Dell Outlines Software Ambitions

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After making a number of strategic forays into the software space by acquiring vendors such as Quest Software, Dell this week outlined a strategic effort to begin unifying its software portfolio.

Saranya Babu, senior marketing manager at Dell, says that Dell is crafting a number of offerings under which products from different software product lines will be more tightly integrated.

The company’s first effort in this direction consists of a set of Dell Mobility Solutions that combine technologies the company gained via its acquisitions of Quest, Dell Kace and Wyse Technology to address a rapidly growing enterprise IT need.

Longer term, the idea is to not so much impose a framework on a customer as much as it is to make a Dell software product the next most logical choice to be installed if a customer already has another product running.

In terms of unifying its software portfolio, Dell clearly has its work cut out as it looks to combine technologies from Quest, SonicWall, Dell KACE and other business units into a cohesive strategy.

Against that backdrop are all the machinations that are taking place as the company seeks to go private. Much of that effort no doubt is going to be tied to additional strategic investments in software. But once those integrations are created, Dell still has work to do in terms of determining how to actually price those offerings.

The challenge will be not only finding customers that want that level of integration across a diverse software portfolio, but are also willing to wait for Dell to accomplish it.