To Dell, business opportunities don’t lie with companies with traditional IT, whose technology budgets are flatlining, if not shrinking.
Nor does it lie with hyperscale companies, whose sheer size and available resources leads them to hire their own teams of engineers to build custom solutions.
Instead, according to the hardware vendor, the fastest-growing market is just below the hyperscale space, who are characterized by a desire to use IT as a competitive tool, who lack the extensive engineering resources, but are looking for semi-custom solutions.
These include service providers, telecom providers, web tech customers, hosting companies, oil and gas, and research organizations among others, according to Brian Humphries, president of Dell enterprise solutions sales and strategy.
Dell believes that there is so much potential in this segment of the market (growing at three times the speed of the traditional x86 server market, 14 per cent estimated CAGR or $7 billion market opportunity) that it has introduced a whole new line of business.
Today it announced what it’s calling Datacentre Scalable Solutions (DSS).
Building on inroads the company has made on the hyperscale market with Data Center Solutions (DCS), the company is deploying new teams of subject matter experts to help the sub-hyperscale market deploy what Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, vice president and general manager of servers at Dell is calling “semi-custom” solutions.
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“This second wave of web scale businesses also uses IT as a competitive advantage… but doesn’t have the thousands of engineers to create and manage a custom solution,” Gorakhpurwalla said. “They need solutions that are agile enough for the supply chain but will also work with their product line.”
According to the company, DSS will feature a fast, flexible, and agile operating model, as well as new and optimized hardware designs, enhanced fulfillment models and accelerated product introductions to give customers exactly what they want
In one use case, an unnamed oil and gas company need to needed to use seismic data processing to find oil faster than its competitors. Dell had to be able to use their existing infrastructure while making sure its capabilities in place are fully supported across the globe, even in dynamic and harsh environments.
“While we don’t necessarily need a new line of business, I think the focus is important,” Gorakhpurwalla said. “The ability to focus a set of R&D professionals and technologists across the globe into an area where the needs of the customer are a little bit unique and there is tight conflict between infrastructure and growth, we think it’s a right investment. I expect that this business will outgrow our DCS business in short order and will be the fastest line of business for us in terms of growth rate.”