Michael Dell says long way to go for turnaround
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Dell Inc.  has made progress  in its turnaround efforts but still has &quot;a long way to go&quot; to  spur personal computer sales and regain lost market share,  Chief Executive Michael Dell said on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Two and a half years afterÂ handing the chief executive title to his hand-picked successor, Kevin Rollins, Michael Dell is again running the company he founded. Dell struggled under Rollins' tenure, recentlyÂ losing its number-one PC vendor rankingÂ to a resurgent Hewlett-PackardÂ and weathering a formal investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionÂ into the company's accounting practices. Rollins has resigned his position as CEO and member of the company's board of directors, Dell said in a statement Wednesday. The company's board had decided that "there is no better person in the world to run Dell at this time than the man who created the Direct Model and who has built this company over the last 23 years," the statement said. Dell also remains chairman of the board. Rollins joined Dell in 1996 from management consulting firm Bain & Co. Prior to assuming the role of CEO in July 2004, he had served as Dell's president, chief operations officer and vice chairman. Â
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"OK" results aren't good enough for Dell anymore. That's great news.
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Dell Inc.  will use partnerships and acquisitions to become more services-oriented, the Financial Times reported in its online edition on Wednesday, citing an interview with Chief Executive Michael Dell.
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&quot;Chief Executive Kevin Rollins said the company was considering using Advanced Micro Devices chips for some future server products, but stressed that Dell had no formal plans as yet to embrace AMD.
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After a year of sluggish growth, financial disappointments and a high-profile safety recall, re-engineering the Dell model will be a daunting challenge.
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Dell  is in the middle of a  brewing image crisis, launching its biggest-ever product  recall, reporting a sharp drop in profit, and disclosing an  accounting investigation all in one week.
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Dell&#39;s efforts to reinvent itself this year through a dramatic break from its direct-sales model, expanded services, and new enterprise offerings have shown positive early results, but some users have lingering concerns about supply chain management and support -- long-time issues for the company.Weathering an accounting scandal and a slump in profit,&#160;founder Michael Dell reclaimed the helm of the company after CEO Kevin Rollins resigned in January, quickly replacing top managers and in May announcing plans to lay off 10 percent of the company&#39;s workforce.For years, Dell was the top PC vendor in the world, an acknowledged master of logistics in a business where margins can be razor-thin. It was efficient enough to keep prices low to ward off competition without suffering big setbacks in profits. But by 2006, when Hewlett-Packard unseated Dell as global PC leader, that was no longer the case.Dell&#39;s plans to regain its former dominance have resounded in the market. The company&#39;s third-quarter results, announced two weeks ago, showed profit increasing year over year, and record revenue of $15.65 billion. During the company&#39;s earnings call, Michael Dell said the company will put products on more retail shelves worldwide while also helping business customers &quot;simplify IT&quot; and reduce maintenance costs via customized hardware, software, and services.The company has also moved to put accounting issues behind it, recently&#160;completing an internal investigation and restating its financial results from fiscal 2003 to the first quarter of 2007.The company has been making an effort to build relationships with customers and partners and deliver products that are easier to deploy and manage, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.Last month, Dell introduced a two-tier channel program designed to give partners better access to Dell&#39;s training, marketing, certification, and online resources. The program will provide a better chance for Dell to interact and understand its partners&#39; needs, the company said.&quot;The company seems to recognize that it has bridges to enhance with customers and partners in the channel. It&#39;s not something that&#39;s going to change overnight,&quot; King said.After years of success selling PCs directly to users, the consumer business&#39; direct-sales business model hit a wall as component prices fell, Pund-IT&#39;s King said. The strategy to simplify IT is a play at SMBs that will help Dell deliver better returns in the long term than its lower-margin direct consumer business, analysts said.However, some customers continue to have concerns about the company&#39;s support and supply chain issues.Dell is having supply shortages and can&#39;t get its servers and OptiPlex desktops to individuals and small businesses in a timely manner, said Josh Kaplan, who runs a franchise of computer support firm Rescuecom and purchases parts and interacts with Dell on behalf of customers.&quot;You can acquire all the technology you want, but Dell will send hardware out blindly,&quot; Kaplan said. It will be a challenge for Dell to deliver what it calls &quot;IT in a box&quot; -- its terms for packages of products and services -- to SMBs and enterprises, Kaplan said. Dell has traditionally delivered mostly standardized systems, Kaplan said. While Dell has built systems to order by letting users select from a menu of options, it does not have in-depth experience offering customers services over the lifecycle of products, he said.Jeremy Cole, owner of Proven Scaling, a small consulting firm with offices in the U.S. and U.K., said Dell has internal staffing issues that affect its support services.&quot;Dell&#39;s sales structure is really strange. They tend to bounce your company around to a new account representative every few months who are wildly differing in experience, intelligence, and understanding of the Dell sales system,&quot; Cole said.Cole is satisfied with Dell equipment but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS. &quot;It&#39;s clear that Dell cares about Linux in that all its server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and it has many people dedicated to making sure that&#39;s the case. However, it&#39;s not good enough just to boot,&quot; Cole said.Though generally positive about Dell&#39;s support, Jason Dunn, who runs Thoughts Media, which publishes Web sites for technology enthusiasts, couldn&#39;t resolve certain LCD&#160;monitor problems with Dell offshore support representatives. He had good experiences with Dell&#39;s PC and HDTV support representatives, so the experience varies, Dunn said.Other users have had a good experience with Dell&#39;s strategy to simplify IT. Dell&#39;s efforts have paid dividends for Bikeworld.com, a medium-size retail business in San Antonio, which saved money by cutting its internal IT person. The company uses Dell systems with Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, connected to multiple offices via a VPN.&quot;Businesses are in a belt-tightening mode. You can&#39;t have extra people on payroll,&quot; said Whit Snell, general partner at Bikeworld.com. Bikeworld has resolved IT problems with Dell remotely and has a contact readily available to help with problems.Dell officials were not available for comment on support issues.Overall, Dell is trying to be more proactive and helpful, said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates. Dell&#39;s new enterprise support services to simplify IT, like remote management services, could, if successful, trickle into the consumer segment, which could benefit end-users, Scherf said.Dell this year has tied up with retailers like Staples,&#160;Wal-Mart, and&#160;Best Buy&#160;to distribute PCs, something competitors HP and Acer have been successful at. But if Dell wants to make sure its customers aren&#39;t tempted by HP or Lenovo in the retail market, fixing problems that some users report about its support infrastructure has to be on top of the company&#39;s to-do list, Pund-IT&#39;s King said.Building out retail partnerships changes the consumer-facing relationships for Dell, which could lead to positive changes in the company&#39;s support and services. The results are a work in progress, King said.Balancing out its business model, Dell is showing signs that renewed efforts in the higher-end business sector are catching on, with third-quarter revenue growing in the server and storage markets. The enterprise market provides better margins than retail, and the remote management services market is growing, King said. Dell is trying to address that through acquisitions and by creating a services organization and specialized products targeted at professionals and businesses.The company this year&#160;acquired SAN (storage area network) vendor EqualLogic&#160;and managed services companies&#160;Everdream&#160;and Silverback. It announced a deal with Sun to offer the company&#39;s Solaris OS.Dell has been pushing hard to improve its systems management portfolio, especially remote desktop management capabilities that could help simplify complex IT infrastructures. In October, the company announced On-Demand Desktop Streaming, a server-based platform that streams the OS, applications and data to diskless desktop clients over a Gigabit Ethernet network.By offering design improvements and bundling software and services like remote management, Dell is trying to get the focus off of price and moving to build the framework for a new business model for the enterprise, said John Spooner, senior analyst at Technology Business Research.Dell&#39;s reinvention should come as no surprise as Michael Dell is on a mission to reconstruct his company, Pund-IT&#39;s King said. &quot;It must have been hard for Dell to see a company he built falter,&quot; King said. He is putting money in the right spots, and competitors like HP and IBM will do well to keep a close eye on Dell, King said.
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Stock in Dell was rising Monday on news thatÂ founder Michael Dell plans to remain as CEO for several years, trim the number of managers reporting directly to him, and eliminate bonuses.
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Dell Chief Executive Michael Dell is making a habit of using the InterContinental Paris-Le Grand Hotel as a backdrop for bold pronouncements. In 1996, the European landmark is where he first told Dell directors of a plan to branch out into servers.
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Dell Inc. DELL.O plans to hire   some 1,100 new staff in the U.S. and Slovakia as the world's   largest PC maker expands its development and services   operations, Chairman Michael Dell said on Monday.
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Turnaround from record loss is not right around the corner.
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Two weeks after he returned to run the computer company that bears his name, Michael S. Dell is making sweeping senior management changes.
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If the figures from Dell Computer's last fiscal quarter hold up after a potential wave of possible corrections due to its admittedly improper accounting of backdated stock options grants, the company may not have fared all that poorly in the three-month period between the first weeks of February and May.
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Michael Dell's return as chief executive officer of Dell Inc. may have appeased analyst demands for now, but they say he faces an enormous, long-term challenge in fixing nagging problems that have plagued the computer maker.
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Dell Inc  said on Thursday it is delaying its fiscal 2008 second-quarter report until it has completed a financial restatement process.
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(InfoWorld) - In the wake of Dell Inc.'s disclosure Monday that it might have to restate recent earnings statements because of discoveries made by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), company founder and chairman Michael Dell has defended his embattled chief executive, Kevin Rollins. "Kevin has done an outstanding job as chief executive," Dell told a crowd at the company's annual Technology Day meeting in New York Tuesday. "We run the company together, so if you want to blame somebody, you can blame me too." Dell will delay filing its quarterly Form 10-Q to the SEC until it answers questions raised by an SEC investigation into its accounting and financial reporting practices, the company said Monday. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has opened a separate investigation, involving documents filed from 2002 to the present. Both offices have raised the possibility of misstatements in prior period financial reports. Dell has already announced a preliminary earnings report for the second quarter, highlighted by a 51 percent drop in profit from the same period last year. Form 10-Q is the formal quarterly earnings report required of every publicly traded company. Asked whether he would heed calls from analysts and investors to resign, Rollins said he disagreed with the sentiment, then turned the podium over to his boss. "Any press speculation on that is completely useless. Feel free to speculate, but it's not going to happen," Dell said. "The CEO is chosen by the board of directors and the shareholders, and I'm the largest shareholder, so you can do the math." Dell and Rollins declined to give further details on the investigations, saying only that they were cooperating fully.