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The Globalizer
Dell will sell about $20 billion of PCs and tech gear on its Web site this year, but what's worked so far for the No. 1 PC company isn't good enough. In October, Dell launched a redesign of its E-commerce site intended to make it easier for customers to navigate complex custom orders and for Dell to deliver fine-tuned promos anywhere on the site based on the products a customer bought or looked at in the past.

Next up: a worldwide consolidation of the back-end data center and applications that power Dell's site in 80-plus countries. About 30% of Dell's revenue comes from Europe and Asia, and global sales need to keep growing if Dell is going to hit an aggressive goal of going from $40 billion in annual revenue to $60 billion within three years. Yet it wants to make IT costs a smaller percentage of total revenue by becoming more efficient. "We don't want to develop everywhere," says Susan Sheskey, a VP of IT responsible for Dell's Web site. "Customers, no matter where in the world, now see Dell the same way."

As Dell grew rapidly through the '90s, it built up lots of static Web pages, many of them country-specific. So adding a new product could require IT staff to cut and paste XML data into sites for each of those 80-plus countries. "The way it worked before was, every night we'd run code to fit what sales wanted to push the next day," says online development director Ahmed Mahmoud. The October relaunch combined with the E-commerce consolidation will let IT staff update information about a product feature once, so it's available worldwide at the same time. Then regional managers can focus on adding local languages or offering promos tied to the marketing nuances of their country, rather than on building product details from scratch.

It's just the kind of customization and efficiency that have always been talked about for the Web, but proven far more elusive. Unlike many Web promises, this looks like the year the best Web sites will deliver on them.

Illustration by Steve Lyons

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