About a year ago we launched a heritage blog series inside Dell called “Our Story.” It’s proven to be a great way to connect, engage and inspire our 109,000 team members around the world. It’s also been fun for me personally to reminisce about our 28-year heritage and connect the dots from my 1984 dorm room to Dell 2012 and beyond.
But our heritage is not just about those of us who wear a Dell badge. Our customers, partners, shareholders and former employees all own an important piece of Dell’s story too. So today we’re launching the first in a series of “Our Story” posts on Direct2Dell and invite you to listen in and join the conversation about Dell’s rich heritage.
The topic of the first post is our mid-90s entry into workstations, a timely subject matter given the new family of Precision mobile workstations we introduced today. These machines are workhorses engineered specifically for some of our most compute-intensive customers—engineers, software developers, video editors, animators and architects, to name a few.
Since launching our first workstation in 1997, we’ve been instrumental in moving the technology industry forward. We were the first to introduce mobile workstations, systems with dual-core processors and rack workstations. We’ve consistently pushed the envelope for better performance, more power and customer-inspired design, and this new lineup is no exception.
Did you know that workstations really marked the beginning of Dell’s solutions-focused journey? It was the first product line we designed for a specific customer segment, with their unique requirements, obstacles and goals in mind. We even partnered with independent software vendors (ISVs) to ensure our workstations were not only compatible but optimized for the critical applications these customers require.
Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and president of Dell Global Operations and End User Computing Solutions, and I talked about this important company milestone recently, and we thought it might be an interesting story to share.
The Dell Workstation 400, as we called it in 1997, was a huge success. In very little time, we went from zero to nearly 50 percent share and led the industry as the No. 1 workstation provider for 10 consecutive years.
It was a homerun for Dell but, even more important, it underscored this notion that the real purpose and benefit of technology is to solve problems and enable our customers to achieve their goals. That’s what our solutions strategy is all about, and it’s the right one—for Dell and for our customers.
