Gateway Turns Display Models Into Revenue GeneratorGateway Turns Display Models Into Revenue Generator

With the PC market looking anything but jolly this holiday season, Gateway Inc. is turning to a services model to generate revenue from excess inventory. The PC maker is linking together 8,000 display-model PCs at its retail locations nationwide to create a grid that small and midsize companies can access on demand for 15 cents per CPU per hour.

Gateway is pursuing smaller companies that don't have the capital to invest in large computing grids as well as departments within larger companies that don't have the budget for additional computing power, says Premal Kazi, senior product manager for Gateway Processing On Demand.

Gateway is offering the PC grid service in conjunction with United Devices, which will use its Alliance MetaProcessor grid software to route workloads throughout the grid, ensuring that customers have enough available capacity.

The idea of a low-cost PC-based grid will appeal to companies that temporarily need more capacity than they have in-house, says Ahmar Abbas, managing director of Grid Technology Partners. Abbas says the security of workloads sent to the Gateway grid won't be an issue because the grid will break down these workloads and distribute them to multiple computers, which will have partitions that protect client data from retail customers checking out Gateway's display PCs.

Abbas likes Gateway's pursuit of additional revenue. "It's the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that you seldom hear from corporations," he says. "They're using underutilized assets and turning inventory into revenue."