DELL: CRADLE- TO GRAVE !

Dell :”cradle-to-grave”
Dell
is poised to enter the print managed services space with a
“cradle-to-grave” offering designed to extend the company’s sales reach
inside the enterprise, a top executive said.
Mar 2006Dell is poised
to enter the print managed services space with a “cradle-to-grave”
offering designed to extend the company’s sales reach inside the
enterprise, a top executive said.
Joseph Marengi, senior vice
president of Dell Americas, said Wednesday at the Morgan Stanley
Semiconductors & Systems Conference that Dell also is ready to jump
back into its strategy of slashing prices on low-end printers as a way
to boost system sales.
“Printer managed services are the same as
when we went into the Dell managed services, and eventually they will
wrap under the same umbrella,” Marengi said at the Dana Point, Calif.
conference.
“We’re going to manage [customers’] print
infrastructure–outside of the big production print machines they
have–across their entire business,” he said. “And that would be
everything from replacing the [printer] asset that exists in there
today with a new Dell asset and managing and taking care of the asset,
making sure there’s always paper there, making sure there’s ink and
toner always there. And when it comes time for the life cycle of that
product retiring, [we’ll] replace it with a new one. It’s a kind of
cradle-to-grave, if you will, for the printers inside of a corporate or
public institution.”
By entering the printer managed services arena,
Dell would be following rivals like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard, which
provide those services in the United States largely through solution
providers. Marengi stopped short of detailing how Dell would build an
infrastructure to provide print managed services or if the company also
would provide workflow consulting services, which are now provided in
part through the channel by Xerox, HP and Lexmark, among others.
Marengi
noted that, ultimately, Dell’s printer business exists for other
purposes beyond imaging. “At the end of the day, the conclusion is that
we need to sell the system,” he said. “If the printer helps sell the
system, we may go back and work with [discounting] again. We may go
back to doing promotions on single-function [printers]. It depends on
where we are in the course of a year.”
Dell boosted its unit sales
on the low-end printer segment last year via a series of aggressive
promotions, including bundling some inexpensive printers with desktops.
However, Dell executives have said such promotions aren’t a practice
they like, because customers that get free printers are less likely to
use them and order high volumes of consumables.