Do you think a server is a commodity? Frost & Sullivan found that most savvy businesses don’t think a server is a commodity. In fact, organizations with strategic business objectives place greater value on server characteristics that directly impact these outcomes. Buying a server is not like buying corn.
Commodity brands are characterized by high-volume, low-price strategies. Name brands are characterized by a broad portfolio of products and services, and offer products vetted with testing and validation. Buyers of name-brand servers tend to be laser focused on business-related outcomes. They place a greater priority on factors like security and reliable availability. Buyers of commodity-brand servers are less concerned with strategic business benefits and more focused on purely with maximizing how far their dollars go. For example:
- Buyers of name brand servers value protection against hardware and firmware compromise more than twice as much as those who purchase commodity brands.
- Name brand buyers don’t want to have to reboot their servers, but when they do have to reboot, they want it to happen quickly (52%). Commodity buyers care less about this (39%).[1]
If you prize key business objectives, you will most likely gravitate toward the high performance and high functionality of a global name brand. And there are even differences among global brands. Dell outranked commodity brands on almost all criteria. How did we measure this? On the Frost & Sullivan survey, survey participants were asked to indicate their preferred brand and rank how it stacked up to the competition. Categories ranged from reliable availability to information security assurance to scalable designs.
Global name-brand players are where it’s at when it comes to crucial features like security. Dell servers offer protection from threats ranging from malware injections to data breaches. Commodity brands simply don’t.
Just as you might look for cutting-edge features when buying a new car, you might be looking for cutting-edge features in a server. Those features probably don’t exist in a commodity server. And if they do, they probably haven’t been tested.
Read the complete Frost & Sullivan report here.
To learn more about Dell PowerEdge servers, visit dellemc.com/servers, or join the conversation on Twitter @Dellservers.
[1] Frost and Sullivan, Hardware Does Matter: Global Server Brands Are Perceived as Superior for Driving Digital Business
