Global real-estate consultancy company Colliers Asia has been using Dell desktops and notebooks for eight years. The company owns over 100 Dell laptops within the region and "luckily, none of them are involved in the recall," said Stanley Lau, general manager for corporate IT of Colliers Asia.
"Our relationship with Dell remains unchanged," said Lau. They have been very responsive and helpful just as they have when with other technical problems before-I'm not too concerned with this recall."
Dell's latest battery recall coincided with founder and CEO Michael Dell's Asian tour, which covered Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong. The recall involves about 4.1 million laptops or about 15 percent of all the laptops sold during the period between April 2004 and July 18 2006. Last December, the company recalled 22,000 laptop batteries.
Service upgrades
Colliers' IT infrastructure (including seven datacenters in Asia) is 95 percent Dell-based. With a single-branded infrastructure, Lau said his team can identify, manage and react to technical problems much easier.
He added Dell also provides a strong service support through its local distributor. Colliers has a three-year contract, in which the company pays a lump sum fee for hardware support services as well as servers renewal after three years. "Dell's offer allows us to upgrade our IT infrastructure with minimal cost higher computing power every three years to fit our business growth," he said.
Service is one of the fastest growing units within Dell, said Tim Griffin, director of services sales and marketing at Asia Pacific--it contributes 10 percent of Dell's annual turnover. He noted the percentage is even higher in Asia Pacific and currently 17 percent of Dell's customers in the region are its gold-level service users.