Dell Snuggles Up to SAP

Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) chairman Michael Dell announced at a news conference in New York today that his company is extending its relationship with SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP), with a new services offering to boost Dells enterprise business and extend its data center footprint.

Dell has included SAP software in its Unix-to-Linux and Unix-to-Windows migration services, a move to win market share from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW).

This is not uncharted territory, as there are already some 5,000 sites around the world with Dell computers and SAP software. Michael Dell told the conference that he expects this figure to grow over the next few years, earning some significant revenues in the process.

“We believe and expect that, over the next few years, we can more than triple the market of SAP installations -- making $1 billion for Dell.”

The boyish executive also underlined Dell’s commitment to attacking the data center space through high-performance computing clusters. With many firms looking to boost their processing power at the moment, Dell is keen to win market share from major players in this space, like IBM.Dell told journalists that his company’s super computer cluster program can greatly reduce the cost of buying and deploying some of the hardware that is traditionally used for super computing. “You can deploy supercomputers at 10 percent of the cost of a traditional mainframe.”

But Dell will have its work cut out, certainly at the top end of the supercomputer space. Dell has one site, the NCSA, listed among the world’s top 10 supercomputers, though it has recently made a number of wins on smaller clustering projects (see Clusters Make a Stand and Dell Cops $30M Cargill Deal).

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum