Global CIO: Dell, Perot, And The Future Of OutsourcingGlobal CIO: Dell, Perot, And The Future Of Outsourcing

Give Small Business Greater Expertise

Altabef is convinced Perot's industry knowledge translates to smaller businesses, such as small doctor's offices. For example, I shared an anecdote of a doctor I spoke with who's selling his small practice to a local hospital, in part because it spared the time and expense of digitizing the practice. "That's happening all the time," Altabef replied.

Dig beyond the EMR costs, he says, and you'll usually find doctors also frustrated at the "labyrinth" they face to get paid. But Perot's specialists have worked with insurance companies, government, and hospitals as well as large physician practices to deal with this revenue cycle problem. And he's promising to use that insight to help smaller companies.

"So we're taking traditional services expertise that's been only efficiently delivered for larger organizations, using that industry knowledge, and moving that into smaller organizations," he says.

Deliver Something Different

Dell in its glory days shook up the computer business with its strategy of super-efficient supply chain, direct sales, and open standards. It longs to be that disrupter again, in services.

"Similar to Dell in that we're not tied to proprietary standards, we're also not tied to a legacy way of doing business," says Altabef.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of the Dell's large enterprise business and a key exec in the Perot deal, talks in similar terms. Dell's existing, $6 billion-a-year services business has focused on a lot of automated, remote management, such as automatic upgrades and patches, services that it could sell along with its hardware. Combining that with the data center services Perot has, from running data centers to hosting software, shows Dell "blurring the line between what's managed services and product support," Schuckenbrock says. "We think that's a disruptive force to outsourcing."

It all feels a bit squishy. But Altabef offers the example of virtual desktops: Companies buy PCs from Dell, and contract to have a certain desktop image delivered and maintained on those machines, a strategy that in turn relies on a lot of data-center servers to supply the virtual desktops. Dell-Perot capabilities can sell whatever services companies need along that chain, from the PCs to running the entire data center. However, Altabef acknowledges companies aren't yet buying virtual desktops across the enterprise--a lot of pilots, some use in departments and specialized functions, but not company-wide.

Profit From Industry Knowledge

Across Dell, from services to PCs, there's a lot of focus on industry-specific offerings. In the PC group, for example, they've created a system for schools where kids get a rugged netbook to use in the classroom, which they deposit in a cart as they leave that both locks up the machines and downloads their work to a server. One clear value Perot brought is industry knowledge, in the booming market of healthcare but also banking, government, and education.

But if industry expertise's so pivotal, Dell's going to have to keep acquiring. Schuckenbrok and Altabef talk about how Perot let Dell get considerable scale of IT services without taking on an army of consultants that need to be deployed, the way a merger with a giant such as CSC would have. "I didn't want 150,000 people I need to bill out every day," Schuckenbrok says.

Dell got about 40,000 with Perot. To compete with this new model across a broader spectrum of industries, it might have to mimic what Indian IT companies have tried doing in the U.S., selectively buying small, industry-specialized boutiques to bolster its insider knowledge.

As I say, I spoke to both of these leaders before the AMA deal. That's only one deal, and only one way that Dell's trying to reach the health IT market. But it fits with Dell's new vision for outsourcing. And, it raises all the right questions Dell will need to answer to make this vision pay off.

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Chris Murphy is editor of information.

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