Dell's high hopes for the UK

Dell UK was the first subsidiary of the company outside the US, and remains one of the company's most successful businesses, with a mature market and user base. Now it is growing again, taking advantage of uncertainty around the positions of HP and IBM in Scotland to use that country as a new base.

Dell UK's country manager, Josh Claman, has been with Dell UK for almost a year now, after replacing another US native, Bill Rodrigues, at a part of Dell seen as a useful staging post on the high-flyers' corporate ladder. It was Rodrigues who began Dell's expansion in Scotland, but Claman who will continue it.

ZDNet UK sat down with Claman recently to discuss his expansion plans and why the UK is looking like such a good bet right now for the PC maker.

Q: Dell's UK arm has been around a long time, and has been pretty successful in building up a solid user base. What are the issues in managing an operation from a mature base?
Claman: A lot of the time we spend on tactics and strategy because it is a pretty high market-share country. We have our core markets but I think we are the fastest-growing storage vendor in the UK now. So we think a lot about things like storage and printing and services, whereas in a lot of our low market-share countries there is a lot of that core [market] still to grab.

There are areas where we have very small market share, printers is one, but the reception from our commercial customers has been very good. They want competition in that market. They know they have been paying too much for proprietary technology. In services we have a tiny share. That is an extremely fragmented market. The number one in services, which I believe in the UK is IGS, has about a 6 [percent] share. So it is incredibly fragmented. That is a huge growth opportunity for us.

HP is playing the total cost of ownership model very strongly. How do you react to that?
On the cost side, we have driven costs out of servers. I think that has probably hurt HP and IBM because we have driven aggressively that cost curve. The new dimension in servers is that it is not just price/performance anymore. It's price/performance per watt.

That's a concern but it is interesting that that's a concern for a very small minority of our customers. But for all of our customers, particularly as the cost of fuel goes up, they become much more aware of the cost of computing. Now it is probably a good thing to use a little less power, the cost issue aside, to be a little more "green" about these things.

Data centres have been hugely power hungry forever and that's not just the computing, but the cooling, the environment and so on.

We are addressing that very aggressively and so our latest model servers go much further in terms in price/performance per watt. We have leadership there and in overall power consumption. With Woodcrest we will be better.

Where are you with AMD? We hear different messages.
There has been a lot of speculation. I cannot really respond to you directly. We're planning, we're debating, we're speculating — internally — and what we have announced we have announced. There are certain plans and...