Dell reveals web services plan

At a press conference in San Francisco, Dell announced plans to offer web-hosted IT monitoring and tech support.

Dell is following major players such as Amazon, IBM and Google into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, which is developing rapidly.

Dell has been paving the ground for the move for quite a while. It acquired SilverBack Technologies early last year. SilverBack sold an application for remotely monitoring devices with an IP address on a network.

This was followed by the takeover of Everdream, a web-hosted antivirus and anti-malware service provider; and MessageOne, an email service provider.

Dell will sell service plans to both private customers and businesses. The company will offer a range of web-hosted services, including antivirus, backup and patch management.

Dell will monitor a customer’s hardware, applications and network from a global network operations center, depending on the service selected. It expects to be able to fix most problems without having to notify the customer.

However, when necessary, the problem will be passed to a local Dell call center, where an advisor will contact the customer to help resolve the problem, either over the phone or through a site visit.

Dell has already built its first network operations centre in Guadalajara, Mexico; and is running a pilot of the service with six customers.

It hopes to add more web service applications either in-house, through third-party deals, or through acquisitions.

Dell hopes to deploy web-based services in Europe and Asia by the end of the year, with a view to opening mission-critical data centres by 2009.