Senior management at Dell in Ireland have confirmed that following the company’s US$3.9bn acquisition of Perot Systems last year it is focusing on becoming a major outsourcing and managed services provider competing with HP, IBM and big five consultancies.
Once it just made the machines, now it’s planning on providing the services. In September last year, Texas-headquartered Dell acquired the IT services provider Perot Systems. “We consider Perot Systems to be a premium asset with great people that enhances our opportunities for immediate and long-term growth,” said Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell at the time.
Optimism about new business
In an interview with Siliconrepublic.com half a year later, Dell country manager Dermot O’Connell and Liam O’Reilly, who heads up the former Perot division in Ireland which will now be known as Dell Services, said they were optimistic about the potential to win business and create jobs.
“We see a major opportunity in providing infrastructure services,” O’Connell told Siliconrepublic.com.
“Traditionally, firms would spend 95pc of their total IT budget keeping things going with little left over for innovation. Our value proposition is helping firms get that down to 50/50 and allow them to drive new products and services out to the market.”
O’Reilly said that at the time of acquisition, Perot Systems employed 150 people in Ireland and 23,000 globally. “The business would be known for having top domain knowledge of specific industry segments and in healthcare, for example, would be No 1 in the world.
“For the past six months we have been focused on integrating into the wider Dell family.
“If you take healthcare or banking, for example, we would have the knowledge and expertise to provide a more holistic solution and if you integrate that in with Dell’s expertise around hardware, you have a broader spectrum of service offerings across all industries.”
About the new Dell Services division
O’Reilly explained that the new Dell Services division will have expertise in the areas of business transformation, application services, business process outsourcing (BPO), infrastructure and managed services.
Prior to being acquired by Dell, Perot Systems acquired John Collins’ Origina Solutions, bringing end-to-end systems integration and business transformation skills into the fold.
“Now we’ve broadened and as part of the Dell family are underpinned by the enabling technology and can provide the entire underlying infrastructure.”
O’Connell said that Dell Services will work across a number of sectors, including government, financial services, telecoms and healthcare, marrying consulting and applications capability with hardware services.
“This is about moving beyond the CIO level where we were all the time selling PCs with no services, to now being able to do significant data centre business and mission critical projects for companies.
“Dell Services is moving up the stack into the business side of services. This way we believe organisations will get better business outcomes from investing in IT.”
By John Kennedy
Photo: Liam O’Reilly, Dell Services, with Dell country manager Dermot O’Connell
