ZDNet: As services become more important, how do you think you'll fare against the likes of IBM and HP?
Marengi: Our services business is growing in excess of 25 percent year over year. It's now at $4bn. We just announced a managed services contract with Boeing, and to win that, we had to displace IBM global services. We're providing the end-to-end client/desktops/workstation lifecycle management. This is everything from procurement to installation to moves, adds, changes, maintenance and retirement. So, as a workstation enters an organisation and goes to the engineers who need the processing power most, and then, when it's time to refresh those engineers and their existing systems get handed down to business users, whose existing systems get handed down to secretaries whose systems get retired, we manage all of that.
ZDNet: Will you manage non-Intel systems?
Marengi: We prefer Intel-based systems. We'll do Sun, but we'll give that work to a subcontractor that we'll manage.
ZDNet: Any plans for a tablet?
Marengi: We haven't spent $25m on tablets like some of our competitors have. You keep reading about all these people buying tablets but where are they? As with other new categories, the market has taken a dip after an initial spike. If and when we see it as an opportunity, we're ready. We've got all of the partnerships lined up and we're ready to pull trigger.
ZDNet: Who should be held responsible for security problems? The operating system vendor, or the company someone buys their computer from?
Marengi: At end of the day, we are accountable for what you buy. We're working with Microsoft and, as you know, they're working on their protective shield. But we have to address the problem because it's affecting our company in a variety of ways. Our . customer support cost has gone up and our call volume is going up. When the call volume increases, and the call lines back up and there's an increase in wait times, our customers get upset and then we end up with decreased customer satisfaction. Matters get worse if the calls are going up and our network goes down [because of a virus or worm. The last one [Sobig] hurt us and it hurt our customers, so we have to find better ways. Microsoft knows before anybody else knows. The key is when Microsoft turns to the OEM partner like this and says you have to implement this. But if there's a one-day difference between the time we implement it [and when the vulnerability is announced], we're basically out of luck.
