Expect New Services from Dell Targeting SMB

Dell and Salesforce.com have announced that they are partnering to reach the small and medium business market. But the real news appears when you consider Dell's planned acquisition of Perot Systems.

As the actual announcement indicates, the intent is to deliver a dual-branded CRM offering via cloud for SMBs, with subscription pricing starting at $9 a month, or $108 a year, which would seem a pretty affordable entry point for most companies that don't want to deal with IT support. (Well, other than the IT support necessary to maintain network uptime, but presumably they have that anyway.)

The underlying interest here is that Dell will have an integration boost from Perot Systems, when the merger actually occurs. Suddenly it provides an interesting view of how a strategy for riding what I call the decentralization wave. Normally a Perot-level consulting force simply does not target small companies because they cannot afford to. The level of income needed from an engagement is too high for smaller companies to afford. And so, in the past, software and hardware companies with higher end consulting practices have had to focus on big clients, leaving smaller ones to VARs and integrators.

However, if you're offering services via cloud and you have a big consulting practice, you can take aim differently. Instead of thinking about individual clients buying integration, group them together. Take many small clients who could all use some particular IT tidbit and do a "mass customization" that essentially creates a set of menu choices, possibly complex, and a way of tracking the particular variations that a given client uses. This is more complicated than a typical SaaS delivery model, but we're not talking about SaaS. We're talking about the cloud, and this is the type of integration that should be possible.

Now the big consultancies can start to spread the costs of service over large volumes of small clients and get the same type of returns that larger clients could give. That would provide new room for growth that simply doesn't exist in traditional approaches to small markets. I'd expect to see a growing number of additional services from Dell, whether developed in-house or purchased from other business partners and integrated centrally. And I'd expect to see Dell's competitors take notice and do the same thing.

Image via stock.xchng user Baltar, site standard license.