Chairman and CEO of Dell Computer, Michael Dell, has said his company plans to diminish its reliance on channel partners for integration and services.
In fact, he said at a press conference on Friday that his company, which was rapidly expanding its services business, would attempt to increase the amount of integration and services for its PCs carried out "in-house".
Dell maintained his company would never falter from its long-standing goal of selling 100 per cent of its PCs directly through the internet. However, he said legislation in many countries still required that paper forms remain the official documentation of all transactions, even those conducted over the internet.
Nevertheless, he predicted $US20 million of his company's $US33 billion in forecast global revenues for this financial year would be made from fully internet-procured sales in Australia.
Dell said that through geographic proximity his company's Australian operation would play a key part in the company's "attack" on the Asian PC market. He said his company expected to soon broaden its ASP and website hosting services to include offerings in the Asia-Pacific market.
The company would continue to shift its focus toward development of server and storage technology, Dell said. The direct PC sales giant, which had a startup budget 16 years ago of $1000 ("spent really carefully, let me tell you"), spends $US500 million annually on research and development.
Dell said his company had little interest in expanding its product offerings to include wireless application protocol (WAP) and other mobile telephony products. So far, he had been "underwhelmed" with the performance levels of such products. "WAP doesn't really do a lot."
