres in banks are more likely to be running Linux-based mainframes long before they run on Itanium-based Windows servers.

But at this point we don't know whether Dell has any designs on the mainframe market or whether IBM is willing to use him as a reseller, as Microsoft and Intel already have.

Dell wants to be a mid-market player. And to succeed he must kill off Sun, which is still the dominant workstation and Unix server player.

But he knows his history and can see that the mid-market is where companies go to die or merge (Wang, Data General, Burroughs and Sperry aka Unisys etc). Ironically, where he might fail is in the fight that everyone thinks is already won: his fight with the channel.

If you are a standardised technology mid-market value-added reseller, the message to your customers is straightforward: buy your standards-based server technology wherever you like, but remember where the skills to make it work reside - not in a call centre, that's for sure.

Mr Dell is again attempting to steal your clothes. So steal them back. Anyone can see they are a better fit on you.