Dell storage chief on EMC's reseller affairs

28.04.2006

NAS is a hot market right now. Currently, you're doing NAS with Microsoft's platform. We're is Dell's future in that market? Do you see yourselves getting into enterprise-class products with multiple protocols, such as iSCSI, Fibre Channel? I'm not going to comment on future product directions. As our customers demand certain products, we'll see how we can meet their needs.

We continue to see a migration upward in capabilities and capacities by you and a migration downward by EMC. Do you see friction in the future between you and EMC? I think we're serving the needs of the customer jointly. The customer's needs are changing in many dimensions. Customers today are having more and more storage needs, no matter the size of the customer. The higher-end customers really want the simplicity afforded by storage consolidation. The midrange customers, when you look at their data needs today, it's like what large customers needed five years ago. So they're actually looking for more sophisticated storage products also. When we're increasing our product capabilities, it's not necessarily that we're only going after higher end customers. The customer needs are increasing in lockstep, and we're trying to meet those needs.