Dell will expand its services portfolio to include
support for customers running applications and databases from SAP,
as part of a pledge for closer interaction between the two
companies, said Dell chairman and chief executive officer Michael
Dell.
Dell and SAP chairman and chief executive officer Henning
Kagermann announced new services and highlighted a growing
relationship between the two companies, which has expanded to
include more than 5,000 enterprise customers running SAP's software
on Dell servers.
SAP's customers which use Dell servers in the US will now
contact Dell first when seeking support. Dell will also offer
operating system migration services to help customers move away
from Unix operating systems to Linux and Windows.
Dell's services arm allows SAP customers to deploy SAP
applications quickly while helping to iron out configuration
issues, Kagermann said.
Dell provided these types of services for a limited number of
customers before the announcement, but will now make them broadly
available, said Jeff Clarke, senior vice-president and general
manager of Dell's Product Group.
The company will also work with Oracle to provide simliar
services for Oracle's databases, Clarke said. Applications
suppliers are drawn to Dell because the company has no applications
business of its own, unlike some of its competitors in the
enterprise hardware market, he said.
"Customers want best-in-class solutions," Clarke said. Dell
feels it can offer its customers better application support through
partners such as SAP and Oracle than companies such
as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which offer their own application
products.
The companies have no plans for expand Dell's partnership to
include hosting SAP applications, Dell said.
Both Dell and Kagermann pointed to a resurgence in corporate
technology spending in the US as a reason for the growing
partnership between the two companies.
"Companies are becoming more confident in their spending. They
are remembering what technology spending is all about," Dell
said.
IT customers are looking to expand their existing two-way and
four-way servers based on Intel's processors, and those customers
still running Unix servers will, eventually, move away from those
platforms.
Technology spending in Europe is not as strong as the US, but
SAP expected the situation to improve over the next two quarters,
Kagermann said.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News Service